Wrestling With the Academy: Future Directions for the Cultural Politics of Sport

This discussion is a response from early-career scholars within physical cultural studies to the ideas put forth in this special issue regarding the cultural politics of sport. The eternal challenge of analyzing cultural politics is that, as soon as scholars stumble upon a set of terminologies, expressions, and articulations that can productively capture a conjunctural moment, that moment has already passed. For scholars, this paradox means that any cultural studies work that analyzes a singular, temporal moment is doomed to stagnancy. Because of the dynamism of the culture–politics–sport relation, scholars attempting to understand it must approach the work with theoretical, empirical, and methodological flexibility. The purpose of this flexibility is to best open spaces for intervention, or “to open new possibilities for transforming the existing context, and to imagine new futures” (Grossberg, 2008, p. 34), as a way to challenge the status quo. As the scholars in this special issue have highlighted, cultural politics should be examined with a flexible sensibility that: is simultaneously forward-looking and historically contextual; is rigorous in identifying fleeting conjunctural ties; and is ontologically and epistemologically comprehensive at the same time it recognizes that any “truth” that is argued for may soon be obsolete.

In this spirit of a forward-thinking cultural studies, we early-career scholars have read this special issue as both a refresher and a (new) starting point for contemporary analyses for the cultural politics of sport. We then ask, and in this piece attempt to answer, the simple question of: where do we go from here? Our intention in reading these pieces from Carrington, Hartmann, Joseph, and Boykoff in conversation is to identify their common themes, synthesize their arguments, and attempt to unpack the gaps and tensions within these accounts. In doing so—and in leaning into our positionalities as budding sporting intellectuals, not yet experienced enough to realize our limits but not yet (completely) hardened by the coercive realities of academic life to care what those limits might be—we aim to pose a set of critical-yet-generative questions for current and future scholars of cultural politics. We argue that work on the cultural politics of sport can be “revived” by: reversing a number of trends in academia that have effectively discouraged cultural–political work; counter-reifying elite, commercialized sport and de-prioritizing it as the “default” form of physicality; and; and by harboring a willingness to do the “dirty” work of scholar-activism that is required if we desire to convert our abstract academic prescriptions into concrete structural improvements. We do not claim to “discover” these points. As we will document, scholars within (physical) cultural studies, sport management, and other related disciplines have developed these arguments far more than we will in this piece. Therefore what follows is a reminder of, and re-emphasis upon, a set of insights and considerations that might assist in reviving the cultural politics work for which the authors in this special issue have advocated.

Institutional Constraints to Studying Cultural Politics

The impetus of this special issue was that an apparent “stagnancy or malaise in theories of and relating to the cultural politics of sport seems to have taken hold in recent years” (Hartmann, 2024, p. 2). Hartmann, Andrews, and others attribute this stagnancy to an academic complacency with foundational-yet-familiar theory, and, as such, urge for sharper, more updated, and more contextually specific analyses of cultural politics. While we agree with these scholars and others who echo their diagnosis, we find it necessary to offer our own perspective on the conditions producing this theoretical stagnancy so that we can properly direct our efforts to ameliorate it. We caution against approaching this malaise from an individualist perspective that attributes blame to the personal characteristics of the scholars producing the work. While there may be truth in suggesting that some have gotten too comfortable, have become too reliant on certain theoretical frameworks over others, or are simply not interested enough in cultural politics, the problem goes beyond the individual. Instead, we argue that the structures of academia and the modern (corporate) university—even in critical social sciences—have functioned to discourage, prevent, or outright render impossible the engaged and impactful types of cultural politics scholarship we all wish to see.

