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Conference Highlights

The 25th annual conference of North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) will be held November 4-6, 2004 at the Marriott University Park Hotel in Tucson, Arizona, USA.

This year's theme of "Interdisciplinary Dialogues" recognizes the diverse theoretical and methodological movements that scholars have enacted over the past twenty-five years to study sport both within and beyond the boundaries of sociology. "Interdisciplinary Dialogues" also suggests the necessity of continuing conversations among and between sport scholars and those working within disciplines and interdisciplinary "fields."

For more information please contact any member of the program committee:

• Mary McDonald, Chair, mcdonamg@muohio.edu
• Ben Carrington, bcarrington@soc.utexas.edu
• Kathy Jamieson, kmjamies@uncg.edu
• Wib Leonard, wleonard@ilstu.edu
• Sammi King, kingsj@post.queensu.ca
• Ellen Staurowsky, staurows@ithaca.edu

Conference Registration Form:   doc               Hotel Reservation Form:   doc  

You can download a free Adobe Acrobat (pdf) Reader at:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Program

Please check your own information for any errors and send corrections to Mary McDonald, 2004 Program Chair, at mcdonamg@muohio.edu. Since the program will go to press the first week of September, please send corrections by September 6, 2004. Given the difficulty in scheduling this event, we are unable to make changes to the time and day of your presentation at this point.

                                          Program:   doc               Abstracts:   rtf

NASSS 2004 Program Features

Pre-Conference Forum

On Wednesday, November 3, 2004 from 7-9 pm, NASSS will host "Human Rights in the North American Borderlands: A Symposium." In this symposium a panel of local Tucson activists and academics will discuss immigrant, indigenous, and civil rights, environmental justice, and labor and anti-racist organizing in the context of local and global border militarization and "free" trade.

Silver Anniversary Celebration

Call for Participants
The 25th Anniversary of the NASSS Conference
NASSS Dialogues: A Discussion of the Future

Our November meeting in Tuscon will mark the 25th annual conference of NASSS. In recognition of this important milestone, all NASSS members are invited to participate in a discussion of the future direction of NASSS at a special session in Tuscon. While participants are encouraged to submit ideas for discussion, the session will direct a particular focus on the following issues:

• Membership, retention and outreach efforts, including promotion of diversity, recruitment of graduate students, and the conference climate.
• Communication among the NASSS membership about organizational matters.
• Conference structure and content, including interdisciplinarity, accessibility and rigor.
• Administrative structure of NASSS, including terms of office and role delineation.

Please bring your ideas and suggestions about these and other issues to the session. Ellen Staurowsky, President, and Mary McDonald, President-Elect of NASSS, will be in attendance. This discussion will take place during the conference on Friday, November 5, 2004. Please direct inquiries and suggestions for this discussion to: Stephan Walk, Division of Kinesiology and Health Science, California State University, Fullerton (714) 278-4763: SWalk@Fullerton.edu

Keynote Address

Emma Pérez, University of Colorado
The Decolonial Queer Body

What is the decolonial queer body? And why should we even care? In my mind, the decolonial interrogates colonial ideologies and hierarchical institutions. In other words, to decolonize is to move beyond a history of racism, homophobia, and sexism in order to promote egalitarianism for all. If "queer" refers to any and all non-heteronormative sexualities, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, and two-spirit, then, we can assume that it has become the umbrella for all of these alleged perversities. To be queer, to queer and to exhibit queer ways are all projects for the queer theorist. To be queer is simple enough, however "queering" that which is perceived as heteronormative takes a bit more work. At the same time, investigating race and ethnicity can determine what is queer to some cultures and not to others. As an historian and decolonial critic, I find myself "queering" and "racializing" documents as I conduct archival research to uncover our multi-faceted histories. But how is the queer, racialized body retrieved and/or theorized? And what is a queer, racialized body? To answer my own questions about the decolonial queer body, I will take us through a journey that summarizes the contributions of a few decolonial queer scholars who theorize the decolonial queer body.

Emma Pérez is an historian, a creative writer and a feminist critic. Her publications include: Gulf Dreams, Third Woman Press, 1996 and The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, Indiana University Press, 1999. She taught in the Department of History at the University of Texas, El Paso for over ten years. She recently joined the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder as an Associate Professor. Postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha notes that Pérez "has a distinctive and beautiful voice. Her work is written across national/cultural/sexual borders that are difficult to cross." Currently, she's revising an historical novel titled, Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory.

