This session will interrogate coloniality in research ‘on’ college athletes and athletics. Scholars have compared the unique model of U.S. college sport to slavery, a monopoly, and a cartel (Barro, 2002; Eitzen, 2016; Fleisher, Goff, & Tollison, 1992; Nocera & Strauss, 2018). Similarly, we apply settler colonialism to college athletics, focusing on how researchers’ methods may perpetuate it (Patel, 2016). Papers in this session will reimagine research methods to challenge settler colonialism as it exists in dominant methodological approaches to college sport in North America. As such, we invite participants to reframe research as ‘with’ college athletes, rather than ‘on’ them. Potential paper topics might include: examining coercive participant recruitment tactics; proposing data collection methods that disrupt vertical interviewer-participant power relationships; interrogating the concept of college athlete as perpetual object rather than subject; examining how race and/or gender interact with settler colonialism, or any number of other topics connecting intercollegiate athletics research to decolonial methods. Presentations should offer concrete recommendations for researchers’ practice.
Presenters: Michael Friedman & Brandon Wallace Brandon Chandler & Kirsten M. Hextrum Ryan King-White, Michael Giardina, & Avanti Kolluri
Thursday November 7, 2019 9:10am - 10:10am EST
Peacock B
