Methods Through the Mayhem: Doing Critical Sports Studies in Precarious Times

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Professional Development Format

Abstract

This roundtable will consider what it means to “Do” Sports Studies in and beyond the academy. Our 2023 state-of-the-field roundtable in American Quarterly considered the ways we thought about and pursued public engagement as a field, asserting that “sports media attracts an enormous audience, creating unique opportunities for critical sports studies scholars in the new economy of public scholarship,” In part this professional development roundtable revisits and reconsiders that question.

Paying particular attention to the ways we build relationships with athletes, research participants, and activists, we now ask: how do these relationships inform our work but also give us pathways to consider the work beyond the academy and in conversation with various communities? What tensions does this work produce? How do we engage with multiple publics? How has the way we do this work changed at this moment? Does it require new methods?

This roundtable brings together scholars from History, Anthropology, Media Studies, Black Studies, Chicano/a/x Studies, Ethnic and Indigenous Studies, and Political Science, from various institutional and organizational backgrounds. Each panelist on this roundtable will draw on their own research, activism, and/or public-facing work to probe these questions before opening up the session to audience participation to facilitate the exchange of ideas, resources, and strategies and address new concerns raised by violent and harmful political realities.

Jules Boykoff will discuss his scholarly and public writings on the Olympics and his work with global anti-Olympic activist groups. Amira Rose Davis will discuss translating her scholarly historical work into public-facing offerings from children’s books to podcasts and video essays and the ways sports storytelling changes in each arena. Courtney Cox will examine the logistical and financial realities of sports studies fieldwork while asking what “methods on a budget” might look like. Tracie Canada will consider the gendered realities of immersive fieldwork and working within/ against jargon-based disciplines while trying to speak to multiple and shifting publics. Paulina Serrano will present her work with oral histories and collective memory-making in places actively fighting over the meaning, narrative, and presentation of American History. Kathy Pulupa will use her work with GIS mapping and ethnographic fieldwork to explore practitioner proximity to the field of sports studies and the possibilities of recreational sports. Joe Darda will chair.

As Sports Studies Scholars, how might we consider embodied activism? How are we tethered to and on the perimeter of the people we write about,and feel accountable towards? Does this vary by discipline? What does interdisciplinary provide us? This roundtable provides an opportunity to learn from each other, and to ask questions about fieldwork, grant writing, public scholarship, scholar-activism, pedagogy and more.

As we consider what our field, jobs, and stories will be in a time of uncertainty and disruption- might our combined methods, meanings and moves shed light on pathways forward beyond tidy definitions? How will sports matter? What does it mean to *do* Critical Sports Studies now and how might we collectively sharpen our tools to meet this moment?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Joseph Darda, Michigan State University

Panelists

• Amira Rose Davis, University of Texas- Austin

• Courtney M. Cox, University of Oregon

• Jules Boykoff, Pacific University

• Tracie Canada, Duke University

• Paulina A Serrano

• Kathy Pulupa, University of Southern California

Biographical Information

Jules Boykoff writes on a range of subjects, including political activism, the Olympic Games, and climate change. He is the author of six books on the Olympics—What Are the Olympics For? (Bristol University Press, 2024), The 1936 Berlin Olympics: Race, Power, and Sportswashing (Common Ground, 2023), NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Beyond (Fernwood, 2020), Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics (Verso, 2016), Activism and the Olympics: Dissent at the Games in Vancouver and London (Rutgers University Press, 2014), and Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games (Routledge, 2013). He also wrote two books on the suppression of political dissent—Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press, 2007) and The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (Routledge 2006)—and co-authored with Kaia Sand Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (Palm Press, 2008).
Boykoff writes across academic disciplines, publishing peer-reviewed articles in fields such as political science, sociology, geography, environmental studies, and history. Boykoff holds a Ph.D. in political science from American University. He currently teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon.

Courtney M. Cox is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (IRES) at the University of Oregon. Her research examines issues related to identity, technology, and labor through sport and wine. Her forthcoming book, Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball, considers how Black women and non-binary athletes maneuver through the global sports-media complex. She is also co-director (with Dr. Perry B. Johnson) of The Sound of Victory, a multi-platform digital humanities project located at the intersection of music, sound, and sport. She previously worked for ESPN, Longhorn Network, NPR-affiliate KPCC, and the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks. Cox is also the co-chair of ASA's Sports Studies Caucus.

Amira Rose Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas-Austin where she specializes in 20th Century American History with an emphasis on race, gender, sports, and politics. Recently named a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, she finishing up her book, “Can’t Eat a Medal”: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow (UNC Press). Davis is the co-author of the award-winning children's book, Go Wilma, Go! (Bloomsbury Press) with Micheal Long. With Joseph Darda, Davis co-edited the 2023 special issue of American Quarterly, titled “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.” Davis also provides sports commentary for media outlets including NPR, CNN, and BBC. She has written, produced, and featured in multiple ESPN projects, including authoring and narrating the digital essay, “Title IX- The Fight Continues,” for which she won a Silver Clio Award. Davis serves on the advisory board of the Jackie Robinson Museum and the Arthur Ashe Legacy Foundation and co-chairs the American Studies Association’s Sports Studies Caucus. Davis is the co-host of the Feminist sports podcast, Burn it All Down and was the host of Season 3 of American Prodigies: The Rise of Black Girls in Gymnastics.

Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, and the founder and director of the HEARTS Lab. In her first book, Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football, she analyzes the performing athletic body to reveal how processes of anti-Blackness, injury, violence, and care impact the everyday lived experiences of Black college football players.

Paulina A. Serrano is a Carlos E. Castañeda Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin. Her current book project, Deportistas! Mexican Women, Sporting Citizenship, and Belonging in Twentieth-Century America, centers sportswomen of Mexican descent to interrogate questions of citizenship as it becomes embodied in the performance of athletic labor.

Kathy Pulupa (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate and scholar specializing in Latinx Studies, Sports Studies, and Queer Studies as the University of Southern California.
Kathy’s research focuses on recreational soccer and the relationship recreational sport has to identity development of Latinx first-generation and immigrant women. Kathy’s research approaches the intersectional identity development of Latinx women as athletes, family members, and queer peoples using sport as analytic to navigate their relationships to their larger queer and cultural communities and families. Her work looks to expand the scope of sports studies to take into consideration the value of recreational sporting participation and athleticism.

Joseph Darda is an associate professor of English at Michigan State University. He writes and teaches about post-1945 American literature, culture, politics, and sports. He is the author of three books on the reconfiguration of race in the age of civil rights: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America (University of California Press, 2021), and Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War (University of Chicago Press, 2019). CHOICE named How White Men Won the Culture Wars an Outstanding Academic Title for 2022, and the New Republic called it “original and persuasive” and “a wide-ranging and provocative tour through the post-Vietnam cultural and political scene.” His next book, Gift and Grit: Race, Sports, and the Construction of Social Debt (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2025), investigates how the sports industry has incubated ideas about race, gender, and advantage since civil rights.