SPORTS PRACTICES OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES AND SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS: THE CASE OF THE HANDISPORT CLUB OF THE GASTON BERGER UNIVERSITY OF SAINT-LOUIS (SENEGAL)

This research collects and analyzes social representations built on sports practice among people with disabilities in a society where practice is perceived as almost impossible for this social category. The objective of this research, which takes place in the disabled sports club of Gaston Berger University in Saint-Louis, is to understand how people with disabilities perceive their sports practice and in return how those around them perceive their investment in sport.To understand the social representations of sports practice among people with disabilities in a country where it is perceived as abnormal and dangerous and where the perception of handicap differs according to the person and his environment, the study was mainly based on discourse analysis from semi-structured interviews. Those semi-structured interviews were carried out with administrators, coaches, families and practitioners from the disabled sports club of Gaston Berger University in Saint-Louis.It emerges from this study that the constructed social representations are differentiated and constitute a system of opposition between those of the practitioners and their trainers on the one hand and those of the social environment on the other hand. Sport which is considered as a Western cultural model reserved for men and the able-bodied, happens to be largely determined by all prevailing social representations, including those stereotypes linked to people with disabilities.