Entangled positionality: Relational ethnography and interconnected small worlds in sports coaching research

This paper develops the concept of entangled positionality as a way of theorising how researcher positionality is constituted across the multiple connected worlds the ethnographer inhabits. Drawing on Crossley’s relational sociology and building on Desmond’s call for relational ethnography, we extend recent scholarship on relational positionality (Bolade-Ogunfodun et al., 2023; Delfino, 2025; Drujon d’Astros et al., 2024) by applying Crossley’s (2011) network-analytic vocabulary to the question of positionality. Through three vignettes drawn from 20 months of longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in an elite youth football academy, we show how access, disclosure and emotional labour were shaped by sedimented histories of interaction and structural intersections across overlapping small worlds. We argue that positionality is not a property the ethnographer carries into the field, but a configuration of ties produced and sustained across the worlds the ethnographer inhabits. The paper makes three specific contributions. Specifically, it applies Crossley’s (2011) theorising to positionality, it draws analytical attention to the ethnographer’s life beyond the field as structurally connected to the field, and it uses the empirical case of sports coaching research to demonstrate how dense, affective and morally charged occupational worlds make these networked dynamics particularly visible.