Topic 1: Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Thought

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a scholarly framework that emerged in legal academia in the late 1970s and 1980s to analyze how race and racism are embedded in social institutions, laws, and everyday practices. CRT challenges the assumption that racial inequality is primarily a matter of individual prejudice, arguing instead that structural and systemic factors — including seemingly neutral policies and practices — produce and reproduce racial hierarchy. In the context of sport, CRT directs attention to who owns teams, who coaches, who gets recruited, how athletes of color are covered in media, and what happens when Black athletes speak out about injustice.

Black Feminist Thought, developed by scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins, argues that Black women occupy a uniquely complex social position shaped by the intersection of race, gender, and class. Intersectionality — a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw — names this phenomenon: the recognition that identity categories do not operate independently, and that the experience of a Black woman cannot be understood by simply adding “Black” and “woman” together. In sport contexts, intersectionality illuminates why Black women athletes face different (and often more intense) scrutiny than their white counterparts, and why their achievements are often treated with suspicion rather than celebration.

Topic 2: Moving Beyond Your Own Reality — Dr. Lisbeth Berbary

Dr. Lisbeth Berbary’s work on recreation and leisure studies challenges students to examine the assumptions embedded in their own social positions. Epistemic privilege — the idea that one’s standpoint shapes what knowledge is available and intelligible — is central to this examination. Sport and recreation spaces are not experienced identically across lines of race, gender, disability, and class. What feels like a welcoming, safe public park or gym to a white person may carry entirely different meaning for a person of color who has experienced surveillance, harassment, or exclusion in those same spaces.

The concept of moving beyond your own reality invites students to develop a more complex sociological imagination: to recognize that their personal experience of sport and leisure is not universal, and that understanding the full range of human experience in recreational contexts requires actively seeking out perspectives different from one’s own. This has both epistemological implications (how we know what we know) and ethical ones (whose experiences are considered worth knowing).

Topic 3: Diego Maradona

Diego Maradona (1960–2020) was arguably the most polarizing figure in the history of football. Born in poverty in Villa Fiorito, Buenos Aires, Maradona became the embodiment of Argentine working-class pride and a global symbol of both transcendent athletic genius and the destructive consequences of fame without adequate support. His career raised fundamental questions about the exploitation of athletes, the relationship between class origin and athletic opportunity, and how national identity is projected onto individual bodies.

The 1986 World Cup quarter-final against England produced the most mythologized moment in football history: the “Hand of God” goal, in which Maradona deliberately handled the ball into the net while simultaneously scoring what is often called the greatest individual goal of all time. His post-match explanation — that the goal was scored “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God” — became a lightning rod for debates about sport ethics, anti-colonialism (the match took place four years after the Falklands War), and the relationship between rule-breaking and heroism in sporting culture.

Maradona’s battles with cocaine addiction, his complicated relationships with club management and national sporting bodies, and his death in 2020 all speak to the underside of the sport-celebrity complex: the systems that extract extraordinary value from working-class bodies while providing little in the way of support, mental health care, or protection from exploitation.

Topic 4: Caster Semenya and the Politics of Sex Testing in Sport

Caster Semenya’s case is one of the most significant and controversial episodes in recent Olympic history. Semenya, a South African middle-distance runner, won the 800 metres at the 2009 World Athletics Championships at age eighteen. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF, now World Athletics) immediately subjected her to invasive sex verification testing, publicly humiliating a young athlete who had done nothing more than run fast.

The controversy centers on hyperandrogenism — naturally elevated testosterone levels — and the contested question of whether such levels constitute an unfair athletic advantage. World Athletics eventually issued regulations requiring female athletes with differences of sexual development (DSDs) and naturally elevated testosterone to reduce their hormone levels through medication in order to compete in female classifications in certain events. Semenya refused and has been fighting the regulations in international courts.

The Semenya case intersects race, gender, African womanhood, and scientific authority in particularly charged ways. Critics note that the testing regimes applied disproportionately to Black African women, that “suspicious” femininity has historically been policed differently along racial lines, and that the notion of “natural” advantage is applied selectively — tall basketball players, swimmers with large wingspans, and athletes born at altitude are not required to medically alter themselves to compete. The case illuminates how sport governance organizations define and police the category of “woman” in ways that reflect social values rather than neutral biological facts.

Topic 5: The Negro Leagues

The Negro Leagues were the professional baseball leagues established by and for Black Americans during the era of racial segregation in the United States. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing until the integration of Major League Baseball following Jackie Robinson’s debut in 1947, the Negro Leagues produced extraordinary athletes — Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, “Cool Papa” Bell — who were barred from competing in the major leagues solely on account of race.

The history of the Negro Leagues is a history of resilience and entrepreneurship against a backdrop of structural exclusion. Black owners, managers, and promoters built a complete parallel sporting infrastructure, including teams, leagues, all-star games, and a thriving culture of barnstorming tours that brought professional baseball to Black communities across the country. The Negro Leagues also represent a distinct cultural achievement: their style of play — emphasizing speed, base-running, and creativity — influenced the broader development of the sport.

