Call For Abstracts
North American Society for the Sociology of Sport
32nd Annual Conference
Revolutionizing Sporting Bodies: Technologies in Practice
November 2-5, 2011
Minneapolis Marriot City Center
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A.
ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE: August 1st, 2011
Abstract Submission Procedure
Abstract Submission Procedure for Open Session
Abstract Format and Submission Requirements
(a) Title of the paper (maximum of 10 words);
(b) Abstract (maximum of 200 words and only one paragraph; abstracts will be published in the 2011 Conference Abstracts in plain text so please refrain from using italics, bold, underlining or html);
(c) The name, affiliation (university or institution) and institutional email address of each of the authors.
Presentation Rules
(a) Participants should not present a paper in a session that they preside (a session organizer must seek a presider that is not one of the presenters).
(b) Participants may submit their abstract to only one session.
(c) Participants may present only one paper as first author in a regular session but may have their name as second or third author on other paper(s), as long as they are not the presenter of such paper(s).
(d) Participants who present a paper in one regular session may also participate as a speaker or discussant in one other non-regular session (i.e., a session for which individual participants do not submit an abstract, for example, a workshop or a round table session).
Acceptance Review Criteria
The Program Co-Chairs (and not the Session Organizers) will make the final decision about the acceptance of abstracts. The following criteria will be used:
(a) Relevance and significance of topic to NASSS and/or to conference theme
(b) Clarity of abstract
(c) Clarity of core issue, research question or objective
(d) Reference to conceptual framework
(e) Reference to methodology
(f) Clear presentation of findings (the abstract must relate to completed research and not work in progress unless the paper is submitted to an open session for students)
(g) Only one abstract per participant: the Program Co-Chairs reserve the right to delete from the program additional abstract(s) submitted by the same participant as first author.
The Program Co-Chairs will post on the NASSS website (www.nasss.org) the list of accepted sessions and abstracts no later than September 15th, 2011 (information will also be circulated via the NASSS listserv). Authors and session organizers will thus know whether their session or abstract has been officially accepted.
Troubleshooting
For further information or any problem regarding the submission of your abstract, please contact the Program Committee Co-Chairs at the following email address: 2011nasss@gmail.com
Index See Session Number
Ability/Disability
Axes of Inequality- Intersections of Race, Class, Gender or Sexuality
Coaching
Community Based Sports Programs
Consumerism
Doping
Embodiment
Equestrian Sport
Gender
History
Mascots
Media
Popular Culture
Race
Teaching
Technology
Theory
Undergraduate Research
Ability/Disability
Sport Sociology, Ability, Impairment: Cripping Realms and Promises
This session calls for contributions of papers centered on (dis)ability(s), crip theory and/or mental impairment, considered through critical, significant, recent cultural-sociological-ethnographic studies of such in the intersections of sport, athletics and technologies.
Synthia Sydnor, Ph.D.,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Axes of Inequality- Intersections of Race, Class, Gender or Sexuality
Building Bridges: One Revolutionary Leader at a Time
Sport literature suggests women and racial minorities have been vastly under-represented in leadership positions. As such, the purpose of this session will be to present the impact non-traditional leaders (e.g., women and racial minorities) have had on sport organizations. Papers should assess how non-
traditional leaders’ experiences, opportunities, and dilemmas have influenced the current state of the organization’s culture and performance.
Thomas J. Aicher
Northern Illinois University, taicher@niu.edu
Janelle E. Wells
University of Florida, jmcverrywells@hhp.ufl.edu
Gender, Race and Sport: Intersections
This session is organized to promote and share scholarship documenting or identifying issues and/or moments in sport that highlight/reveal the overlapping/interlocking/intersecting social forces of 'race,' 'sex' and modern 'sport'. Perspectives engaging with critical race and critical feminist theorizing are particularly invited.
Robert Pitter, Ph.D.
Acadia University
Ann Travers
Simon Fraser University
Coaching
Coaching Cultures and Discourses
Every aspect of the ‘coaching act,’ from conditioning and athlete development, to coach-athlete relationships and theories of training, is somehow influenced by power relations and the construction of knowledge. However, when it comes to educating coaches, concerns over the social nature of coaching and the body are often over looked. This gap in understanding coaching as a human endeavor affords sport sociologists interested in coach education, sport ethics and performance enhancement the opportunity to enhance coaches’ effectiveness by analyzing coaching from a sociocultural perspective. Such a concentration, with a specific emphasis on the problematization of dominant or taken-for-granted coaching ‘knowledges’ is the focus of this session.