Keynote Panel

Interdisciplinary Dialogues: (Post)identity and Sport

Each panelist was asked to respond to the following: The past twenty-five years and beyond have witnessed various responses to "identity" and inequality both within and outside the realm of sport. These range from identity-based social movements (i.e. women's movements, indigenous rights movements) designed to challenge inequality to nonidentarian critiques that posit identity as the very mode enabling the reproduction of inequality. Moreover, debates about the usefulness of identity as a basis for scholarly analysis and political action have led many scholars to revise fundamental assumptions about the nature of subjectivity, agency, and the intersection of axes of difference. Where do you position your work among these various responses? What theorists or theoretical movements have been influential in your thinking? What insights does your position offer for scholars of sport and the future direction of the field?

• Ben Carrington, University of Texas, Austin
  "Merely Identity?": Cultural Identity and the Politics of Sport
  The extent to which the claim to identity and the rights of recognition underpin or undermine progressive politics has been a central part of critical discussions on culture since the 1980s. More recently some have suggested that 'identity politics' has itself gone too far, leading some commentators to argue that we are now in a putative post-identity situation. Within the academy this position has been articulated from two divergent positions. The first, emanating most clearly from what Spivak has called the conservative Left, derides 'identity politics' as a movement away from materialist struggles and suggests further that Leftist politics concerned with challenging forms of social inequality has been undermined by what is sometimes referred to as the 'cultural turn'. Identity politics, for the conservative Left, is either not political enough, or more often political in the wrong way. The second position argues that identity politics, often mis-labelled as political correctness, is at fault for being over-political, for reading politics into every aspect of knowledge production and therefore is blamed for the movement away from detached forms of social scientific endeavour towards political, interventionist activism. I want to argue that rather than perceiving identity to be in contradiction to questions of inequality that it is in fact a necessary, although not sufficient, precondition for any effective oppositional politics. I further suggest that attempts to caricature identity politics as a manifestation of political correctness, is itself an operation of institutional power within the academic field of sport sociology. To this end I argue for an explicitly politicised form of cultural studies that interrogates the speaking positions of those who argue for a 'return' to the good old days of sport sociology 'before identity' and that instead centres identity as a constitutive process of becoming that is the necessary basis for any (cultural) politics.
• Richard Gruneau, Simon Fraser University
  When Everything Old Becomes New Again: Sport, and the Retreat From Subjectivity and Romanticism
  Social theory has oscillated over the past two centuries between a concern for concrete social "facts," or readily identifiable social forces that shape human beings and their social relations, and a concern for the meaningful, interpretive, dimensions of human life, including subjectivity, discourse, identity and the emotions. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the concern for subjectivity, discourse, identity and emotion was often most powerfully expressed by romanticism. I want to argue that work in the sociology of sport since the 1960s been swept up in this broader series of theoretical oscillations. Notably, the postmodern assertion of subjectivity and identity in the sociology of sport in recent years is a manifestation of a burgeoning post-war romanticism that arose in the 1960s and took full flight during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. This romanticism provided an important corrective to many of the limitations of mainstream social theory and traditional political economic analysis, but its excesses have prompted a renewed interest in alternative perspectives. Suddenly, with the growth of "post-identity" thinking, everything old becomes new again.
• Othello Harris, Miami University
  While Ruminating About Self and Activities . . .
  Identity politics. This is the first time I've used that term. It's not that I am unfamiliar with the term or some of its uses. On the contrary, I've become quite acquainted with it through discussions with, or listening to discussions by, colleagues and students. It's also a term that appears in a number of my readings. Yet, I have avoided it like the term, "political correctness." And, like the term "political correctness"-in its popular usage- identity politics is often invoked contemptuously. I suppose, here, I should set the context for my understanding of, and feelings about, the concept identity politics. Years ago, I was engaged in a debate with a "scholar" about race and sport in America. Having thought I had made an important point (and I will admit, I was probably enjoying the moment a little too much), I was accused of identity politics. The point was that my political position was tied to my racial classification. Suddenly, nothing I had said was a result of my willingness to interrogate ideas (or historical "facts") and come to a non-traditional or unconventional conclusion. My position was determined by "race." My colleague, of course, did not indulge in identity politics because he was "race-less" (and perhaps in his mind "class-less" and "gender-less") for only those who are concerned with race, class, and gender oppression have race, class and gender status. I don't mean to argue that there is no connection between race, class, gender and one's political position. Certainly, social movements are mobilized by leaders' ability to identify collective concerns based on one's class, gender, ethnicity or race (to name a few identities). By way of example, leaders of the Black Power Movement sought to identify the structural and cultural barriers "Afro-Americans" faced, and appeal to "Black pride" as a way to organize a large segment of the population to contest their largely, societally-imposed predicament. But, to argue that race determined one's position regarding this movement is to miss out on the considerable variation in peoples' perceptions and practices. African American communities, churches and families, like (and likely more than) others, were divided about this movement. In addition, many older African Americans were more resistant to the movement than some of the younger ones. This is but one example of how identarian political claims can be too deterministic. To quote Mostern's paraphrase of Stuart Hall, "while a cultural pattern of articulation may exist between various subject-positions and various political statements, this relationship is arbitrary, conforming to no objective conditions of social enforcement" (1999, p. 7).