The integration of Major League Baseball is often narrated as an uncomplicated triumph. But integration came at a cost: the Negro Leagues collapsed, destroying the economic ecosystem that Black baseball had built. Many Negro League owners, managers, and players found themselves unemployed. Integration thus illustrates a broader pattern in which the formal removal of barriers to participation can coexist with the destruction of Black institutions and the loss of Black economic and cultural power.

Topic 6: Lacrosse and Indigenous Sovereignty

Lacrosse was invented by Indigenous peoples of North America, with roots going back hundreds of years. For nations such as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), the game known as dehuntshigwa’es (“men hit a rounded object”) was played for spiritual, medicinal, and diplomatic purposes — as a gift from the Creator. It was not merely a sport but a ceremony, a form of conflict resolution, and a connection between the physical and spiritual worlds.

The appropriation of lacrosse by settler-colonial institutions — first by French colonizers who named it after a bishop’s staff (la crosse), and subsequently through its institutionalization in universities, prep schools, and elite sporting culture — is a central issue in the sport’s contemporary politics. Modern lacrosse has largely been stripped of its Indigenous spiritual and ceremonial dimensions, repackaged as a sport primarily associated with white upper-middle-class affluence in the United States and Canada.

The Haudenosaunee Nationals — an Indigenous team that represents the Six Nations Confederacy — have faced exclusionary treatment from international sporting bodies, including being barred from the 2010 World Lacrosse Championship because the United States government refused to recognize Haudenosaunee passports. This episode encapsulates the ongoing conflict between Indigenous sovereignty and the nation-state structure that governs international sport.

For students interested in supporting Indigenous lacrosse businesses, purchasing equipment from Indigenous-owned stores (such as ILA Sports) is one concrete way to direct economic activity toward Indigenous communities.

Topic 7: Hurling and Irish Cultural Identity

Hurling is one of the oldest field sports in the world, with origins in Irish mythology and a continuous recorded history stretching back at least three thousand years. Played with a wooden stick (hurley or camán) and a small leather ball (sliotar), hurling is governed by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), founded in 1884 explicitly to preserve and promote Irish sports in the context of British colonial rule.

The GAA’s founding was a cultural nationalist act: establishing hurling and Gaelic football as distinctively Irish sports was a way of asserting Irish identity against the Anglicization of Irish culture and the spread of English sports. This political dimension gave the sports an emotional significance that transcended athletics — to play hurling was to perform Irishness, to connect with a pre-colonial heritage, and to refuse cultural assimilation.

Historian and author Stephen Gleeson has documented the intimate relationship between community, class, and hurling in Tipperary. Several dynamics stand out from his account. The role of education — particularly Catholic secondary schools and the Harty Cup competition — was pivotal in sustaining and transmitting hurling culture. Schools actively recruited promising hurlers, sometimes bending admission rules, because success on the pitch brought prestige to the institution. This created a system in which athletic talent functioned as a form of cultural capital that could be exchanged for social mobility.

Equipment and safety provide a fascinating window into the sport’s evolution. Helmets were first introduced in the 1970s, borrowed from ice hockey manufacturers, at a time when many players viewed protective headgear as unmanly and foreign. The gradual normalization of helmets — from optional to compulsory, from stigmatized to standard — reflects broader changes in how risk, masculinity, and athletic identity are understood.

Hurling’s community-based structure, in which players compete for the parish of their birth or residence, creates intense local loyalties and makes the sport resistant to the commercial forces that have transformed other codes. The tradition of GAA players remaining amateurs — despite the sport drawing crowds of 80,000 at Croke Park — represents an explicit rejection of the sport-commodity relationship that governs most professional sport.

Topic 8: Hockey and Canadian Identity

Ice hockey occupies a singular place in the Canadian national imagination. The sport has been mobilized as a symbol of Canadian identity and national character since the late nineteenth century — its association with cold winters, rural landscapes, and frontier hardiness feeding a mythology about what it means to be Canadian. This mythology has historically excluded large portions of the population.

The near-total whiteness of professional hockey, particularly the National Hockey League, and the sport’s cultural association with a particular version of Canadian (and implicitly Anglo-Saxon) identity has functioned as a mechanism of exclusion. Indigenous communities, Black Canadians, and immigrant populations have long experienced hockey culture as unwelcoming — through explicit hostility, through economic barriers (equipment costs, ice time fees, travel expenses), and through the absence of representation in the sport’s media and leadership.

Recent years have seen growing attention to these exclusions, driven partly by the accounts of players like Akim Aliu, whose experiences of anti-Black racism from coaches became a catalyst for the Hockey Diversity Alliance and a broader industry reckoning. The work of understanding hockey’s relationship to race requires examining not only individual incidents of racism but the structural conditions — recruitment pathways, coaching cultures, media framing — that reproduce the sport’s demographic homogeneity.

Topic 9: Curling and Winter Sport Demographics

Curling presents a case study in how a sport’s social composition reflects broader patterns of access and belonging. The sport has historically been associated with predominantly white, middle-class communities in Canada and Scandinavia. Understanding why certain sports develop strong demographic concentrations requires examining infrastructure (where are curling rinks located, and who can afford membership fees), historical origins (who founded the sport and who was included in its social networks), and cultural associations (what image of the sport is promoted, and who sees themselves represented in it).

