AUTHOR=Calow Emma 

TITLE=Activism for intersectional justice in sport sociology: Using intersectionality in research and in the classroom

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sports and Active Living

VOLUME=Volume 4 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sports-and-active-living/articles/10.3389/fspor.2022.920806

DOI=10.3389/fspor.2022.920806

ISSN=2624-9367

ABSTRACT=The moments of individual calls to support by sports people and organizations in recent years reenergized a collective movement of Black Lives Matter. In turn, this movement galvanized a conversation across geographical borders about anti-racism, including the ways in which race as a system of classification and difference-making operates. The power from intersectionality as a concept can guide methodological and analytical studies emerges from the ability to recognize how social and cultural processes of domination and difference-making are mutually constitutive. This perspective paper considers what sport sociologists can learn by applying the concept of intersectionality to contemporary forms of activism in the context of sport. I focus on five examples of athlete activism from the past ten years led by sports people and organizations. While each  example is focused on a particular axis of difference and domination, I show how the cause at stake is always already intersectional. This has consequences for how the “root” of social (in)justice is explained by sports sociologists, as well as for how we encourage sports policymakers to respond. In the final part, I focus on my own positionality as a graduate student within sociology of sport, reflecting on how I and my colleagues might understand our role within the “matrix of domination” that characterizes both our subject and our field. I suggest that intersectional justice in sport does not just mean on the track/field/court; it can also mean in the classroom, thereby expanding our notion of what activism “in sport” is and looks like.