Alternative and Activist (Sports) Media: Examining Digital Mobilizations of Sport by Social Movement Organizations

• In Event: Left of Sports

Abstract

This paper examines how social movements and alternative/activist (new) media are increasingly engaging and integrating––if not hijacking––the power of sport for articulating a more progressive society. Following the popular embrace of the connection between sport and social (in)justice in the late 2010s and early 2020s, sports media in the mid-2020s appears to be experiencing a moment of political backlash, characterized by the rise of openly conservative sports media and the overt succumbing of many sports media platforms and personalities to corporate domination. This rightward shift in sports media reflects how “new” media has more generally failed to live up to its promise to reinvigorate the public sphere through fostering transparency, openness, and decentralized democratic discourse. In these times, it is important to recognize and analyze alternatives to a “new” sports media that is increasingly being galvanized for neoliberal and ideologically regressive ends.

This study thus attempts to outline the contours of a (potentially) Leftist sports media. I call attention to how new media enables the use of sport for political conscientization––or what I term digital sporting pedagogy––which aims to disrupt the contemporary political economy of new media that structurally and algorithmically disincentives critical and contextual reflection on social issues, promotes misinformation/disinformation to corroborate state or commercial interests, and prioritizes cheap forms of digital engagement so enticing (and profitable) in the contemporary attention economy. I contend that analyzing the political mobilizations of sport at the grassroots level lends insight into how a Gramscian and Freirean model of critical pedagogy can be enacted in the digital age, as a progressive and humanistic – yet still popular––counterpolitic to algorithmic dominance of the online public sphere. While much previous scholarship explores the uses and articulations of sport by professional athletes, global franchises/leagues, institutions, and celebrities, this study demonstrates how analyzing grassroots “bottom-up” sporting initiatives is necessary to capture the ways everyday people and communities are engaging and assigning meaning to sport.

As such, the empirical site of this study is not sports media per se (at least as traditionally construed). It is rather media created by social movements––or what Lievrouw (2023) terms “alternative and activist media”––which is increasingly engaging and integrating sport into its counter-hegemonic messaging. This study examines two empirical examples: Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp for Black Liberation and the Está Pasando de Nuevo initiative to highlight political imprisonment in authoritarian regimes during the 2024 Copa Americana. Both initiatives offer insight––across different contexts and issues––of how alternative/activist media can strategically wield the economic centrality and cultural ubiquity of sport as a tool for framing social critique, hailing digital publics, soliciting resources, and imagining alternative political orders. Overall then, if “to study alternative media is to consider how the world might be represented differently” (Atton, 2015; p. 2), then to study these models of grassroots sporting mobilization is to consider how sport itself might be framed differently, and leveraged as a tool for representing the world differently.

Author

• Brandon T. Wallace, Indiana University