The sport-diversity literature suggests that diversifying participation in sports like curling requires more than simply removing formal barriers — it requires active outreach, representation in media and leadership, affordable programming, and cultural competency from coaches and administrators who may be unaccustomed to welcoming athletes from outside the sport’s traditional demographic base.

Topic 10: The Great White Hunter — Race, Nature, and Outdoor Space

The figure of “the Great White Hunter” — the colonial sportsman pursuing big game in Africa or Asia — is one of the foundational archetypes of imperial masculinity. It encodes a set of relationships: between civilization and wilderness, between human and animal, and between the colonizer and the colonized landscape. Understanding how this figure shaped the culture of outdoor recreation and sport hunting illuminates why those spaces continue to feel exclusive to many people of color.

Scholar Jonathan Hall’s work on Black hunters in contemporary America documents the ongoing structural barriers to Black participation in outdoor sporting spaces. These barriers operate at multiple levels. Historical land ownership patterns — shaped by the theft of Black-owned land through terrorism, the Great Migration, and discriminatory lending — mean that most rural land in the United States is owned by white Americans, making access to hunting and outdoor recreation contingent on white landowner permission. The legacy of racial violence in rural spaces — including the murders of Garrick and Carl Hopkins, shot by a white neighbor on their own land — makes these spaces carry a different kind of threat for Black outdoorspeople.

Carolyn Finney’s Black Faces, White Spaces documents how outdoor spaces — national parks, hunting areas, forests — are racialized environments. The mental maps that people carry about who belongs in these spaces, and the real safety calculations Black people must make when entering predominantly white rural environments, represent a form of spatial exclusion that persists long after the formal removal of segregationist laws. Finney’s work calls for a reimagining of the relationship between African Americans and the great outdoors that takes seriously both the historical dispossession and the deep cultural traditions of Black outdoor life that have persisted despite it.

Topic 11: Jockey Syndrome and Disability in Sport

The concept of jockey syndrome draws attention to how sport systems create and manage the bodies of athletes in ways that can produce lasting physical harm. Horse racing has historically demanded that jockeys maintain extremely low body weights, producing a culture of extreme disordered eating, dehydration, and related health consequences among professional jockeys. The term has come to represent more broadly the ways in which sport institutions impose body type requirements that damage athlete health in the service of competitive performance.

This intersects with questions of disability: when sport participation produces chronic injuries, neurological damage (as in contact sports), or eating disorders, the line between chosen athletic risk and institutionally produced harm becomes ethically complex. The Paralympic movement has transformed understandings of what bodies can do athletically, challenging the assumption that elite sport belongs exclusively to non-disabled athletes. But Paralympic and disability sport also exist in a complex relationship with mainstream sport — celebrated when convenient and marginalized when not.

Topic 12: Naomi Osaka, Jeremy Lin, and Athletes as Social Movements

The cases of Naomi Osaka and Jeremy Lin illustrate how athletes of color navigate the intersection of athletic achievement, public expectation, and social justice activism in contemporary media culture.

Naomi Osaka became the highest-paid female athlete in the world while simultaneously using her platform to speak out about police brutality and anti-Black racism. At the 2020 US Open, she wore masks bearing the names of Black victims of racial violence, including Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. Her decision in 2021 to withdraw from the French Open and Wimbledon, citing mental health struggles, sparked global conversation about the obligations of athletes to media, the costs of celebrity, and whose wellbeing the sport-media complex is actually structured to protect.

Jeremy Lin’s career in the NBA was marked by the distinctive experience of being the first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent to win an NBA championship, and by the racism directed at him throughout his career — from childhood sports exclusion to the “Linsanity” media frenzy of 2012, when his sudden breakout performance prompted both celebration and a wave of racist jokes and diminutive coverage. Lin spoke publicly about anti-Asian racism in sport and in American society during the COVID-19 pandemic, when violence against Asian Americans increased sharply.

Both cases illustrate how athletes of color who speak publicly about social justice are subjected to demands that athletes “stay in their lane” — demands that are rarely made of white athletes who express political opinions, and that reflect a particular conception of sport as a racially neutral space that should be protected from the contamination of “politics.” Critical race scholarship in sport has extensively documented this double standard and its function in maintaining racial hierarchy.

Methodological Note: The Podcast as Critical Form

The course’s use of the podcast as both content and assignment reflects a pedagogical argument: that public communication of scholarly ideas is itself a skill worth developing, and that the informal, conversational format of the podcast is well-suited to engaging complex social topics with general audiences. Unlike academic writing, podcasting requires translating theoretical frameworks into accessible language without losing analytical rigor. The best podcast episodes in sport studies manage to be both entertaining and genuinely educative — modeling the kind of public scholarship that allows academic knowledge to circulate beyond university walls.

Students are encouraged to approach their podcast assignments not as performances of already-known information but as genuine inquiries: research tools, narrative vehicles, and contributions to public knowledge about how sport shapes and is shaped by the society around it.