Our shared concerns here spread further than the apparent theoretical stagnancy. We also wish to call out the policing of work deemed important, valuable, and impactful in fields related to and including the cultural politics of sport, physical cultural studies, sociology of sport, and sport management. There remains a discernible hierarchy in terms of what scholarship gets more frequently cited, circulated, and esteemed. Atop this hierarchy is scholarship that naturalizes elite, commercial sport as the most worthwhile form of physicality, while at the bottom is work that focuses on nonelite, noncommercial, noninstitutionalized forms of sport and physical activity (Andrews, 2008). On several occasions, our research projects have been criticized on the grounds of not being “sporty” enough, despite still exploring the broader individual or collective (in)active body in relation to physical culture. In effect, this results in what is considered academically “rigorous”—or “whose knowledge counts” (Ingham & Donnelly, 1990)—to be research that ultimately embraces “sport” in its current commodified iteration, with conclusions that propel rather than problematize sport's ever-expanding commercial imperatives (Andrews et al., 2013; Silk et al., 2018). As such, when we do confine our work within sporting dogma, we must adhere to a tone that reflects a “pro-sport” bias. In the process, our analyses of sport, while “critical,” are watered down in the sense that we are incentivized to use writing styles that read neutral when discussing the broader sporting industry and individual sporting cultures. Consequently, the academy asks for work that is critical of sport, but rewards the work that does not read too critical.

These dominant trends and structures of academia pose various questions for scholars of cultural politics. How do we conduct research that critiques and denaturalizes taken-for-granted assumptions about sport under the guise of neutrality? How do we center storytelling in our cultural politics methodology as advocated by Joseph—or even explore/express the complex cultural politics of our own stories—within academic structures that increasingly only seem to validate research that produces the facade neat, concrete, generalizable, “Truth”? How can we avoid romanticizing or overstating the political depth of everyday cultural acts as advocated by Hartmann—to seriously entertain the possibility, as rigorous research should, that our study might find nothing at all—within a publishing and tenure culture that implicitly mandates that each act of inquiry produce a new discovery, a new breakthrough, a shiny new concept? How do we act as scholar-activists willing to “[engage] in the messy world of politics” by doing the unglamorous behind-the-scenes work as advocated by Boykoff (p. 13), within an academic culture that only seems to hire, retain, fund, and reward academic work that markets itself as glamorous? How do we pursue and prioritize decolonial epistemologies as advocated by Joseph within a university system that is based upon (and intent on reproducing) the modern Western colonial values? How do we revive a serious analysis of cultural politics within a contemporary academic culture in which, as Carrington (2014) notes, Stuart Hall himself would never have been considered for a job?

These questions are not rhetorical. Nor are they excuses for why studying cultural politics is too difficult or cannot be done. We are even optimistic that there are ways to reconcile these tensions until these academic structures change, as outlined by previous cultural studies scholars (see Chen, 2022; Davids & Waghid, 2021; Grossberg, 2015, 2021; la paperson, 2017). Instead, highlighting these structural constraints demonstrates the point that a bold and rigorous bottom-up study of cultural politics is among the many things that have been damaged by the corporatized neoliberal university (see Andrews et al., 2013; King-White, 2018; Silk et al., 2018). Indeed, these structures have been shaped by what Carrington (2024) identifies as the six conjunctural moments. For instance, the rise of right-wing populism has resulted in some timid universities to (re)prioritize “neutrality” in research, as if questions of power relations can be studied from a position outside of them. The response to September 11, 2001, in the United States has diminished key critical capacities that underpinned sociocultural research. The turn to austerity resulted in a privileging of quantitative “evidence-based-research” that is hostile to the qualitative, cultural approach that we argue is necessary for studying cultural politics.

In the face of these trends, we call for a rethinking of academic life—spanning from the foundational values that underpin the processes encompassing publishing, hiring, acquiring funding, obtaining tenure, and more—to encourage work that is critical, politically engaged, messy, and engages alternative ways of knowing (Cooky, 2017; Giroux, 2001; Joseph Mbembe, 2016). However, we agree with all the authors that despite these constraints we still must maintain our pursuit of this work. Ironically, the same processes that have discouraged and delegitimized cultural politics are those that have rendered the serious study of cultural politics more urgent now than ever. Although we furthered our education to “wrestle with the angels” of academic theory, we too often find ourselves instead “wrestling with the [academy]” (Hall, 2018, p. 75). Perhaps wrestling with the academy, then, is an unspoken right of passage we must all endure. As graduate students, we are bombarded by calls to action that inspire us to conduct research underpinned by a “commitment to progressive social change” (Miller, 2001, p. 1), yet we receive little guidance in how to achieve this feat within the stifling and isolating confines of the ivory tower while balancing our teaching and research responsibilities as precarious yet pivotal cogs in the academic machine (Suoranta & FitzSimmons, 2017; Vander Kloet & Aspenlieder, 2013)..