Jim Denison
University of Alberta
Solidifying the Sociology of Sports Coaching: New Practices for Coaching Education
In a mere 10 years the force and momentum of research and literature on the sociological aspects of coaching has quite literally exploded. Topics such as knowledge, identity, power, learning, and the body have offered new, penetrating insights into coaching practices. The recently released text “The Sociology of Coaching” (2010) may soon be considered the magnum opus of this historic period. Nonetheless, as Jones (2010) points out, the sociology of sport coaching is still seeking to solidify its place in coach education programs and with policy makers. To this end, significant issues arise. What needs to be done to move the sociology of sport coaching from the periphery to the center? What power relations need to be changed? Globally, higher education is under scrutiny to streamline students to degree attainment. How does the sociology of coaching make the case to be included in an already crowded curriculum?
The purpose of this panel is to bring together a distinguished group of coach educators who have helped to pioneer the union of sociological theory and sport coaching practices. The panel will discuss their contribution to the new book “The Sociology of Coaching,” how this knowledge has led to new coaching practices, and exciting future directions.
Dr. Brian T. Gearity
The University of Southern Mississippi
Community Based Sports Programs
Evaluating and Theorizing Community-Based Sports Programs
Description: There has long been support among NASSS members for direct community engagement by scholars. Indeed, scholars are integrating “action research” or evaluation research in their efforts to theorize sport in society. We are soliciting papers from sport sociologists whose work has taken them “off campus” to study and evaluate a community-based sports program or organization. The research can focus on grassroots, community-based programs or on sport programs that have a regional or national scope. The program objectives under study can vary from the promotion of health, gender equity, racial and ethnic diversity, educational achievement, or increased participation with sports and physical activity. Papers should speak to the ways research on community-sport programs advances the theoretical, empirical and/or applied knowledge in the field.
Don Sabo
D’Youville College
Consumerism
The Institutionalizing of Fantasy Sports Consumption
Fantasy sport consumption is a relatively new form of interaction between spectator and sport, yet it has been met with unprecedented popularity. The development of internet technology has played a large role in fantasy sport becoming an institution in North America, with more than 30 million participants in the United States and Canada accounting for over $4 billion spent online (Kwan et al, 2010; Fantasy 2009). Fantasy sports provide an arena for sports knowledge bragging rights to its many participants. “Owning” a fantasy team not only allows participants to test their knowledge of the business side of the sport, but it also gets them involved in a way beyond that of merely spectator (Nesbit and King 2010).
This session will provide participants with the opportunity to explore various aspects of fantasy sport participation, including (but not limited to) work-place productivity, social media enhancements, and cultural implications.
Phil Hatlem
Saint Leo University
Doping
Doping, gender and media
This session addresses the gendered media coverage of athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs. Drawing in several theoretical and conceptual frameworks, participants in this session analyze the ways in which media coverage presents athletes who have committed doping infractions and/or athletes who are suspected of using banned drugs. Emphasis is placed on the media presentation and evaluation of the bodies of athletes suspected of drug use.
Sarah Teetzel
University of Manitoba
Charlene Weaving
St Francis Xavier University
Gertrud Pfister
University of Copenhagen
Embodiment
Living Biopolitics: Performing the Physical and the Possible
This session seeks contributions that will expand upon the ongoing advancement of a radically embodied study of physical culture. Building upon various forms of ‘body work’ developed at recent NASSS conferences (and elsewhere), we are particularly interested in papers that offer new ways of engaging, or thinking about, cultures of the body—and particularly those that explore how the corporeal is made political, pedagogical, performative. That is, we ask contributing scholars to consider, and share their empirical encounters about, embodiment as lived experience; to look at the forces acting upon, and negotiated by, various medicalized, pathologized, politicized, and scientized bodies. Beyond cultural studies’ structuralist tendencies, however, we are specifically asking scholars to share co-present experiences of everyday performance—seeking out those messy pluralities created by somatic encounters (exercising, sporting, leisuring, laboring, etc.) where bodies live within, and against,different ‘biopolitical’ formations. Out of these discussions, we hope to chart a ‘politics of possibility’ (Madison, 200?) generated within (and against) formations of biopoliticized physical culture; along the way highlighting the vital bodies, the vulnerable bodies, the dying bodies, the growing bodies, the agentive bodies, the subjugated bodies, the operative bodies, and the moving bodies that bring it to life.
