The End of Sport Podcast

It's September 24th, 1988 -- a warm, sunny and dry day in the Olympic Stadium in Seoul, South Korea. It also happened to be the final of the men's 100 metre sprint to decide the Olympic champion and world's fastest man. The top contenders, Carl Lewis from the United States, and a Canadian sprinter named Ben Johnson, lined up in lanes 3 and 6 respectively in one of the most highly anticipated races of the year. The gun goes off -- and almost immediately Johnson had a step on every other runner, including the defending Olympic gold medalist from the US. By 50 meters it was clear that nobody could keep up with the Canadian runner. As Johnson approached the finish line, he iconically raised his hands in victory, pointing his right index finger to the sky and then to stands toward thousands of screaming fans. With a time of 9.79 seconds, Ben Johnson had completely smashed his own World Record and was now an Olympic champion. Three days later, Johnson was stripped of his gold medal and world record by the International Olympic Committee after he tested positive for the banned performance-enhancing substance stan-o-zolol.   Why am I telling you about an Olympic final that happened over 35 years ago? Well, the events that would transpire after the IOC announced that it would strip Johnson of his gold medal and world record, would send shockwaves through the Canadian sport system – the reverberations of which would be felt in our cultural, political, and social systems as well as our collective memories. Johnson's disqualification spurred something of what sociologists might call a moral panic regarding the unethical grip that had apparently taken hold of Canadian sport – a deviation from the stereotypical perception of Canada as a wholesome, equitable, and polite geopolitical nation. And perhaps most relevant for this talk today, I argue that this was a fundamental precursor to the current moment that we find ourselves in Canadian sport – a moment, as I hope to convince you, that is riddled with harm and abuse. In this episode, Derek walks us through why Canada needs a judicial inquiry into harm and abuse in sport and, more importantly, why that's nowhere near enough to give justice to survivors. If we want to do justice for survivors of harm and abuse in Canadian sport, we need a judicial inquiry. But that's nowhere near enough. We also need to act, and we must act now, to ensure there are effective mechanisms for oversight, accountability, and, perhaps most importantly, reparation for the harms already done and the harms being done literally right now across the country. Anything less is a metaphor for action – it's an obfuscation of the long-history of harm and abuse that we know about in this space, and that we know is only a small snapshot of the true reality of abuse in Canadian sport – and it's a surface level attempt reinforce and replicate a system of sport that inevitably produces and endorses abusive spaces within a project of winning-at-any-cost. For if we continue to allow and obfuscate violent abuse in sport, and sport is supposedly integral to our national identity, one concludes that violent abuse is indeed part of Canada. I don't want sport to be about violent abuse, and surely you don't want Canada to be about violent abuse. So let's do something about it, and let's do something now. Video of a version of this talk at McGill University can be found here.  Please read Kim Shore's brilliant piece on the crisis of abuse in Canadian sport here. Our podcast episode with Kim can be found here.  Ciara McCormack's piece "A Horrific Canadian Soccer Story" can be found here. The End of Sport episode with Ciara can be found here. Mac Ross' piece on the importance of external investigations into Canadian sport can be found here. Our interview with Mac and Jennifer Fraser can be found here. 

In this episode, all three hosts sit down to discuss how transphobic attempts to prohibit trans women from sports participation fit into a larger fascist project unfolding in North America today. We delve into Johanna's recent article for The Guardian on the question of 'allyship' (and, indeed, the politics of how we speak about allyship), why Trump and others made a spectacle out of the early loss of the USWNT, and why a seemingly comparatively insignificant issue (sports) has become so central to the political discourse today.   You can find Johanna's article here.   You can find Nathan's meditations on the subject from this summer here, here, and here.

All three hosts get together to discuss an apocalyptic summer in college sport. Our conversation begins with an in-depth analysis of Northwestern and the hazing/abuse culture that permeates college football and then ranges to a discussion of conference realignment and gambling. This is a conversation both for those who have been following closely and anyone who has not been paying close attention and wants to be brought back up to speed. You can learn more about Northwestern hazing via the coverage of The Daily Northwestern here and here.   You can find the FOS story on Minnesota's toxic culture under P.J. Fleck here.   You can find Nathan and Derek's story about Northwestern and the broader culture of abuse in college football here.   Follow the show on Bluesky at @endofsportpod.bsky.social.