That being said, actively working to counter dominant and hegemonic forces in the academy is easier said than done, especially as early career scholars. We find Joseph's use of storytelling vital in the crude pursuit of framing our critiques. Storytelling—whether for personal reflexive practice or sharing and showing our participants’ stories—is powerful (Toliver, 2021). After all, “We are a storytelling species” (Joseph, 2024, p. 1). Through shared storytelling, we are simultaneously offering our participants’ multiplicitous selves, experiences, emotions, privileges, and oppressions. This compels us as researchers to realize and expose our own bias(es), “affirm[ing] [our] own identity and community traditions” (Joseph, 2024, p. 12), which are then reflected in the ways we read, analyze, and interpret the narratives offered by participants (Glynn & Cupples, 2022; Jacobs et al., 2023; McGuire-Adams & Giles, 2018). However, storytelling offers public and academic audiences alike a window into the motivations behind the work to which we are drawn. Our stories stick with us forever. Grounded by our experiences, however revitalizing, heartwarming, traumatic, or otherwise, sharing stories not only precipitates the type of work we do, but the methodologies and theoretical frameworks we choose to investigate it with (Carrington, 2017). Stories offer us vividly illustrated firsthand experiences that would otherwise leave our work derivative, soulless, and achromatic. If we are able to translate them appropriately, our stories can “motivate, inspire, invoke emotions, and move bodies into action” (Joseph, 2024, p. 12). This has the potential to more readily demonstrate the relevance and applicability of our academic work to those not already privy to the benefits of cultural politics analysis. Cultural studies, at its core, is the practice of telling better stories (see Hall, 1998; Wood, 2019).

However, we are not naive to the stories that are evidently worthy of being shared over others, and have the potential to transform sporting environments into safe spaces, but remain largely used in menial ways, such as to “affirm lack of evidence or to shift blame without holding perpetrators responsible” (Joseph, 2024, p. 8). Not to mention the academic value, or lack thereof, conventionally inscribed to storytelling as an appropriate method of inquiry. Joseph (2024) showcases the way(s) in which the power of storytelling can and should be used for (academic) good, however, we cannot help but question who is allowed to use storytelling as an intellectually rigorous way of knowing, investigating, and critiquing. In our shared experience, storytelling is only appropriate for our forms of inquiry as long as it is not the only way of knowing, and supported, if not wholly masqueraded by methodologies and theoretical frameworks that give our work an adequate scholarly vigor. Thus, we cannot help but question: is storytelling a privilege reserved for established scholars who can rely upon their tenured status if they wish to explore these alternative forms of inquiry? As with the other issues we have raised, transforming the structures of the academy will help to legitimate and normalize storytelling as a method of studying cultural politics.

Counter-Reifying (Uber) Sport

A direction for more productive cultural politics work is found in Boykoff's (2024) piece, in which he breaks down all the minute and unspectacular ways in which our everyday lives and actions are intertwined with political dynamics. Reinscribing the famous feminist mantra—“the personal is political”—we might say that Boykoff (2024) has reminded us how “the quotidian is political.” We argue that this approach has untapped potentials and stakes for how cultural politics can be discovered, and as such fought, within our everyday experiences and taken-for-granted daily routines. While we automatically naturalize the political dynamics that shape our lives, defamiliarizing them in our own lives, as Boykoff did, is a route to exposing the politicized nature of our everyday life. Unpacking how the “quotidian” within our sporting experiences and landscapes is shaped by a number of specific cultural processes—processes that might be different, that can be different—may serve as an effective and pedagogical practice for merging micropolitics with macropolitics. In fact, it is possible that, through storytelling as advocated by Joseph, the cultural politics of our quotidian experiences can be revealed to both us and others, and can be a generative entry point for political groundwork. This approach might also bring us toward a more “physical cultural” study of sport, that does not privilege elite commercial “uber” sport (see Andrews, 2019) over the limitless other mediums and meanings of being active (Giardina & Newman, 2011).