Joshua I. Newman
Florida State University
josh.newman@otago.ac.nz
(Auto)ethnographic Bodies
This session is aimed at contributing to a discussion about researchers’ bodies as fruitful sites of research in and of themselves. It invites papers that explore the tensions and contradictions of our bodies as something we can know with, about, and through. Papers that forefront the vulnerabilities, sensualities, and failings of our researching bodies are particularly welcome.
Jason Laurendeau
University of Lethbridge
Equestrian Sport
Research on Equestrian Sport
This session explores equestrian sport as a distinct form of competitive, recreational and leisure pursuit characterized by gender, race, class and interspecies relations. Researchers are invited to submit papers that explore a range of topics regarding equestrian sport which may include but are not limited to: equestrian sport as a feminine sport preserve; the interspecies relationship in equestrian sport; questions about our societal understanding of equine athletes; examining the definitions, meanings and roles attributed to the horse sport; the ethics and practice of equestrian sports; horse sports and risk.
Michelle Gilbert
McMaster University, Hamilton,
James Gillett
McMaster University, Hamilton
Gender
A. Multiple Femininities/Multiple Masculinities
Within a gendered society, especially a sporting/physical environment, we are focused on achieving hegemonic femininity and hegemonic masculinity. However, this, by many, cannot be reached. As a result, we try to balance the pursuit of hegemonic femininity and masculinity with varying degrees of femininity and masculinity. This is prevalent within the sporting/physical activity environment. This session focuses on papers exploring the pursuits of hegemonic femininity and masculinity and those that “fall short”.
B. Paper Session: Pregnant Bodies in Sport and Physical Activity
When most enter a sport or physical activity the body is central to achieving the purpose within the sport or physical activity. For example, if you pursue running as a sport, you train your body to achieve to win. If you pursue running to lose weight, you run to achieve a fit/thinner body. This is part of a gendered society but also part of body ideology that suggests youth and fitness. There are many videos, programs, drugs and literature on how to achieve the ideal body and to stay fit. But what happens when that body becomes pregnant, the videos and books are gone. This session looks at the pregnant body when it is physical and athletes that have become pregnant and the struggles that they face in terms of societal limitations and their quest to remain active.
C. Paper Session: Women, Sport and Mass Media
This session focuses in how mass media represents women and sport. For the purpose of this session, mass media will be limited to non-sport television shows, documentaries, and film. How are women in sport represented within these venues when a story is told? Areas of investigation may include by not be limited to the feminine paradox and apologetic, an investigation of bodies and movement, and doing gender.
Giovanna Follo, Ph.D.
Emporia State University
Negotiating Being a Girl Athlete
Through sport, young girl athletes learn more than athletic techniques and strategies; they also are schooled in acceptable bodies, expected girl behavior, and the negotiation of gender relations (Azzarito, 2009; Azzarito & Solomon, 2004; Schmalz & Kerstetter, 2006). This session will focus on the findings from a research study in which 53 girl athletes participated in focus group interviews. The data we will present are part of a larger study examining girl athletes’ perceptions of women’s sport in visual culture. During the interviews the girl athletes often went on tangents and pushed the discussion into a broader dialogue regarding gender, bodies, and the negotiations they perform as young female athletes. There will be four presentations in this session. Negotiating Being a Girl Athlete will introduce the study and method. In the second presentation, You Look Stupid Smiling: Athletic Negotiations, the data themes of gendered sport lessons and gender performance will be discussed. Sport Bonds, Lunch Tables, and Best Friends: Social Negotiations will focus on the relationships among teammates. Finally, Girls Traversing Gender Boundaries will provide a conclusion to the session.
