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 f ..read more

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 Minnesot ..read more

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 conf ..read more

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 ..read more

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 Rees ..read more

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 internation ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 heterosexu ..read more

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, an ..read more