Current academic structures burden us with the task of trying to somehow make the transdisciplinary study of physical culture fit within the confines of artificial disciplinary boundaries. As one senior scholar commented at a recent conference: “Sociology of sport is getting torn apart, with physical cultural studies on one end and sport management on the other.” While we reject this premise—that a physical “cultural” approach has in some way diminished the ostensibly more legitimate sociological or management-based approaches—we acknowledge the reality that cultural scholars of sport will likely need to embed themselves in sport management departments in order to stay in academia. Without diminishing exemplary instances of critical sport management scholarship (Chardovahli & McLeod, 2022; Chen, 2023; Cooper, 2019; Hawzen et al., 2018; Newman, 2014; Newman & Giardina, 2010), we do have concerns about how the emergent hegemony of this field will require us to discipline our research profiles to fit the sport management mold, at the expense of an explicitly cultural–political approach. If the 1990s were marked by a turn to the body (Ingham, 1997), our time now is marked by a turn to bodies—formally organized bodies and institutions of sport, that is. For some of us, this may mean leaving behind projects that center embodiment and less popular instantiations of sport, or, at the very least, finding ways to make them “sporty” enough.

We argue that a cultural studies sensibility is capable of getting us the closest to reconciling these tensions. Despite being a truly “transdisciplinary field of inquiry” (Hall, 2018, p. 309), cultural studies does not reject disciplined forms of knowledge. While cultural studies respectfully acknowledges various disciplines and their knowledge, it does not believe that confining itself to only one or two disciplines and adhering strictly to their rules is the most effective approach to critically engaging with reality (Hall, 2018). That is, instead of promoting fundamentalism, “simplifications, reductionisms, and essentialisms” (Grossberg, 2010a, p. 54), cultural studies can help confront the “complexity, contingency, contestation, and multiplicity” of physical culture in its myriad forms (Grossberg, 2010a, p. 54). We believe it is particularly important for cultural studies projects about sport to counter-reify uber-sport: the hegemonic highly rationalized model of elite, high-performance sport shaped by the constituent forces of corporatization, commercialization, spectacularization, and celebritization in order to generate mass appeal and profit (Andrews, 2019, p. 8). Much of the research that focuses on sport refers to sport without aptly contextualizing it as a product of its time and social formation, as if sport were to contain some “timeless formal essence,” existing in a social vacuum (Gruneau, 2017, p. 4). As Boykoff (2024) explains, “the way sport is structured for and experienced by the general public can quietly normalize the political-economic machinations of capitalist democracies” (p. 12). Naming uber-sport does the important work of counter-reifying it, as its hegemonic nature has foreclosed alternative ways of managing sport, including alternatives that might better prioritize athlete health and safety, joy and creative expression, and cultures of inclusion and respect in sport (Andrews, 2019; Newman, 2014).

As sport management jobs continue to proliferate, scholars who may have once been critical scholars of physical culture will likely need to become critical scholars of uber-sport. Fields such as sport governance studies (Posbergh, 2022), corporate social responsibility (Hayhurst & Szto, 2016), and mega-events (Boykoff, 2022) contain many potential empirical entry points for critical intervention given their proximity to the operations of national and global political power relations. As demonstrated by Boykoff (2024), strategic and thoughtful scholarship can lend an academic's legitimacy to grassroots causes, uplift community knowledge, and counter the dominant narratives spun by organizations such as the International Olympic Committee.

