Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Sport, Race, and Grassroots Activism: A Contextual Analysis of Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp as a Sporting Social Movement Organization(2024) Wallace, Brandon T.; Andrews, David L.; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation engages Know Your Rights Camp for Black Liberation (KYRC) – founded and led by athlete-activist Colin Kaepernick – as a case study for critically analyzing the contemporary intersections of sport, race, and grassroots activism. Among other related initiatives, KYRC hosts “camps” across the U.S. designed to facilitate empowerment, solidarity, and critical education about structural racism for Black and Brown youth in marginalized communities. KYRC is illustrative of the recent resurgence of sporting activism in the 2010s and early 2020s, in conjunction with the broader Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement. Not only is Kaepernick a symbolic figure of both athletic protest and Black resistance more generally in this era, but KYRC is representative of how contemporary sporting activism has evolved in more radical, coordinated, and grassroots directions. Because these emerging sporting initiatives more closely resemble the character of social movements organizations than traditional sport-for-development or sporting philanthropy initiatives, I propose conceptualizing these grassroots organizations as Sporting Social Movement Organizations (SMOs). Borrowing from social movement frameworks, I examine KYRC as a Sporting SMO, defined as an organization that utilizes its connection to sport or athletes to pursue social, political, or cultural change in a coordinated, strategic, and sustained manner. While scholars within Physical Cultural Studies and related fields have outlined the historical significance of and public reactions to this resurgence in sporting activism, there remains a considerable lack of theoretically and empirically rigorous research into Sporting SMOs, let alone with data collected in collaboration with organizations that can speak to their inner workings and on-the-ground mechanics. This project fills these gaps. The underlying research question is: in what ways, and within what broader sociopolitical contexts, does Know Your Rights Camp conduct grassroots sporting activism? First, based on in-depth interviews with KYRC associates, content analysis of KYRC’s social media, and textual analyses of KYRC’s public-facing pedagogical documents, I conduct a micro- and meso-level sociological analysis of KYRC’s mechanics, logics, strategies, messages, tensions, and challenges of KYRC’s model of grassroots activism. Second, based in the methods of radical contextualism and articulation, I conduct a macro-level cultural studies analysis of the social, political, economic, historical, technological, and ideological contexts within which KYRC is situated. Overall, this dissertation contains a precise sociological analysis of what KYRC is and does, as well as a broader cultural studies analysis of what KYRC tells us about sport, race, and politics in contemporary America. To summarize the key findings, I suggest that KYRC is simultaneously a Black Radical political project, a form of celebrity sporting activism, a team-based Sporting SMO, a grassroots pedagogical project, and an anti-essentialist progressive conjunctural response to racial capitalism/neoliberalism. KYRC’s blueprint of grassroots activism can be characterized as the symbolic mobilization of high-profile celebrity association and the material mobilization of philanthropy/donor contributions for the purposes of youth empowerment, collective community uplift, and critical public pedagogy. KYRC is propelled by the Kaepernick Brand – referring to Kaepernick’s stature as a global commercial symbol of bold and authentic political resistance – which uniquely affords the organization material and symbolic resources that the KYRC team strategically channels into navigating the non-profit sector and serving its communities with critical education and rapid community response. Based on these findings, I argue that KYRC reveals the political and transgressive potentials inherent to the immense economic and cultural expansion of sport, in ways that urge us to reconsider our assumptions about sport’s emancipatory potential and heighten our expectations of Black (celebrity) athletes. More broadly, KYRC demonstrates how the Left can intervene through the terrain of popular culture to resist neoliberalism and the Right’s reactionary authoritarian populism, and instead articulate a vision for America based in abolition, solidarity, and liberation from all forms of oppression.Item Visualizing Active Bodies: Knowledge-Making in Visual Physical Culture(2013) Sterling, Jennifer; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Within a "world replete with images and representations" (Haraway, 1997, p. 202), visual discourses play significant roles in the ways that bodies, and in particular active bodies, are organized, represented, and experienced in society. In physical culture, visualizing practices shape ways of seeing, and being seen, through the display, and interpretation of, active bodies in a wide variety of settings. Consequently, visual discourse in physical