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 upon which it is based for the first time. Also, Nathan introduces the talk by complaining about conferences.

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 National identity.

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 exemplified the dehumanization of Black people under our white supremacy, as well as how Reese's response could not have addressed sports' anti-Blackness and misogynoir in a better way. We also refer back to Kelly's insights from her prior episode about the white gaze of sports scouts and extend it to the mainstream media landscape that spewed racism and misogynoir against Reese. Kelly emphasizes how speech is an act, and not just words; hand gestures and body movements (and responses to them) are actions too, and we must analyze them as such regarding systemic violence and resistance to it. We pivot to the racism at the 2022 Men's World Cup: when a white German commentator chose to describe the Moroccan player's hand gesture as an "Islamic State gesture " (folks, he held up his index finger to suggest #1, like athletes do worldwide). We discuss sporting nationalism and whiteness in relation to this incident. Considering the German state's insistence that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, we briefly talk about how this fits into Germany's nationalist use of Holocaust commemoration for anti-Arab racism. 

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 Communications. In this conversation, we explore how Zack's biography as the child of former Pittsburgh Steeler Steve Furness, a member of the 1970's Steel Curtain, has come to shape him as a scholar and as a person more broadly. The conversation traces questions of masculinity, health and harm in football, representation and ideology, and the concussion industrial complex. You can follow Zack on Twitter at @riseandgrindcor and Bluesky at @punkademic.bsky.social.

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 discipline is complicit in the reproduction of racism, colonialism, and the exploitation of international students in the context of its fundamental commitments to a capitalist project. You can follow Chen Chen on Twitter @cchenDr

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? In the first part of our conversation, Chen Chen explains the disciplinary orientation and history of the field and then we jump into a discussion of the political economy and epistemology of sports management as a project intimately linked to the reproduction of capitalism. You can follow Chen Chen on Twitter @cchenDr

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 sports network. On this episode, Dr. Runstedtler joins Johanna Mellis and Nathan Kalman-Lamb to explain the history of the NBA's 1970s and how an era of anti-racist athletic labor struggle came to be discursively distorted as a 'dark age' for the professional basketball league. This wide-ranging conversation also covers cultural studies as an epistemological and methodological framework for understanding sport, youth sport as a site of child labor, dance as sport/labor, and so much more. You can find Dr. Runstedtler on Twitter @DrTRunstedtler.

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 sport's whiteness and related anti-Blackness, its history of rampant mainly cisgender heterosexual white men's sexual abuse of mainly cishet white girls and women, and the East German state doping program against its female swimmers during the Cold War. The sport's whiteness is not just a dangerous condition that impacts many people today (check out our 2020 episodes with Kevin Dawson and Matt Hodler if you haven't already); people also use it as a shield to claim that swimming "doesn't have a race problem" in a way that gives foundation to denying cishet Black female swimmers as well as trans women their gender. The invocation of the GDR's doping scandal for transphobia is a misappropriation of East German women's suffering that inaccurately denigrates their experiences and silences trans girls' and women's experiences today too. We also talk about USA Swimming's use of white women on its staff as a possible cover for its sexual abuse history, and how cishet white women are always the main beneficiaries of "diversity" schemes due to their proximity to the white patriarchy. Frankie moreover details the challenges they encountered in finding an outlet that would accept their pitch, and contextualizes the sport's transphobia compared to how other sports are responding to anti-trans activity. Johanna ends with a call to action to fellow cishet white women to directly challenge transphobic rhetoric and policies as they support the resurgence of violent fascism and its attempted genocide of transgender people today.  Read the Sports Illustrated piece that Frankie mentioned about Lia Thomas here. 