Even amongst this call for more scholar-activist work (with which we generally agree) to critique the excesses and exploitation of sport formations produced by uber-sport and mega-sporting events, we want to trouble the notion that we can assume to know what constitutes “meaningful work.” We suggest that this call reveals the way in which scholars themselves are entangled in the assemblage of uber-sport, as the epistemological privileging of such “high-impact” scholarship for its activist potential may curtail knowledge production in areas that have less obvious or grandiose opportunities for intervention, but are nonetheless important. For instance, assessing what is funded and prioritized, it appears that the rationalized academy continues to marginalize cultural studies work that analyzes the “ordinary” (Grossberg, 2015; Miller, 2001). On the other hand, research deemed impactful pertains to much “bigger” issues than the mundane, monotonous, or uninspired “ordinary.” What too often goes unacknowledged in work that privileges large scale “evidence-based” approaches and conclusions, however, is how these issues impact the ordinary, such as bodily experience, day-to-day cultural practices and engagements, or situating the body in place(s) and space(s), using accounts to speak to broader political, social, economic, technological, and/or spatial forces that undoubtedly have a significant impact on the ordinary. Put simply, research on “bigger” issues is important and impactful, but we cannot lose sight of their connection to the ordinary. Cultural politics work is needed to illuminate these connections.

As critical scholars, we often speak about and aim for “impact” for our research in broader society. Thus, echoing scholars before us (Bennett & Watson, 2002; Dworkin, 1997); we argue for a reconceptualized definition of “impact” that prioritizes actively working to counter hegemonic forces in the academy and beyond, through a more conscious and dedicated commitment to working with communities to build knowledge and power. It is the aforementioned ways of being in the body and among other bodies that we see so powerfully communicated in the work of Joseph (2024), and it is the curiosity towards more liberatory sport formations (Boykoff, 2024; Hartmann, 2024) that we feel is endangered when we assume to know “what matters” in the field today.

The Political Work of Cultural Politics

In this section, we take up the question posed by Carrington (2024): “What is the politics of all of this? What are the interventions that can be made to shift either the terms of the debate or the effectiveness of political struggle in a positive direction?” (p. 6). The scholars in this issue each offer their own perspective: Boykoff endorses scholar-activism that engages in the messy world of politics; Joseph demonstrates the pedagogical and de-colonial power of storytelling; and Hartmann maps the shifting developments in the contemporary entanglements between sport, politics, and activism. While they may have their place, the coercive structures of academia as described earlier will not be transformed by publications, books, tweets, or speeches. We argued that it will require a balance of—in Boykoff's (2024) terms—“public intellectualism” and “scholar-activism” (p. 13), with two primary focuses. First, it will entail scholars involving themselves in true real-world politics, embedding themselves in movements and committing to doing the behind-the-scenes work that sustains long-term change. Second, it will require collective organizing within our own academic spaces and institutions.

Acknowledging our specific positions within the institutions we reside in, as well as the communities we come from, we see political possibilities within the empirical sites that we approach as scholar-activists. To briefly offer a few personal examples, our early-career scholarship models different ways that cultural politics work might go “on the attack” (Boykoff, 2024, p. 20) by merging scholarship with praxis and community impact. Wallace's (2024) work with Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp investigates both the mechanics of using sport for grassroots community activism and critical pedagogy, as well as how these emerging mobilizations of sport reveal and (re)construct the contemporary articulations between sport, race, radical politics, social movements, and our current conjuncture. Drafts-Johnson's (2023) work on professional sport gender-based violence (GBV) policies questions the dominant assumptions and approaches to GBV from sporting institutions by explicating their corporatized, neoliberal rationalities. In doing so, Drafts-Johnson aims to re-articulate cultural understandings of why GBV happens in sport by calling attention to the structural instability caused by the racialized, gendered, and classed power dynamics embedded in the systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy that underpin professional sports. In Nowosatka's work (Nowosatka & Jette, 2023), she investigates discourses that underpin US Gymnastics’ institutional Safe Sport policy to more comprehensively understand how varying forms of abuse proliferate in gymnastics, as well as how these limited (if well-intentioned) policies are lived, embodied, and experienced by survivors. By sharing the stories of participants and telling her own experiences of abuse in gymnastics, Nowosatka aims to “motivate, inspire, invoke emotions, and move bodies into action” (Joseph, 2024, p. 12), thus empowering athletes and establishing safer sporting environments. Weber's (2024) work uses the sporting endeavors of Red Bull to highlight the way space is utilized and manipulated in the creation of urban sporting spectacles within contemporary neoliberalism. Through site visits and field observations, the forthcoming work explicates the way Red Bull positions sport, urban settings, and their brand to reproduce dominant uses of space. All of these examples demonstrate how modern scholarly analysis of discourses, processes, and representations is not “detached,” but rather paired with immersion into the sites we study to produce tangible institutional change.