culture takes place, and makes meaning, through a range of visual events, texts, and technologies. To explore these sources and sites for their (re)production of differentiated social positions, I examine the visualization of (im)proper, (un)healthy, and physically (in)active bodies across multiple locations. These include: 1) the exhibition of heroic sporting portraiture in Champions at the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC); 2) the gross anatomy lessons of plastinated cadavers in the Body Worlds exhibition at the Maryland Science Center (Baltimore, MD); and, 3) my commemorative, yet critical, construction of Champions All as part of the Fear the Turtle Sculpture Project at the University of Maryland (College Park, MD). Broadly located within the theoretically fluid, interdisciplinary, and multi-method project that is physical cultural studies, I utilize visual discourse analysis and (auto)ethnographic methods to examine the role of visual discourse in physical culture. In particular, I examine each of the above visual events, and their visual and interpretive texts, for their "key themes, claims to truth, their complexities, and their silences" (Rose, 2007, p. 187). In understanding what positions are being constructed, and how they are advanced, challenged, or denied, my research reveals who is rendered (in)visible, and the consequences of such (in)visibilities. Extending empirical definitions of both the visual and the physical, this research illustrates the breadth of visual physical culture and its impacts; the productive nature of visual displays and their practices; and the knowledge-making, and thus world-making, contributions of the visualization of active bodies.Item Beyond the Beauty Salon: Sport, Women of Color and Their Hair(2011) Collins, Jennifer Elizabeth; Schultz, Jaime; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research concerning women of color in sport tends to center around several topics: barriers to participation, racial stereotyping, symbolic annihilation, and the intersecting axes of power that influence their involvement and representation. Furthermore, while there exists a rich body of literature that hair has inspired in black feminist scholarship, these works have overlooked the experiences of black female athletes. In this project I seek to bridge these two bodies of knowledge through focus groups and personal interviews with black female collegiate athletes. Specifically, I examine three issues related to hair in the context of black women's athletic experiences: 1) as a particular racialized, gendered, and sexualized expression of self; 2) as a signifier of "other" in sport and society; and 3) as a possible cultural barrier to specific athletic endeavors. By bridging the disconnect between the two fields, I will address the ways that hair is an embodied cultural form influencing the physical culture of women of color.Item DIXIE'S LAST STAND: OLE MISS, THE BODY, AND THE SPECTACLE OF DIXIE SOUTH WHITENESS(2005-12-06) Newman, Joshua Isaac; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The interrelated studies within this dissertation provide new insights into the problematic nature of identity and the political disposition of the performative body in the contemporary American South. In particular, this research project will expand upon an emergent critical sociology of the South, particularly by interrogating the sporting and physical cultures of the University of Mississippi ('Ole Miss')--an institution which has historically functioned to discipline and authorize a preferred culture of the segregated body and the segregation of physical cultures. By investigating the genealogical ascendancy of whiteness at the University, as well as the more contemporaneous materializations of iniquitous social hierarchies, this dissertation disrupts 'traditional' notions of representation, subjectivity, and identity at Ole Miss. Looking beyond black and white, past the conventions of modern identity theory, this study interrupts the binaries of race and gender and reconsiders the dominant subject positions which actively shape the social experience on the Ole Miss campus. Through analysis of local cultural physicalities, namely the celebrity discourses of sporting icons Archie and Eli Manning and Confederate Civil War heroes such as the 'University Greys,' the symbolic embodiments of the Ole Miss brand (from the waving of the Confederate flag to the caricatured physicalities of the sporting mascot, Colonel Rebel), the complex relations between the student body and the campus space, and the spectacular practices of corporeal whiteness, this dissertation empirically identifies and theoretically criticizes the disciplinary regimes of power which normalize and marginalize the cultural experiences of the Ole Miss student subject. Engaging a qualitatively-grounded, multimethod analysis of the multifarious ways in which whiteness is encoded and decoded through discourses of the corporeal, this project is intended to begin the formulation of a broader interpretive framework from which the cultures of the body and the discourses of overt Southern whiteness can be understood as: 1) intersecting planes of postmodern subjectivity; and 2) the return of a conservative American 'ethnocentric monoculturalism.'