New Books in Sociology Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football
Aug 28, 2025
Dr. Tracie Canada, an insightful socio-cultural anthropologist from Duke University, tackles the complex realities faced by Black college football players. She shares her ethnographic research revealing how athletes resist exploitative systems while navigating the 'football family' narrative. The discussion highlights the disparities between Black players at HBCUs and predominantly white institutions, as well as the impact of race, gender, and kinship. Canada also calls attention to the educational and post-collegiate challenges that further complicate their lives.
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Learning Football To Learn Players' Lives
- Tracie Canada entered football research as an outsider and used learning the sport as a research tool to prompt players to teach her about their lives.
- This method let players reveal how football shaped their identities and daily experiences beyond game mechanics.
Dorm Life Sparked Research Question
- Canada noticed starkly different treatment of basketball and football players while living in the same dorm at Duke.
- That contrast sparked her curiosity about how value and race shape athletes' campus experiences.
Comparison Reveals Systemic Patterns
- Canada compared a historically white university and an HBCU to reveal system-wide patterns, not just campus differences.
- She shows resource gaps but emphasizes the same exploitative structures apply across institutions.