In considering approaches to institutional change (as a complement or precursor to broader structural change), we argue that the most expedient is building of power in a way that uses differences in identity, career path, and academic discipline as points of collective unity rather than division (McGuire-Adams et al., 2022). We are encouraged to see that recent collective organizing on U.S. university campuses that—in the past few decades has been most animated by identity politics (Johnson, 2022; Táíwò, 2022; Taylor, 2021)—has become supplemented by a nationwide re-emergence of labor politics (Thelen, 2023). For, as Hall (1998) reminds us, “Identity is at the end, not the beginning, of the paradigm. Identity is what is at stake in political organization” (p. 331). Organizing along labor lines is not just a matter of reducing exploitation, but also is a tactic for scholars to question, expose, and resist the aforementioned neoliberal rationalization of university that has functioned to disincentivize analysis of cultural politics.

Here, we wish to remind readers—particularly those who have the protection afforded by attaining tenure or professorships—that one of the most important battles to be fought to ensure the longevity of a critically engaged cultural politics of sport will take place at home. From the increasing precarity for adjunct and nontenure track scholars in academia (Colby, 2023), to the struggle for graduate worker collective bargaining rights (Roberts-Grmela, 2023), to the repression of free speech through legislation limiting topics such as critical race theory and gender (Myksow, 2022), academic workers are facing threats on all fronts in the increasingly neoliberal and corporate university (Bunds & Giradina, 2017; King-White, 2018). Academic workers must unite (and dare we say, unionize) to protect what is left of the public institutions built to educate citizens, research societal challenges, and sustain democratic values. In our own current situations, the labor movement holds opportunities for direct personal change as well. Labor politics have facilitated cross-disciplinary dialogue, solidarity, and friendship that has broken down barriers between disciplines and produced more comprehensive scholarship and activism. Further, as graduate workers for example, our unionization efforts are directed toward steering the university away from using our intellectual and material labor to maintain the status quo (through producing technologies of surveillance, war, or punishment for example), and instead to stimulate progressive transformation (through prioritizing peace, justice, and community impact). While we applaud the shift toward diversity and inclusion which we have seen in the years following such cultural moments such as the #MeToo (Burke, 2022) and Black Lives Matter movement, we do not have faith that representative or symbolic shifts in power will result in the changes needed. Structural problems require structural solutions.

Conclusion

This special issue has sought to consider how cultural politics research itself has been presented, and how we might reinvigorate the analysis of cultural politics in a time when hegemonic ideas and forces continue to result in people dying in the streets. Following Carrington, Hartmann, Joseph, Boykoff, and numerous other scholars before us we have attempted to put forth our ideas, as the next generation of scholars, of how current and future generations must engage the cultural politics of sport to intervene, struggle, and contest within these spaces of tension. This struggle is ultimately the significance of studying and theorizing cultural politics, as a basis for “intervening into contexts and power… in order to enable people to act more strategically in ways that may change their context for the better” (Grossberg, 1996, p. 143) and, previewing Joseph, to “tell better stories about what's going on, and to begin to enable imagining new possibilities for a future than can be reached from the present—one more humane and just than that promised by the trajectories we find ourselves on” (Grossberg, 2010b, p. 241). To be clear, there are scholars finding ways to do this kind of work, despite the difficulties we have outlined. For this work to be more frequent and valued, however—let alone institutionally supported—we have argued for both structural changes to be made to academia and for scholars to be willing to do the unglamorous work of cultural politics; behind the institutional scenes and in the literal streets, in addition to on paper. Doing so is not only necessary but possible, and is the first step to resolving the malaise in the study of the cultural politics of sport.