Vikki Krane
Bowling Green State University,
Sally R. Ross
University of Memphis
The “Girl Effect” and Corporate Social Ir/responsibility
“It only takes one girl to change the world … are you the one?”
In recent years, ‘corporate social responsibility’ programs, such as Nike’s Girl Effect and Plan International’s Because I am a Girl initiatives, have attempted to constitute girls as significant agents of self/familial-empowerment and as change-makers in both their families, local communities and entire regions of the globe. Poverty, illness and illiteracy are focal targets on the long list of social injustice issues that ‘girl effect’ programs suggest they can eradicate. However, the work of Sen (2000), Heywood (2007) and Hayhurst, MacNeill and Frisby (2010) provoke us to interrogate the claim that marginalized girls are active agents of significant social change. This session will critically assess the ethics and transformative potential of corporate social responsibility programs that deploy sport, dance and/or fitness-related programs.
Margaret MacNeill, PhD
Faculty of PE&H, University of Toronto
Challenges to the Gender Binary in Sport
This session is organized to promote and share scholarship documenting or identifying trends and/or opportunities for disrupting the ideology of the two sex system that is so manifest in much of modern sporting spaces and practices.
Ann Travers
Simon Fraser University
atravers@sfu.ca
History
(De)constructing Historical Narratives
In this session, how we do research is the object of inquiry. In our professional training and our own work, we often read/think about research methods in the abstract, sometimes at the expense of potentially fruitful discussions of how research plays out “on the ground.” Papers in this session will interrogate the potentials, challenges, and complexities of historical research methods (eg. oral histories, visual methods) and explore how we, as researchers, influence, enable, and at times, constrain the construction and deconstruction of narratives. Contributions that explore how researchers embrace multidisciplinary approaches and perspectives, reflect on the historical methods employed, and reflect on ongoing challenges (e.g., power, ethics, reflexivity, researcher positionality, memory) are encouraged.
Carly Adams
University of Lethbridge
Mascots
Manslaughter of a Mascot: A Case Study of the Demise of the Western Illinois University Westerwinds
The discussion about athletic teams’ mascots and nicknames has focused primarily on issues of race and Native American mascots. The NCAA has issued guidelines about using or displaying “hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery” and limits the opportunities for its members to compete if such images are displayed. The irony of this action is that the NCAA probably never thought to consider gender sensitivity on this list when it was trying to eradicate stereotypical mascots or nicknames. Consequently, little attention has been paid to the takeover of nicknames devoted to women’s teams. This paper explores the demise of the revered and unique Westerwinds nickname at Western Illinois University. The actions of an administration that, over a period of years, devised, implemented, and ultimately contributed to the death of a mascot associated with the WIU women’s athletic program for 32 years will be examined. Unlike other mascots lost to history, the Westerwinds nickname was not one of the inherently sexist names for female teams, nor did it contain any association to reviled Native American mascots across the country. This paper details a singularly unique action to eradicate a non-hostile athletic nickname based solely on the basis of gender.
Ellyn L. Bartges
University of Illinois
Laura M. Finch
St. Cloud State University
Media
Title: Body, cultures, & media representations: Research from Latin American perspectives
The body in contemporary society—viewed from a symbolic, culturally referenced perspective —manifests itself as a social construction. The inter relationships of social bodies as they move about in the daily life of different cultures is a topic of interest and research among scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and they often come together in the fields sociology and physical education. Thus, an awareness of the permeability and fluidity of disciplinary boundaries is an important feature of research on the body and culture. The use of interdisciplinary perspectives to study and understand the body has gained support among researchers in Latin America, and they have produced many studies, especially those focused on media representations. Therefore, the purpose of this session is to present research by Latin American scholars who study the relationship between the body and sports, body images, and the body and diversity. The goals of the session are to (a) bring together researchers from sociology and physical education in Latin America, (b) facilitate relationships between North American and Latin American scholars who study the body from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, and (c) begin to develop a network of scholars who wish to participate in multi-cultural, comparative studies of the body.
