Basketball sounds like many things—almost anything—depending on space, time, and subject positioning. Relatively speaking, each complex sonority offers its listeners a synthetic experience extending a route of radical belonging. No matter the response—whether “sneakers squeaking,” “an inflated leather ball bouncing off finished hardwood flooring,” “down-tempo, furrow your brow hip hop,” “DE-FENCE!” or “the Black Eyed Peas”—basketball sounds like humanity.
Combining philosophical, aesthetic, and political notions of north with expressions of grassroots sport, this new work builds off and responds to my PhD thesis project, Net Effects: Nationalist-Capitalist Hegemony in the Hip Hop-Basketball Paradigm, which investigates the role of sound and music in the constitution of performance events associated with the Toronto Raptors Basketball Club, and the use of sound and music within these performance events to achieve certain kinds of social business related to community building. In this context, my work aspires to an approach I call just listening—an experimental and emergent practice that strives to listen to the world without prejudice, with an ear for social, cultural, and environmental justice.
After receiving a Partnership Engage Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (December 2025 competition), I’ve hired a team of student research assistants to help study grassroots basketball culture in South-Central Ontario. examining how pickup basketball models improvisatory behaviours that transcend social and cultural difference, facilitating pleasurable sociability among diverse populations in contexts where interpersonal trust is declining and social isolation is increasing across all demographics. By studying informal norms, contingent practices, and improvised communities emerging on public basketball courts, we investigate mechanisms through which small-scale affinity groups—groups of individuals who take pleasure in similar activities—can build broader solidarity in everyday life.
This research examines how public basketball courts can function as community hubs that bring together diverse populations in increasingly fragmented urban environments. Working in partnership with the City of Guelph Recreation Services, we study the Norm Jary Park basketball complex—a highly successful public space in Guelph’s most diverse neighbourhood—to understand what makes it work so well and how other municipalities can learn from this success.
Cities across Canada are struggling with how to create inclusive, welcoming public spaces, especially in neighbourhoods experiencing rapid demographic change. These demographic shifts create both opportunities and challenges for municipal recreation services trying to serve increasingly diverse populations with different cultural practices, languages, and expectations about public space. Guelph exemplifies these challenges: the city’s immigrant population now comprises nearly 24% of total residents, with 18.9% identifying as visible minorities—an increase of 35.5% since 2015. While many municipalities invest in programming and facilities, they often lack the capacity to deeply understand how residents actually use these spaces and what makes the residents feel welcome or excluded.
The Norm Jary Park basketball complex has become something special: players from diverse ethnic and language backgrounds, spanning multiple generations, come together for pickup games. Players create teams on the spot, negotiate rules collectively, and work out disputes without external authorities. This informal approach appears to foster social connection across significant cultural and linguistic differences in ways that formal programming often cannot.
At a time when Canadians report declining trust in institutions, increasing social isolation, and growing difficulty connecting across cultural differences, understanding how public spaces can foster everyday encounters that build solidarity matters urgently. If our research demonstrates that relatively modest municipal investments in accessible public infrastructure—basketball courts that are free, require no booking, and welcome spontaneous use—can generate significant social returns by creating spaces where diverse residents practice the skills of living together, this has profound implications for how governments think about infrastructure spending. The social return on investment in genuinely inclusive public space may far exceed the initial capital costs when we account for reduced social service demands, improved community resilience, enhanced civic participation, and the intangible but crucial sense of belonging that comes from having places where you feel welcome.