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 decisions to schools' Board of Trustees, banning many "diversity" programs, and more. This is all on top of banning the AP African American history course as well as requesting that schools submit information about trans students receiving gender affirming care to the state. We talk through how these dynamics could impact the college sport landscape and what prospective athletes could think about doing moving forward: take their labor outside of the state or attend HBCUs in Florida. We discuss the complicated structures coercing athletes to stay silent and compliant, and how athletes simultaneously always have more power than they think they do. The state propaganda photo op over Florida's new NIL legislation of governor Ron DeSantis with UF's athletic director and head football coach alongside counterparts at FSU and athletes has been used to link DeSantis's white supremacy with racial capitalism sport. Black coaches outside of Florida also have a role to play in the resistance, as do other athletes and athletic administrators whose salaries are paid by the exploitation of college athletic workers. While not an uplifting episode, we hope to urge listeners who are athletes, academics, sports journalists, and yes even coaches to stand up and openly resist Florida's fascism and attempt to create "silent and compliant" racialized workers across all industries and walks of life.    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

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 may be of interest for listeners including a bit more detail on how the show got started, what we hope to accomplish through the show, and, of course, we go off again on college athletics and the cartel that is the NCAA.   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

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 and the growing calls for a judicial inquiry.    Check out Ian's work here: Substack: https://iankennedyck.substack.com/ Book: https://www.tidewaterpress.ca/on-account-of-darkness/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/IanKennedyCK?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Piece on Jordan Peterson “show” at Canadian Tire Centre (owned by the Ottawa Senators ownership group): https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/jordan-petersons-ottawa-event-directly-opposes-nh-ls-diversity-and-inclusion-efforts-experts-say-191156733.html 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 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 organizing member of Scholars Against Abuse in Canadian Sport.       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  

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, 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  

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 experiences in high school football as a prism for understanding how racial capitalism shapes and constrains those who participate in US football at the high school, college, and professional levels.   You can find Josh's essay in Catapult 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, 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 increasing ties between right-wing and anti-trans movements and groups.   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 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: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination (Fernwood) and Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras (AK Press). Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU and Faculty Director of NYU Prison Education Program. He is also author of the books Race and America's Long War (UC Press) and Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press).   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 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 Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, The Independent, and the Athletic, where she has recently joined as a contributor to the culture vertical. Victoria has also appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss American college sports and is a frequent podcast, radio, TV, and documentary film commentator on sport and society.  Tracie Canada, is an assistant professor of Anthropology, concurrent faculty in Africana Studies, and affiliated with the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame. Tracie is finishing her book about the lived experiences of Black college football players, tentatively titled Tackling the Everyday: Race, Family, and Nation in Big-time College Football. Tracie has published a number of public pieces in outlets like Black Perspectives, Scientific American, SAPIENS, Fieldsights, and Anthropology News.  And finally Nathan Kalman-Lamb is a Lecturing Fellow at Duke University. Nathan is the author of Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport, published with Fernwood in 2018, and has authored a number of public pieces in outlets such as LA Times, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Time Magazine, The Daily Beast, Jacobin, and many others. Finally, Nathan is a co-host of The End of Sport Podcast.      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

