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Becoming Talents

Becoming Talents

We are working on studies of talent programs and the making of talents from a basic understanding that talent is something that becomes with others.  A traditional view of about what talent is and how best to develop it, implies that the talent is in an autonomous and self-reliant individual. It develops from within given the proper fertilizer in the form of supportive circumstances. The talent belongs to the individual and can be brought around from location to location without the competence to perform certain actions in an excellent way is changed fundamental thereby. But what if talent is something that is created? What if the talent is dependent on specific circumstances in order to exist? What if talent instead come from the outside and forms the individual, so it becomes able to act in certain ways that can be recognized as a talent? Rather than assume that talent shall be an individual ownership, we perceive talent relationally, where the knowing subject becomes through exchange with its surroundings.

We examine talents as integrated parts of extensive social and material network that allows them to appear and act as talent. We focus on interactions between subjects, technology, materiality, discourses, bodies, etc., that makes talent emerge in certain ways. Talent is in our view not an unambiguous phenomenon. It is movable and ambiguous, and might appear in many different ways. Talent is something that is added existence, as it is formed in relation to specific practices.

In relation to this research theme, there exists a 3-year research project that examines the importance of sports classes in primary schools (Folkeskolen) for sports talents' athletic, academic and social development and becoming.