In this short episode, Nathan shares his Canadian Sociological Association conference presentation on the book manuscript for The End of College Football: Exploitation and Harm in the Academy and on the Gridiron, co-authored with Derek. The manuscript has just been submitted (yay!) to the University of North Carolina Press for peer review (and only 100% longer than promised!). This seventeen-minute presentation distils the core arguments of the book and shares some of the player testimony...

On this episode, @kristi_allain joins @Derekcrim and @nkalamb to comprehensively explore what's wrong with the culture of Canada's favourite game. Kristi Allain is Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Physical Culture and Social Life at St. Thomas University. Her work examines physical culture and its complex relationships with national identities, perhaps no more obvious in her work on how men’s hockey produces, contests, and supports dominant expressions of Canadian...

In this episode, Johanna is joined by repeat guest and close friend of the show, interdisciplinary scholar extraordinaire Kelly Wright. We discuss and compare the media's reactions to Angel Reese during 2023's March Madness to a white German commentator's remark about the Moroccan World Cup team's gesture last summer. After recapping for us what happened with and against Reese, Kelly shares her agreement with and expands upon Letisha Brown's excellent First and Pen analysis: how the incident...

Zack Furness is Associate Professor of Communications at Penn State Greater Allegheny. He is the author of One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility (Temple University Press, 2010), editor of Punkademics (Minor Compositions, 2012), and co-editor of The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives (Temple University Press, 2014). Importantly, he is also author of the excellent journal article “Reframing Concussions, Masculinity, and NFL Mythology in League of Denial” in Popular...

Chen Chen is Assistant Professor of Sport Management in the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education. He is the absurdly published author of seemingly countless high quality academic journal articles that interrogate the themes of capitalism, racism, imperialism, and settler colonialism both in the discipline of sport management and in high-performance sport. In this second instalment of our two-part series with Chen Chen on sport management, we delve into the question of how the...

Chen Chen is Assistant Professor of Sport Management in the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education. He is the absurdly published author of seemingly countless high quality academic journal articles that interrogate the themes of capitalism, racism, imperialism, and settler colonialism both in the discipline of sport management and in high-performance sport. In this episode, Derek and Nathan are joined by Chen Chen to answer the question, what's the deal with sports management?...

Member of the legislative assembly for Bathurst East-Nepisiguit-Saint-Isidore and leader of the Liberal Party and official opposition in New Brunswick Susan Holt joins Nathan to discuss the controversy in the province over educational Policy 713 and anti-2SLGBTQIA+ developments in the province's politics.   Check out Nathan's commentary piece on these issues in NB Media Co-op here.

Theresa Runstedtler is Associate Professor of History and Critical Race, Gender, and Cultural Studies at American University. She is the author of Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (UC Press, 2012) and, this year, Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA (Bold Type Books, 2023). She is also a former member of the Toronto Raptors Dance Pak and has worked in public relations for a national...

In this episode, Johanna talks with repeat guest and one of our favorite sports journalists, Frankie de la Cretaz, about their incisive piece for The Nation, "How Women's Swimming got so Transphobic." Per Frankie's research, "Almost no other sport is as hostile to trans athletes - and that's because its culture created the perfect conditions for transphobia to take root." Frankie first discusses the confluence of 3 main factors upon which the sport's dangerous transphobia has emerged: the...

In this episode, Johanna and Nathan are joined by one of our all-time favorite journalists and a repeat guest: Joel Anderson from Slate. Joel came on to expand on his argument for what prospective Black athletes might do regarding Florida from his February 13th episode of Hang Up and Listen in the "Afterball" segment. We begin by laying the landscape of the FL state's discriminatory policies, including the proposed HB 999 legislation that aims to ban Gender Studies, gives faculty hiring...

Today we have a special episode which is actually a recording of a symposium panel session Johanna, Nathan and I participated in. The symposium panel was part of William & Mary’s Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice spring symposium series called “Level the Playing Field: How Sports Both Advance and Hinder Social Justice Goals,” and was hosted by William & Mary JD Candidate Eric Beinhart, who you will hear as host of the session. In this panel we covered a lot of topics that...

On today’s episode, Derek is joined by Ian Kennedy, critical sports journalist and writer for The Hockey News and Yahoo Sports, and author of On Account of Darkness: Shining Light on Race and Sport (Tidewater Press). This wide-ranging discussion covers On Account of Darkness and what it can tell us about racism in sport through the lens of athlete’s experiences, Ian’s work as a critical sports journalist (and the corresponding pushback), and we’ll get his thoughts on abuse in Canadian sport...

In today's episode we are joined by Jennifer Fraser and MacIntosh Ross to discuss the pervasive abuse and harm in the world of Canadian sport and the efforts of athletes and academics to push the federal government to initiate an independent judicial review despite resistance from within.  Jennifer Fraser is an educator, consultant, and author of The Bullied Brain: Heal your Scars and Restore your Health. MacIntosh Ross is Assistant Professor of Kinesiology at Western University and...

Johanna and Nathan are joined by Dionne Koller, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Sport and the Law at the University of Baltimore, to discuss her fascinating new paper "Identifying Youth Sport." The conversation explores the historical development and particularities of the US youth sport system, and the ways in which US youth sport can be theorized through a Marxian framework as a site of harm. Tune in for this fascinating discussion.    For a transcription of this episode,...

Nathan is joined by Joshua Myers, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Howard University and author of Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition and  We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989, to talk about Cedric Robinson, racial capitalism, and how we cannot understand football without grappling with intertwined histories of racialization and capitalism.    The conversation explores Josh's brilliant essay in Catapult on his...

In this catch up episode, Nathan, Johanna, and Derek talk about what they have been up to for the past six months before diving into some of the latest issues in sport and society, including the downfall of Twitter, the NLRB regional office in Los Angeles’ ruling that USC, the PAC-12, and NCAA are joint employers of revenue-generating football and basketball players (and it’s direction to pursue unfair labor practice charges), mass harm and violence in Canadian sport, and the seemingly...

In the newest episode of our EOS Panels series, Johanna and Nathan talk to Tyler Shipley and Nikhil Pal Singh about what imperialism is, why it is a crucial concept for our understanding of the world system today, and how imperialism advances and is advanced through capitalist sport.  Tyler A. Shipley is a Professor of Society, Culture and Commerce in the Department of Liberal Studies at Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning and author of the books Canada in the World:...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...