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  

On this episode of The End of Sport, Johanna and Nathan sit down with Kim Shore for the second part of a two-part episode to talk about different forms of abuse that persist in Canadian gymnastics as well as how we as fans, parents, and onlookers can prepare for it and prevent it. Kim Shore is a certified Corporate Leadership Coach, Workshop Facilitator, former member of the Gymnastics Canada Board of Directors, chair of the first ever GymCan Safe Sport Committee and was a gymnast for her entire childhood and competed at national and international competitions. She ultimately achieved a full ride scholarship to a Division I NCAA school, CIAU individual and team national championships, and a 7th place finish at the Sport Aerobic World Championships. This is a really special episode that will continue past conversations we've had with Ciara McCormack and many others. We hope that this interview will help equip parents with approaches, questions, and demands they should make of their coaches and teams, and national governing bodies of sport, governments. Parents want to know what they should do, should they even enroll their parents in more intense sport environments to begin with? How do they need to prepare themselves and their children to recognize warning signs? These are all such difficult questions. But we hope to continue talking through some answers that we got from Ciara about a year ago, and dive even further here.  We want to make it very clear that we are rejecting the premise that athlete abuse is an acceptable part of modern sport. It absolutely is not. It needs to be rooted out. Infuriatingly, many sportspeople seem to have accepted the existence of sporting abuse. We say they seem to have accepted it due to their reporting and response to abuse as a ‘bad apple' phenomenon the way they view racism. This is evidenced by the horrific pervasiveness of sporting abuse, with cases in every single sport from the youth level to the pros and Olympic Games, which is abetted and promoted by sport orgs, universities, etc. who refuse to properly investigate, create pathways to reporting abuse, etc. And as we've seen with the NCAA and other orgs: some even reject any responsibility for protecting child athletes. This all means that parents of children of all genders are practically sending their kids to sports with a high possibility that they could be abused. Parents basically have to cross their fingers and toes that coaches, other athletes, etc. won't abuse their children. This is institutional and governmental failure at numerous levels. Hopefully this episode will help provide a guideline of sports to help parents and athletes navigate the dangerous nature of modern sport. Children should be able to compete in sports without worrying that they'll be abused and harassed; parents should feel completely comfortable signing their children up without having to be hypervigilant about predators. But as we've talked about, the people who created modern sport decided to control athletes' bodies first and foremost under the guise of acceptable and even laudable behavior. And since sport orgs have decided that their actual purpose is not to protect athletes - but to protect the image and liability of the organization and powerful people who control it – then athletes' bodies are mere pawns in the sport orgs' game for control. The following discussion is absolutely not a sign that we are accepting of the status quo, nor that parents and children should accept the status quo. This is about fighting back.   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  

On this episode of The End of Sport, Johanna and Nathan sit down with Kim Shore for the first part of a two-part episode to talk about different forms of abuse that persist in Canadian gymnastics as well as how we as fans, parents, and onlookers can prepare for it and prevent it. Kim Shore is a certified Corporate Leadership Coach, Workshop Facilitator, former member of the Gymnastics Canada Board of Directors, chair of the first ever GymCan Safe Sport Committee and was a gymnast for her entire childhood and competed at national and international competitions. She ultimately achieved a full ride scholarship to a Division I NCAA school, CIAU individual and team national championships, and a 7th place finish at the Sport Aerobic World Championships. This is a really special episode that will continue past conversations we've had with Ciara McCormack and many others. We hope that this interview will help equip parents with approaches, questions, and demands they should make of their coaches and teams, and national governing bodies of sport, governments. Parents want to know what they should do, should they even enroll their parents in more intense sport environments to begin with? How do they need to prepare themselves and their children to recognize warning signs? These are all such difficult questions. But we hope to continue talking through some answers that we got from Ciara about a year ago, and dive even further here.  We want to make it very clear that we are rejecting the premise that athlete abuse is an acceptable part of modern sport. It absolutely is not. It needs to be rooted out. Infuriatingly, many sportspeople seem to have accepted the existence of sporting abuse. We say they seem to have accepted it due to their reporting and response to abuse as a ‘bad apple' phenomenon the way they view racism. This is evidenced by the horrific pervasiveness of sporting abuse, with cases in every single sport from the youth level to the pros and Olympic Games, which is abetted and promoted by sport orgs, universities, etc. who refuse to properly investigate, create pathways to reporting abuse, etc. And as we've seen with the NCAA and other orgs: some even reject any responsibility for protecting child athletes. This all means that parents of children of all genders are practically sending their kids to sports with a high possibility that they could be abused. Parents basically have to cross their fingers and toes that coaches, other athletes, etc. won't abuse their children. This is institutional and governmental failure at numerous levels. Hopefully this episode will help provide a guideline of sports to help parents and athletes navigate the dangerous nature of modern sport. Children should be able to compete in sports without worrying that they'll be abused and harassed; parents should feel completely comfortable signing their children up without having to be hypervigilant about predators. But as we've talked about, the people who created modern sport decided to control athletes' bodies first and foremost under the guise of acceptable and even laudable behavior. And since sport orgs have decided that their actual purpose is not to protect athletes - but to protect the image and liability of the organization and powerful people who control it – then athletes' bodies are mere pawns in the sport orgs' game for control. The following discussion is absolutely not a sign that we are accepting of the status quo, nor that parents and children should accept the status quo. This is about fighting back.   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, all three hosts are joined by University of Oregon Assistant Professor Courtney M. Cox for a wide-ranging conversation about the ethics of the sports industry. Courtney interrogates the ever-proliferating surveillance practices in the world of sport and the ways they are connected to exploitation and harm for athletic workers. She also dives into her fascinating experiences inside the sports-media complex at ESPN and as a professor at the University of Nike and the ways they have informed her thinking about sports.  Check out Courtney's collaborate project The Sound of Victory, which focuses on the historical relationship between music, sound, and sport and how musical and sporting intersections (in)form historical and contemporary understandings of space and place, on Twitter or Instagram!     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