Dulce Filgueira
University of Brasilia
Jay Coakley
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Popular Culture
When Sport Heroes Fall: Interrogating Media Narratives About Sport and Character in the Age of Celebrity
Narrative reconstructions of heroic sports figures undergird many of our understandings about how sport builds character. But what happens when key figures in sports--athletes, coaches, and even announcers and journalists--fall from grace? The studies featured on this panel explore how media treatment of a variety of offenses--from drugs to sex to guns and beyond--frame our understandings of heroic character and the moral contours of sport. The cases explored on this panel reflect on the elastic nature of sporting celebrity in crisis and the role that media plays in being both receptive and resistant to the redemption efforts of fallen sport heroes.
Lawrence Wenner, Loyola Marymount University lawrence.wenner@gmail.com
Race
Work in Play: Race, Class, and Gender in Professional Sport
C. Richard King & David J. Leonard
Too often the play on the field obfuscates the work of players. Spectacular plays and moral panics over individual transgressions distract fans and journalists from issues of labor, exploitation, and alienation. This session seeks to explores the interplay of race, gender, and class in ongoing labor crises, particularly those impacting the NFL and NBA.
C. Richard King
Professor and Chair
Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies
"Race and College Sports: Experiences of Racial Minorities in College Athletics at Large Predominantly White Institutions!"
This session will examine the sports experiences of racial minorities who are enrolled at or employed by large predominantly white colleges and universities. This session seeks to exam the socio-cultural experiences of student athletes, coaches, athletics staff and traditional students attending home athletics contests as fans. It is the intent of this session to critically examine the paradoxical phrase "Race matters!"
Gary Sailes
Indiana University
Teaching
I have organized several such sessions in past years, and always had a full complement of papers. I know that there are sometimes multiple requests for sessions on teaching; if that is the case this year, I suggest that we try for subtopics. Two that I would like to try are "Teaching the Sociology of Sport: Effective Classroom Techniques" "Teaching the Sociology of Sport: Teaching/Reading the Classic Books"
Michael Malec,
Boston College
Mentoring the Black Student-Athlete in Predominantly White Institutions of Higher Education
The purpose of this session is to illuminate mentoring relationship efforts and programs, which aid in the development of Black student-athletes in the 21st century. More specifically, this session will demonstrate the significance of race, ethnicity, and culture in facilitating the formal and informal mentoring efforts in the context of the predominantly white institution of higher education (PWIHE). While mentoring has numerous definitions, the practice itself has several benefits to include career support, emotional and psychosocial support, and role modeling. In an effort to achieve its benefits, the mentor-mentee relationship should entail a level of trust, a mutual vision or goal, professional skill development, and networking opportunities. That said, mentoring Black students in the PWIHE also aid in retention, academic achievement, identity development, and strategies to cope with institutional racism. However, what about mentoring today’s Black student-athlete? The papers in this session will provide rationale for the emergence of mentoring relationships and programs for Black student-athletes and provide insight into the various program a) philosophies, b) models, c) challenges, and d) outcomes.
Dr. Billy J. Hawkins
University of Georgia
Dr. Akilah R. Carter-Francique
Texas A&M University
Technology
Sporting Body Net-a-Narratives: Revolutionizing Representations of Sporting Bodies and Sporting Practices on the Internet
This session consists of papers that explore the role of the Internet in revolutionizing sporting bodies (e.g., gendered sporting bodies, racialized sporting bodies, classed sporting bodies, aging sporting bodies, etc.) and sporting practices. Proposals for presentations, including demonstrations of Internet productions that reproduce and/or challenge status quo representation of bodies and practices as well as traditional paper presentation formats, are welcome from scholars. The anticipated topics that session presenters and attendees will explore include, but are by no means limited to: reproduction of and/or resistance to gendered, racialized, classed, aged, etc. representations of sporting or physically active bodies located on the Internet and/or World Wide Web; Internet blogs, social networking sites and other creative expressions online as sites for engaging/enacting/destabilizing conventions of sporting bodies and/or sporting practices; the use of the Internet as a place to produce and disseminate knowledge about the role sport and physical culture (and ultimately, sporting bodies and sporting practices) play in environmental sustainability; Internet sites that promote activism, participatory decision-making and issues of technological citizenship related to sport and physical culture.