  Margaret MacNeill, University of Toronto
  Identity, Representation and Critical Media Studies

  Identities are fluid, slippery and central to political attempts to redress inequality. Over the past few decades the issue of identity has been taken up in contradictory ways in both scholarly debates and political struggle. My initial attraction to the field of sociology of sport was sparked by the possibility of redressing sexist media representations in fitness and sport media. A critical cultural studies approach has been central to all my work and recently has been adapted to include poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches. As a student of Gruneau, Kidd, Beamish, and Cantelon, my under/graduate work and research as a junior prof was heavily influenced by the Gramsican turn in media and critical cultural studies (CCS). Thus, the CCS approaches of Hall, Johnson, Hebdige, Willis, and McRobbie figured centrally in my fitness media and sport media research - particularly concerns for deconstructing dominant hegemonic ideologies about gender and nation, unearthing capitalist media labour processes, and speculating about audience positioning, interpellation and resistance. Within our field, the pioneering work of Hall, Hargreaves, Fasting, Lenskyj, Theberge and Vertinsky have also been focal to the development of my feminist approach, while broader media scholars like Jhally, Ang, Morley, and Whannel are some of the many scholars that have influenced my media research. Engagement with groups like Promotion+, Media Watch and CAAWS has allowed me to address gender inequality and mediated identities through research and activism. The constructivist phase of my early work was implicated in pressuring Canadian media to increase the amount and type of coverage of women's sports, eliminate the "babe cam" from CBC programming, contribute to Olympic press kits, to offer athletes' rights and media skills workshops, and to change the editorial policy of Shape from a diet to a lifestyle orientation. A major limitation of my applied studies - which attempted to combine political economic scrutiny of the media and feminist cultural studies -- include rendering issues of race, ability, sexuality and class invisible. More recently, I have become intrigued with cultural studies as transformative practice using the radical contextualism of Ang in media ethnography, feminist poststructuralist approaches (e.g. Butler, Davies, Weedon, Hutcheon) and post colonial approaches to explore difference, identity and power (e.g. Jiwani, Bhaba, James, Razack, Mojab, Gilroy, and hooks). My earlier constructivist approach to ethnography foregrounded the research participants' realist accounts of the sport/fitness-media-sponsor nexus as they experienced it. Following Davies (1982), I've shifted to problematize subjectivity and to locate my accounting of gender inequality along other axes of difference. Feminist post-structuralist approaches attempt to understand the processes through which the researcher, research participants and communities are subjected by social structures, relations and discourses, as well as constituted by them. Thus, I've shifted from issues of socialization to subjectification, that is, from an examination of shaping by the media to the ways in which people actively take up discourses to produce identities, seek pleasure and to tackle oppressive relations.

Spotlight Session

Interdisciplinary Dialogues: Thinking Through Sport, Race and the Nation
This panel will feature young scholars whose work engages the latest thinking in critical race theory and who have not previously attended NASSS.