Johanna, Nathan, and Derek are joined by Johnny Stanton, a Cleveland Browns fullback and Athlete Ally ambassador, to discuss the politics of football, from gender and sexuality in the locker room, to race-norming in the concussion settlement, and exploitation at the college level. We also engage the always difficult topic of what it is like to perform a job that comes with such exceptional physical risks. You can check out Johnny's work with Athlete Ally 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

On this very special episode, Johanna and Nathan are joined by the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Jennifer Abruzzo to discuss her September 29 memo entitled “Statutory Rights of Players at Academic Institutions (Student-Athletes) Under the National Labor Relations Act.” That memo has been widely interpreted as open season for the organizing of campus athletic workers, so we went to the source to ask about its implications for college sports and what exactly it means for college athletes who want to organize.   For any listeners who are unfamiliar, we begin the show by sharing the most salient passages of the memo and explaining the function of the NLRB. From there, we talk to the General Counsel about why she felt the memo was necessary, what it means for college athletes, whether it applies to non-scholarship athletes, and if the NLRB has jurisdiction over public universities. We also get at the tricky question of NCAA rules about compensation and what that means for bargaining with a university over wages. Finally, Johanna and Nathan conclude by breaking down the implications of the conversation and what it means for college sport.   You can find the full memo 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, all three hosts sit down to discuss where athletic labor fits in the flurry of labor action that has been called "#striketober." Among other things, we delve into the place of athletes in the labor movement as a whole, the vaccine mandate debates in the context of sport, and concussion consensus statements in relation to the occupational health and safety conditions of athletic labor.   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 we are joined by former minor league baseball player and executive director of Advocates for Minor Leaguers Harry Marino to discuss the unconscionable working and living conditions minor league baseball players are subjected to. We discuss the impact of the pandemic on minor league baseball, recent developments around housing, and how Advocates for Minor Leaguers are trying to organize players and build solidarity. For more on the housing struggle of MiLB players, check out this story. For more on the brutal conditions in MiLB, check out this fabulous expose by Joon Lee. For previous End of Sport coverage, check out Nathan's Jacobin conversation and this really good early episode with Dirk Hayhurst.   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, Nathan draws from a recent discussion at the American Studies Association to lay out his conception of the coercive conditions that frame participation and resistance in college sport. Derek and Johanna respond with their own meditations on the future of college sport and the challenges that continue to confront campus athletic workers. Check out our recent Guardian piece on why NIL doesn't address the fundamentally exploitative plantation dynamics of college sport.   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

