The End of Sport

In this third episode of our End of Sport Panels series, Johanna and Derek sit down with Amanda Mull, Steven Salaita, and Kevin Gannon to explore how some of our favorite anti-racist/anti-capitalist critics, folks whose focus in their work is not on sport, come to engage with sport and experience fandom. The conversation explores what the panelists get out of their engagements with racial capitalist sport and how their experiences with and through sport inform their politics. Amanda Mull is a three-time guest on the show and staff writer at The Atlantic. Steven Salaita is a former Associate Professor at Virginia Tech and should-have-been professor at the University of Illinois, before having his position revoked in an actual instance of ‘cancel culture,’ for principled comments about Israeli apartheid. He is the author of eight books, including 2015’s Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom. Kevin Gannon is Professor of History at Grandview University and author of the recent book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested, you can support the show via our Patreon! As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. www.TheEndofSport.com

In this second episode of the End of Sport Panels series, Johanna and Derek are joined by current and former college athletes to discuss the changing dynamics of the US college sports system and to explore how they would change college sport if they could.Kaiya McCullough is a former UCLA and Washington Spirit soccer player, Chairwoman of the Anti Racist Soccer Club, and Athlete Ally Ambassador.Colin Anderson is a former linebacker for Vanderbilt University.Sophie Carmosino is a rower at Indiana University.Andrew Cooper is a former track athlete at Cal Berkeley and lead organizer of #WeAreUnited and co-founder of United College Athlete Advocates.     For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested, you can support the show via our Patreon! As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. www.TheEndofSport.com

This special 100th episode of the show marks the beginning of a new series on The End of Sport: EOS Panels. The EOS Panels are meant to capture the very best of the academic conference panel--free-flowing discussion among experts on a common theme, but without the cursed academic conference paywall that inhibits access. In the first of this series, we had the pleasure of being joined by Louis Moore, Lucia Trimbur, and Ryan King-White to discuss how they navigate the tensions of being critical sports scholars with children who participate in sport. This is a wide-ranging discussion that delves into fundamental questions about the value of youth sport, potential forms of harm, and even interrogates the very nature of competition itself. We think you'll enjoy it! Lou Moore is Professor of History at Grand Valley State University, co-host of the Black Athlete Podcast, and author of the books I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood and We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality. Lucia Trimbur is Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies at CUNY’s John Jay College and the Graduate Center and a Global Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Come out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym and is currently working on her second book, Lights Out: The Creation of the Concussion Crisis, under contract with Columbia University Press. Ryan King-White is Associate Professor of Kinesiology at Towson University and editor of the book Sport and the Neoliberal University: Profit, Politics, and Pedagogy.     For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested, you can support the show via our Patreon! As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. www.TheEndofSport.com

This episode is quite different from our normal releases – rather than an interview or monologue about harm in contemporary sport, we are actually publishing a panel session on the importance of public sports scholarship, particularly in the context of a global pandemic. This episode was recorded in Montreal on April 22, 2022 at the annual meeting of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, or NASSS as you’ll hear in the episode. The episode starts with Derek urging us to consider the place of both academic conferences – and more specifically, the role that in-person only conferences hold in our fields. In the lead up to organizing this panel, we had been thinking about ways in which we can make our work more accessible and more widely available for folks who may not have access to the ivory tower and/or the ability to attend NASSS – not to mention the desire given that we are still in the midst of a global pandemic. Since this panel was focused on the importance of critical public scholarship, we thought….how can we have such a panel that is entirely paywalled in the ivory tower and inaccessible for folks who are not comfortable returning to in-person events? We decided the only way to actually put such a panel on was to – despite a lack of support from the association – put the event on in a hybrid manner.  We think that we must start resisting the decisions of the academic communities in which we are part of – and doing it vocally and loudly. When thinking of the ways in which we can mobilize against an academic system that contributes to inequality, I think we need to look at small forms of resistance and disobedience to build momentum. The academy has LONG been willingly complicit in erecting some of the most harmful systems of oppression and discrimination, so taking that on requires a concerted effort from us all. So I will simply close with a call to all scholars on conference planning committees, association executive boards, or editorial boards, or any other influential position in our disciplines, to loudly object to exclusionary decisions that are made even if it puts our positions at risk.  Huge thanks to our panelists! Please check out their brilliant work.  Letisha Brown, assistant professor at Virginia Tech and incoming assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati. Letisha has published numerous brilliant public pieces in First and Pen, Engaging Sports and The Shadow League and has appeared on podcasts including Crossing the Lane Lines, The Black Athlete Podcast, and is also a friend of the EoS show! Courtney Szto is an assistant professor at Queens University and author of the 2022 NASSS Outstanding Book Award for Changing on the Fly: Hockey Through the Voices of South Asian Canadians published with Rutgers University Press in 2020. Courtney is managing editor for Hockey in Society, Associate Editor for Engaging Sports, and executive producer of “Revolutions,” a documentary on bike waste and the circular economy premiering tomorrow here at NASSS at 3:30 in Salon 1. Courtney has also appeared on or published in The Globe and Mail, Sports Illustrated, Rabble, Interrupt Magazine, CBC’s The Current, and on a number of podcasts.  Jules Boykoff is a professor of politics and government at Pacific University and author of NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond, published in 2020 with Fernwood, Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, published with Verso in 2016, among many others. Jules has also been an active public scholar, publishing on myriad topics in outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York times, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, NBC News Think and many others. Jules has also appeared on television on the BBC, Democracy Now, CBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera.  Victoria Jackson, a Clinical Assistant Professor at Arizona State University who has published in the Los Angeles times, Washington Post, Boston G