• Brett St Louis, University of California, San Diego
  Sport and the Politics of Biocultural Racial Explanation
  Given the popularity of sport and its common acceptance as a marker of human attributes, patterns of racial performance and achievement within particular sports are easily accepted as empirical examples and evidence of meaningful racial difference. This paper discusses the analytical salience and popular resonance of explanations of the biological and cultural basis of racially distributed athletic capacities. I argue that such biocultural forms of racial explanation are especially significant in two key senses: first, their capacity to move between the biological and socio-cultural forms of racial description offers a potent antidote to the competing assertions of race as either biological fact or social and cultural construction. Second, by combining ostensibly scientific frameworks with intuitive understanding, moral argument and the popular sporting medium, the biocultural mode of racial explanation and its conclusions on the racial distribution of athletic propensities can be defended through appeals to intellectual freedom and value-free objective scientism while representing a much-needed opposition to the evils of liberal and radical ideological dogma and political correctness. Taken together, this categorical and analytical fluidity is a valuable political resource that cannot be easily dismissed or countered, nonetheless I draw attention to a series of methodological inconsistencies and ethical dilemmas as demanding urgent attention. And, perhaps most importantly, I ask whether we can justifiably ignore the implications of remaining ensnared by a furtive and fundamental fascination with qualitatively meaningful racialized difference.
• Kathleen S. Yep, Claremont Colleges
  "Orientalism and its Discontents": Basketball and Performing Nation and Racialized Masculinities
  In 1939-1940 and 1940-1941, the first and only professional Chinese American men's basketball team, known as the Hong Wah Kues, traveled around the United States and Canada. On the barnstorming circuit, the Hong Wah Kues competed against local Caucasian teams as well as other "ethnic theme teams" such as the African American Harlem Globetrotters, a Native American team, and a White ethnic team representing a religious colony. Described in racialized and gendered terms by local newspapers as "tiny little oriental rug cutters" or the "foreign attackers," the newspaper coverage and the promotional marketing defined the borders of "America" through contradictory but simultaneous themes of alien invasion and assimilation. Through an analysis of newspapers, advertisements and key informant interviews, this paper explores the use of novelty and sport to (re)articulate racialized notions of masculinity and nation.
• Gregory S. Rodríguez, University of Arizona
  National Identity, Raza Boxing, and History: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
  In the United States, sport confounds many long-standing, academic paradigms of Mexican immigrant history. Categories, such as "Ethnicity" and "nationality" lose their original intent as categories of analysis in their everyday cultural practice as sport. My premier example of this is raza boxing (by raza I include all Mexican-descent people residing in the U.S.). I interpret some possible meanings presented in the historical boxing feud between Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans that has raged since at least the 1940s. Over the decades, these boxing bouts often erupted into full-blown rebellions that reflected the interstitial spaces growing numbers of undocumented Mexicans began to occupy and from which new definitions of identity emerged. Mexican nationals, together with Mexican Americans, came to use boxing as a means of self-identification and expression. The literature against which I frame the social movements I see in boxing history is from an emergent school of thinkers for whom Mexican and Mexican-American history are deeply intertwined and as such require an interdisciplinary method in order to speak outside the box of nation-centered approaches to social inquiry. In my work, the nation poses a problem in so much as it is a powerful force of recognition on the cultural ground of history. In boxing history, the "nation" is imagined as a critical terrain on which new identities are deployed in the face of powerful, impersonal, hemispheric forces. Yet, without a doubt, as boxing demonstrates, the antinomies of capital appear incapable of exhausting cultural possibilities. For example, transmigrant Mexican nationals, whose culture emerges full-blown in U.S. boxing industries, demonstrate a manifestly adaptable and resilient use of boxing that might be thought of as one of many ways this community is transforming the cultural and national terrain on which we live. This transforming sense of self and connection to place is seen in the way transmigrants have made boxing a means of not submitting to the vagaries of multinational capitalists demands and dominant popular cultural expectations.

Special Session

Graduate Workshop - Negotiating the Publication Terrain

Organisers: Alissa Overend, Emma Wensing, NASSS Graduate Student Reps

Publish or perish is a common, and often accurate rhetoric among most university institutions. Grants, scholarships, productivity, job applications, and tenure are often gauged upon one's ability to publish. For those of us just entering the already-challenging world of academia, the "p" word can be both frightening and intimidating. How does one begin this arduous process? What kinds of journals are available for those who study sociology and cultural studies of health, physical activity, recreation, and sport? What non-refereed sources should also be considered? What are some of the dos and don'ts around written submissions? Designed for but not restricted to graduate students, this seminar will include three panelists in a round table format: Annelies Knoppers, the newly appointed editor of the Sociology of Sport Journal; Peter Donnelly, the editor of the International Review of the Sociology of Sport; and Audrey Giles, an all-but-defended Ph.D. student. Each presenter will speak for about 10-15 minutes, leaving ample time for a question and answer period. If you have any concerns or curiosities about the publication process, this seminar will provide a non-threatening and informative environment where graduate students can help negotiate the ever-important publication terrain. We hope to see you all there.

Barbara Brown Student Paper Award

Students are encouraged to submit a paper for consideration for the Barbara Brown Student Paper Award. This award is granted annually to the best student-authored, non-published paper submitted for consideration.

Papers should not exceed 30 double-spaced pages, including all notes, tables, and bibliography. Authors should follow a consistent style (e.g., APA) throughout the paper. Papers do not need to be submitted for presentation at the NASSS conferences (though most are), but authors MUST be members of NASSS. Participants must be students at the time the award is presented. Papers that have been accepted for publication are not eligible for the contest.

The winner of the award will have all of her/his NASSS conference expenses paid, up to $1,000, plus a waiver of the conference registration fee. The Student Paper Award Committee may also give up to two honorable mentions. Students receiving an honorable mention will have their conference registration fees waived.

The DEADLINE for submissions for 2004 is September 5, 2004. Papers should be sent to:

Billy Hawkins
367 Ramsey Student Center
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602

e-mail attachments (Word format) can be sent to bhawk@uga.edu

Take a Student to Lunch

As in the past, Friday will offer the annual "Take A Student to Lunch" opportunity where faculty treat graduate students to lunch.

NASSS 2004 Info | Sessions | Abstract Submissions | NASSS Homepage | Comments and Questions

Created : 03 May 04 : ash
Updated : 11 Oct 04 : ash

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