Johanna and Nathan are joined by Max Alvarez, editor-in-chief of The Real News and host of the Working People podcast, to break down the state of the labor movement and class warfare in the United States. Max walks us through the intricacies of some of the most prominent strikes this month and situates them within political economic developments in recent US history. He also draws on his experiences in Alabama to situate Amazon as a front in the class war.    For more on the recent flurry of strikes, check out this piece by Jonah Furman and Gabe Winant, this piece on NY taxi drivers by Luis Feliz Leon, and all of Max's incredible coverage on the Real News and Working People, including this conversation with Robin DG Kelly and this discussion with Dan Osborn about Kellogg's.   Follow Max and Working People on Twitter.      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 week's episode, Nathan and Derek are joined by Citations Needed co-host Adam H. Johnson to talk about sports media within the broader landscape of US media commodity spectacle, problems within the exploitative NCAA athletic system and the complicity of sports media, pandemic sport, and, of course, how Adam reconciles all of these problems within the context of his own fandom.   Adam H. Johnson is co-host of the essential Citations Needed podcast (w/ Nima Shirazi) and one of our most important public critics of media discourse. He is also author of a brand new substack newsletter called The Column. You can follow Adam on Twitter!     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 Nathan interview one of our favorite critical sports journalists,  Britni de la Cretaz, about their tireless work spotlighting trans and non-binary athletes and critiquing sporting discrimination. They have written for a phenomenal array of outlets, including the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and many more, and have a co-authored book with Lyndsey D'Arcangelo coming out in November 2021: HAIL MARY: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League. Britni begins by sharing how they got into sports journalism. They pinpoint why mainstream sports media remains loathe to hire and include critical analyses of sport like their work and why hustle culture absolutely is exhausting for them and other freelance journalists. We transition to Britni's Vice analysis in “Why Can't WNBA Broadcasters get the Players' Names Right?” Britni walks us through various tools available to broadcasters, racism, as well as the role played by the decentralization of the league's coverage on the mispronunciation of Black, Brown and international basketball players in the WNBA. The work that broadcasters' pronunciation forces onto the players is of crucial importance. Our discussion of Britni's superb work on nonbinary athletes such as Layshia Clarendon and others in Sports Illustrated last summer continues this theme by highlighting how the questions that Clarendon and other nonbinary players have to ask themselves just to keep playing constitutes additional labor that we often forget about. The WNBA's collective efforts to support her in an inclusive announcement about him provide ideas for how leagues can support nonbinary athletes' humanity first and foremost. The conversation explores what can make sport unsafe for trans and nonbinary people (such as cishet white feminists who argue for segregating cis athletes from trans and nonbinary ones), and to what extent sport can be reformed or recreated to make it safe for them. Britni also takes us through their Bitch Media piece about the NBA's hiring and preference for male coaches with known assault and/or predatory qualities like Jason Kidd and Chauncey Billups over Becky Hammond. The possibilities and limits of representation for women – namely white and white-passing women - in sport organizations, broadcasting, and teams continue to prevent altruistic inclusion, as they analyzed in ‘progress for whom?' Britni's work explores the intersection of sports, gender, culture, and queerness. Their website is here where you can (and should!) subscribe to Britni's newsletter. You can follow them on Twitter here @britnidlc.   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. __________________________________________________________________________ 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 Nathan are joined by historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique to issue blistering critiques about how universities are full-fledged corporations whose number 1 aim is to exploit the labor of graduate students, all faculty (not just contingent ones), and athletic workers—as well as students' loans—to earn profits. After walking us through his research on how the British empire governed their colonies through paper and archives in the 18th century, we shift to how we are governed inhumanely by our universities: by business people and executives who often have right-wing political and capitalist interests. Asheesh details his phenomenal Teen Vogue piece from May 2021, “Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards,” about how our universities and colleges are run by Boards of Trustees filled with corporatists and not academics, from Harvard's racist ‘Board of Overseers' to even supposedly left-leaning Oberlin College. We discuss the people who are most vulnerable to higher ed's corporatization especially during Covid – from graduate students and contingent faculty, to athletic laborers and even cutting permanently-employed faculty. Asheesh importantly details the huge potential impact of The Chair discourse (sarcasm), and the threats that we all face in higher education if we continue to ignore our exploitation. During our conversation we mentioned pieces on how universities are becoming hedge funds with schools attached, and how universities diverted billions of government CARES Covid funds away from educational support to athletics. Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently working on his book, Rule Through Paper: Archive and Language in the Governance of the British Empire. His work has appeared in numerous academic journals, as well as Teen Vogue and The Daily Beast, Inside Higher Ed, and more. You can find Asheesh via his website here, as well as on Twitter @AsheeshKSi.     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. __________________________________________________________________________ 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, all three hosts are joined by anthropologist Tracie Canada to interrogate the ways in which familial discourses are deployed in the world of college football to obfuscate exploitative power relations and also the ways in which that rhetoric is reappropriated by Black players to fashion their own forms of kinship and care. The conversation also explores the methodological dimensions of ethnography in the world of power five college football and Tracie's fascinating research findings from her work with Black college football players. Tracie Canada is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is currently working on her first book Tackling the Everyday: Race, Family, and Nation in Big-Time College Football. Her work has appeared in Sapiens, Scientific American, and Black Perspectives. Check out Tracie's analysis of Covid and college football for Sapiens here. Check out Tracie's co-authored discussion of race-norming in the NFL concussion settlement as an after-life of slavery for Scientific Americanhere. Check out Tracie's work on how Black college football players care for one another in Black Perspectives here. You can find Tracie on Twitter @tracie_canada.   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. __________________________________________________________________________ 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, all three hosts are joined by Joel D. Anderson for a rich conversation about the labor of college football, the tensions of fandom, and the challenges of being a critical voice in the sports media complex.  Joel D. Anderson is a writer and podcaster at Slate, where he co-hosts the show Hang up and Listen. He has previously worked for ESPN, Buzzfeed, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and played football for two years at TCU. You can subscribe to the Hang up and Listen podcast here. You can find Joel's brilliant reporting on Liberty University athletics here. You can find Joel's story on Chuba Hubbard's protest at Oklahoma State in the context of Grambling State's 2013 labor action here. You can find Joel on Michael Jordan and The Last Dance here. Follow Joel on Twitter!   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, all three hosts are joined by Dr. Erin Hatton to discuss her brilliant intervention Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment and how status coercion shapes working conditions in college sport. Erin Hatton is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University at Buffalo and also author of The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America. Too often, the conversation around exploitation in college sport becomes strictly focused on their lack of access to the free market. This episode moves beyond that paradigm to explore how the power dynamics inherent to college sport as presently conceived are far more coercive, harmful, and exploitative than we often imagine. You can find Erin Hatton's book Coerced here. You can find an article she authored on status coercion in college sport for The Conversation here. You can find her on Twitter @eehatton. Dr. Erin Hatton is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University at Buffalo and author of Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment and The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America.     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're 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