SB Nation writer Ben Natan joins Nathan to discuss the NFL Draft, how it suppresses wages, and the ways in which the process generally dehumanizes and exploits players. The conversation also roves into some current issues in college sports, including a potential partnership between universities and the military to subsidize scholarships in exchange for service and the newest moral panic around NIL. Check out Ben's piece on the shortcomings of NIL here. You can find him on Twitter @thebennatan.     For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested, you can support the show via our Patreon! As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. www.TheEndofSport.com

Well, it's been a minute! In this episode of The End of Sport, Nathan, Johanna, and Derek catch up on some recent cases of harm in sport, including a preview of our latest piece for The Guardian on how many of our esteemed institutions of higher education are *refusing* to pay entirely permissible academic bonuses for campus athletic workers, abuse and harm in Gymnastics Canada, and the recent putatively 'independent' review of the NHLPA's handling of Kyle Beach's reporting of sexual abuse.  See our latest piece on universities refusing to pay academic bonuses to campus athletic workers in The Guardian.  For more on Kim Shore's work, brilliant athlete mobilization, and recent news on abuse and harm in Gymnastics Canada, click here.    For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested, you can support the show via our Patreon! As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. www.TheEndofSport.com

In this catch up episode, Johanna, Nathan and Derek sit down to talk about recent developments in the world of capitalist sport, including the failures of the UCLA athletic department to protect gymnasts from targeted racism (and the brilliant social media mobilization to shed light on it), the racist culture in the Iowa football program, and (at long last) we offer some of our critical thoughts on the cultural product of Ted Lasso.  See Dr. Letisha Brown's piece on UCLA Gymnastics in First and Pen here.    For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested, you can support the show via our Patreon! As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. www.TheEndofSport.com

In this episode, Johanna and Derek sit down with Karleigh Chardonnay Webb to talk about the transphobic moral panic surrounding Lia Thomas, exclusionary practices and discourses of ‘fairness’ and ‘competition’ in capitalist sport, and how allies and put in the work to make sport an inclusive space for trans folks.   Karleigh Chardonnay Webb has been working as a sports journalist including for ESPN for over 27 years. She currently writes for Outsports and hosts a podcast called The Trans Sporter Room, which we *highly* suggest listeners check out. She is also an athlete of many sports, and a staff operator forTrans Lifeline which is the first and only peer support line run entirely transgender people. Check out Karleigh’s latest piece on the NCAA not immediately adopting USA Swimming’s trans policyand on allyship and solidarity from other athletes, both for Outsports.       For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested, you can support the show via our Patreon! As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. www.TheEndofSport.com

In this episode, Johanna, Derek, and Nathan catch up on the last week of sports and politics. Of course, it isn't really your typical 'catch up' on the week of sports podcast. Tune in as we discuss the normalization of the pandemic and the role that sport plays in it, the so-called 'Freedom Convoy' in Canada, and the illogic of the anti-trans movement in sport (and the trend of seeking ally ship with right-wing news organizations). Athlete Ally Responds to USA Swimming Trans Athlete Policy (feat. Johanna Mellis).  Check out Lou Moore and Derrick White's discussion of the NFL's racism targeting Brian Flores and other coaches on The Black Athlete. Check out Letisha Brown's piece on racism in the UCLA gymnastics program for First and Pen.   Katie Barnes Piece on support for Lia Thomas.    For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested, you can support the show via our Patreon! As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. www.TheEndofSport.com

In this rather searing episode, Derek and Nathan sit down with former San Francisco 49er and Wisconsin Badger Chris Borland to discuss the football industrial complex. Chris explains why he decided to retire at the very beginning of an exceptionally promising NFL career, how the Care Consortium is profoundly understating the danger of football in concussion research, and what makes college football so fundamentally exploitative.  You can find Chris' full testimony before Congress on the prevalence of concussions in college football here. You can also follow Chris on Twitter to keep up with everything he is working on!     For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested, you can support the show via our Patreon! As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. www.TheEndofSport.com