Steph MacKay
University of Ottawa
Sport, Cultural Citizenship, and the New Digital Broadcasting Landscape: Emerging Opportunities, Enduring Issues
Access to live telecasts of sport as a matter of cultural citizenship is an increasingly complex and contentious political issue in the new digital broadcasting landscape. The technological developments associated with digitization coupled with the convergence of broadcasting, telecommunications, and the internet has, on the one hand, produced unprecedented opportunities for audiences to watch sport on a host of platforms. On the other hand, though, access to live broadcasts of the most popular sports now regarded by distributors as premium content is often restricted to audiences who can afford subscription fees to specialty channels and the requisite technologies. All of these developments including the ability of media conglomerates to overpay for various sporting properties and amortize the cost of those rights over other properties and platforms, have further eroded the ability of public broadcasters to provide live coverage of sporting events of national significance for all citizens. Papers in this session, then, will examine these interrelated issues and their associated political debates that are occurring within innumerable locales around the world.
Jay Scherer
University of Alberta
Technologies, In/Visibility, and Perception
Technologies developed for or applied to sport alter the ways with which sports and sporting bodies are engaged. As technologies in/on sport and sporting bodies are developed, debates over the functions, roles, and acceptability of these interventions and responses to these alterations can range from indifference to moral panic. One aspect of technology that can affect the way a its introduction into a sport is perceived is its level of visibility to participants and on-lookers—whether it is inside or outside body; visible or invisible during a sporting event; alters the course or rhythm of an event. Another important factor in the acceptance of a technology into a sport is whether or not it is understood to be a supplement to the performance or the governance of the sport. It is important to demarcate two different categories of technologies in sport: those which perceive and those which are perceived. This panel will explore how both the visibility of sporting technologies and the visibility created by sporting technologies affect perceptions of the acceptability of these practical changes to sports and bodies.
April D. Henning The Graduate Center, CUNY ahenning@gc.cuny.edu
Andrew McKinney
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Social Media Addiction? Professors get HOOKED!
The Interchange Group (2006) described the millennial generation as those “born into the world of the internet, cell phones and video games, they are tech savvy with short attention spans.” They are natural multi-taskers and are filled with confidence. So, in order to meet their expectations, teachers, mentors and advisors must adapt and adopt.
In an effort to gain insight into student expectations we need only consider the pervasiveness of social media. As a primary means of communicating with the millennial generation, social media has been coined “word of mouth on digital steroids.” And according to Allfacebook.com (2010), college-aged kids (18-24) made up the fastest growing segment of users on Facebook in 2010.
Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics contends, “We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media; the question is how well we do it.” Are you equipped to meet this challenge? What are the implications and expectations of faculty with regard for social media usage? This roundtable seeks to identify and discuss the pros and cons of incorporating social media into course expectations and how we embrace this paradigm shift.
Leigh Ann Danzey-Bussell
Ball State University
Brenda Riemer
Eastern Michigan
Theory
Putting Social Theory to Work in Sport and Physical Cultural Contexts: Conversations between Sociology and Psychology
Sociologists have often critiqued applied research in sport and exercise as uncritical and apolitical, and sometimes as supporting rather than challenging problematic power relations and sporting structures. The papers in this session, however, will reveal interesting developments on the margins of the fields of sport sociology and sport psychology where attempts are being made to enhance individuals’ experiences in practical contexts by conducting research that is informed by a larger social critique. We welcome papers from scholars who are engaging with the sport psychology literature around problems or issues such as sport retirement, injury or burnout in a productive way but who illustrate how social theory augments their analysis. We also welcome papers from scholars who are exploring how social theory can enhance understandings of the socio-psychological dimensions of the subject-in-the-world (e.g., agency, reflexivity, subjectivity, affect), and/or to inform intervention and change at the micro level. In so doing, this session will open a new dialogue about the potential of critical psychological and sociological concepts for creating positive change in sport and physical cultural contexts.
Holly Thorpe
University of Waikato
Jim Denison
University of Alberta
Tatiana Ryba
University of Jyväskylä
Undergraduate Research
This panel invites papers from undergraduate students doing sociological research on sport, fitness, and body cultures. All theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and areas of sports study welcome. Requirement for presentation is the research is thorough, rigorous, and draws upon appropriate theoretical and methodological perspective for the research question asked by the project.
Jeffrey Montez de Oca
University of Colorado Colorado Springs
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