Here is the second part of Johanna's interview with Dvora Meyers where they talk about America's role in gymnastics' abusive history, what (certain) responses to Suni Lee's gold medal tells us about the sport, and the impact of name, image, likeness (NIL) developments on college gymnastic athletes. Dvora Meyers is a writer and freelance journalist (formerly of Deadspin), and the author of the book The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics' Top Score —from Nadia to Now. Dvora writes prolifically about gymnastics and other sports from political, cultural, and social angles and her work has appeared in The New York Times,The Guardian, The Atlantic, Vice, Defector, FiveThirtyEight and many more. She also has a substack titled Unorthodox Gymnastics, which we strongly encourage people to subscribe to get a roundup of her published pieces, plus additional exclusive analyses made available to subscribers. Pieces mentioned in this episode: “Why it's Not Surprising that Simone Biles Cheered for Angelina Melnikova” FiveThirtyEight  “Time for the End of the Teen Gymnast” FiveThirtyEight “Suni Lee Doesn't Owe Her Gold Medal to Anyone” Unorthodox Gymnastics “Women's Gymnastics is blasting into the future, but its scoring code is stuck in the past.” Defector You can follow Dvora on Twitter!   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 part one of a two-part episode, Johanna is joined by Dvora Meyers to talk about the antiquated and problematic roots of gymnastics, systemic racism in the sport, athlete activism, and the ways in which the gaze of observers and fans hurts athletes within the sport and reproduces various forms of harm and exploitation. Dvora Meyers is a writer and freelance journalist (formerly of Deadspin), and the author of the book The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics' Top Score —from Nadia to Now. Dvora writes prolifically about gymnastics and other sports from political, cultural, and social angles and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Vice, Defector, FiveThirtyEight and many more. She also has a substack titled Unorthodox Gymnastics, which we strongly encourage people to subscribe to get a roundup of her published pieces, plus additional exclusive analyses made available to subscribers. Pieces mentioned in this episode: “Why it's Not Surprising that Simone Biles Cheered for Angelina Melnikova” FiveThirtyEight  “Time for the End of the Teen Gymnast” FiveThirtyEight “Women's Gymnastics is blasting into the future, but its scoring code is stuck in the past.” Defector You can follow Dvora on Twitter!   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

