Sports and Society
FALL 2023
CULANTH 151S
This course will critically examine the role that sports play in the modern world and our everyday lives. Sports are a universe of their own, bodily practices that involve complex choreographies of movement and coordination. Yet they are also always a reflection of society, a mirror that imitates the sensibilities, tensions, and forces in the collectivities to which we belong. To better understand this relationship, we will engage topics like racial, gender, and sexual politics, fandom and celebrity, and labor and capitalism, through texts like academic writing, music, podcasts, essays, documentaries, news media, and social media. We’ll consider anthropological, historical, feminist, and economic studies of sport, and we’ll learn from various guest speakers who are thinking about sports from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Overall, we’ll consider the pleasures, costs, dangers, and attractions of play and games, and we’ll examine how they have been commercialized over the last couple of centuries into the current billion dollar sports industry.
Instructor: Tracie Canada
Tuesday/Thursday 1:25-2:40 pm
Cross-listing: SOCIOL 151S, ICS 150S
Race, Sport & Education: Duke Basketball
FALL 2023
EDUC 290-01
This course uses Duke's athletic history, present and future to explore how Black intelligence is recognized and/or not recognized and the value of Black athletes' intellectual capacity in college athletics over time. We will do this primarily, but not exclusively, through CB Claiborne's story. He was Duke’s first Black athlete and member of the Duke Men’s Basketball team. We will discuss the role of race-based slavery on the emergence of Black education in America leading up to Duke's athletics integration in 1965, the emergence of Duke Basketball as a global brand -- including five men’s national champions -- and the "one-and-done" era until the present with Name, Image & Likeness (NIL) legislation.
Instructor: Javier Wallace
Monday/Wednesday 10:15-11:30 am
Race, Power and Identity from Ali to Kaepernick
SUMMER I 2023
EDUC 220
An exploration of historic and contemporary psycho-social and socio-cultural aspects of the African American sport experience. Examination of research that addresses the effect of physical differences, racial stereotyping, identity development, gender issues and social influences on African American sport participation patterns. Analysis of sport as a microcosm of society with an emphasis on examining associated educational and societal issues.
Instructor: Martin P. Smith
Tuesday/Thursday 10-12:05 am
Cross-listings: SOCIOL 202; AAAS 232; RIGHTS 221
Deporte Negrx: The AfroLatinx Sport Experience
FALL 2022
AAAS 290-01
This course examines the Black Latin American and AfroLatinx sporting experience over time. Their hypervisibility has brought much prestige to their countries. However, their success on behalf of the nation doesn't equate to improved social conditions in Black communities. Students in this course will utilize various methods and platforms, including digital and social media, to make these individuals' subjectivities more visible to the public.
Instructor: Javier Wallace
Monday/Wednesday 10:15-11:30 am
Images of Black Masculinity
FALL 2022
AAAS 338-01
The late Muhammad Ali may have been the most recognizable Black Man of the 20th Century, in no small part due to the fact that he was one of the most photographed sports figures of the 20th Century. Ali’s own investment in curating his own image, contributed to the development of his iconic status. What Images of Black Masculinity will consider are the ways that images of Iconic Black Men, particularly male athletes, circulated in American and Global culture through photography, visual culture and film, and contributed to their “larger-than-life” status, becoming frameworks and contexts for which Black masculinity has historically been read, interpreted, and revised and critique in the context of “Female Masculinity” and the fluidity of identity.
Instructor: Mark Anthony Neal
Wednesdays 7:00-9:30 pm
Cross-listings: ENGLISH 380; VMS 340
Race and the Business of College Sports
SPRING 2022
CULANTH 290
College sports have become a multi-billion dollar business in the United States. Yet they have a troubled history of racial injustice, one where white coaches have earned millions and Black players only the price of a scholarship. How did the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s lead to the end of whites-only college teams? What are the experiences of black athletes recruited to predominantly white schools? What are the roles of money, myth, and ideologies of race, gender, and performance in college sports today? And what policies would make for a better system? The class will explore these questions from a multidisciplinary perspective including anthropology, economics, history and public policy. We will explore these questions through readings, class discussion and guest speakers from the academic, media and sports worlds. Students will conduct their own independent research project on Duke sports as their main assignment for the semester.
Instructors: Jennifer Nash and Orin Starn
Tuesday/Thursday 3:30-4:45 pm
Cross-listings: GSF 290; ECON 290; HISTORY 290; SOCIOL 290; PUBPOL 290