A move to rethink life skills as assemblages: a call to postqualitative inquiry

ABSTRACT Life skills, defined as psychosocial skills enabling individuals to successfully meet life demands, have been popular in youth sport research to frame what we learn through sport. In light of recent critiques of life skills, the purpose of the present paper is to propose a move to rethink life skills as assemblages through a postqualitative inquiry, with the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Delanda, and Buchanan informing how the concept of assemblage is advanced. To properly pave the way for rethinking life skills as assemblages, a closer look at sport, learning, positive youth development, and sport skills is undertaken. As assemblages, life skills are no longer positioned to reside within the individual and the notion of transfer is abandoned. Rather, life skills as assemblages are proposed as relationally adaptive know hows, enacted through a coming together of shared agency between human and nonhuman entities intra-acting in an immanent world. Life skills as assemblages are deemed to have certain stable functions but are always expressed differently through evolving relations. Implications for qualitative research are offered, along with suggestions as to how researchers can inquire on life skills moving forward.