On today's episode, Johanna and Derek are joined by NOlympics LA coalition member and community organizer Jonny Coleman to talk about the LA28 Olympic bid, the powerful people behind the Games, the harms associated with LA28, and how the Olympics may be quite far beyond any possibility of reform. Jonny Coleman is a writer and organizer based in Los Angeles and a member of the NOlympics LA coalition, which was launched in 2017 by the Housing and Homelessness Committee of the LA Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The Coalition has since expanded to include over two dozen partner organizations based in LA and California, as well as a growing transnational movement with dozens of groups around the world. Jonny has published widely on the harms associated with the Olympics in Jacobin Magazine, Knock LA, The Nation, The Appeal, Deadspin, Slate, and many others. Follow NOlympics LA on Twitter!   The piece mentioned by Gia Lappe and Jonny in Jacobin can be found here “Abolish the Olympics.” Check out our episode on the Tokyo 2020 games with Jules Boykoff here “Buying Unicorns with Dogecoin.” 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, all three hosts are joined by Kaiya McCullough, a former UCLA soccer player and former member of the Washington Spirit and Wurzberger Kickers, Athlete Ally ambassador, host of the Unfiltered Podcast, co-founder of the United College Athlete Advocates. The first half of the conversation ranges from why college athletes need representation to Kaiya's views on the working conditions in college sport and NIL. In the second half, Kaiya shares her perspectives on athlete protest, the gender dynamics of coaching, and the racist culture of soccer. Check out Kaiya's wonderful "Letter to a Younger Me" here. Listen to her podcast Unfiltered here. Join the United College Athlete Advocates here. Follow Kaiya on Twitter @hiyakaiya. 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  

All three hosts are joined by show favorite and Professor and Chair of Politics & Government at Pacific University Jules Boykoff to talk all things Tokyo Olympics, principally why they shouldn't be happening at all. The conversation ranges from why the Tokyo Olympics should have been cancelled in the first place, to overarching problems with the Olympics as an institution, to the racial politics at play in these Games in particular. The discussion also addresses the ethics of the Tokyo Games from the standpoints of fan consumption and athlete participation. Jules Boykoff is author of the recent book NOlympians and the classic Power Games. He has recently written on the Games in countless venues, including the Los Angeles Times, The Nation (with Dave Zirin), and the Washington Post. The terrific piece co-authored by Michael MacDougall and MacIntosh Ross can be found here.

**our apologies for the audio issues at the r beginning of this episode!** On this episode of The End of Sport, Johanna and Derek chat with Naji Ali, producer and host of Crossing the Lane Lines podcast, to discuss the role that swimming has played in his life, the rich aquatic history of the Black diaspora, and the white supremacist history of modern swimming and USA Swimming's complicity. Naji provides so much detail and nuance about his experiences with racism in and out of the pool and how that continues to influence the wonderful work he does now with the swimming community in San Francisco.   Naji Ali is the producer and host of Crossing the Lane Lines, a podcast that highlights the achievements, struggles, and activism in, on, or near the water for Black folk. The podcast is dedicated to giving voice to the Black Swim community by connecting with coaches, swimmers, authors and activists. Naji is a long distance open water swimmer, who swims year around, without a wetsuit, in San Francisco Bay, as well as the Pacific Ocean. He is also a Total immersion Swim Coach, who specifically teaches Black and Brown children and adults how to swim, at whatever cost they can afford.   You can check out Naji's interview with Johanna on the Crossing the Lane Lines podcast 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