The End of Sport Podcast

Episode 138: Sport and the Climate Crisis with Madeleine Orr

In this episode, Derek and Nathan chat with Dr. Madeleine Orr about why any conversation about justice, harm, and sport needs to account for the unfolding climate catastrophe.
Dr. Madeleine Orr is an assistant professor of sport ecology in the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education at the University of Toronto focused on the intersection of sport and climate change. Dr. Orr's most recent book, Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport just published with Bloomsbury Press focuses on the threat that climate change poses to sport, but offers insight into those dire consequences through in-depth interviews with athletes, coaches, politicians and others to demonstrate the sport industry’s role in global warming.
Nathan and Derek's forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game is now available for pre-order from UNC Press. Use the code 01SOCIAL30 to save 30% when ordering from the UNC Press website.
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Episode 137: The Hegemonic vs. Inclusive Masculinity Debate

Nathan is joined by Colleen English and Daniel Sailofsky to dig deep into the concepts of hegemonic and inclusive masculinities and unpack which of these concepts offers a more persuasive and accurate theoretical frame for grappling with gender in critical sports studies.Colleen English is Associate Professor and Chair of Kinesiology at Penn State Berks, where she studies the philosophy and history of sport. She is author of, among other things, the extremely influential article “Toward sport reform: Hegemonic masculinity and reconceptualizing competition.” in Journal of the Philosophy of Sport.Daniel Sailofsky is Assistant Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Toronto, where he studies violence, masculinity, racial capitalism, and sport. He is currently writing Rules of P(l)ay: How Capitalism Produces Violence in Sport (under contract with UNC Press).
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Episode 136: How the Anti-trans Movement Shields Cisgender Sexual Predators

**This episode contains discussions of sexual violence**
 
In this episode, Johanna offers an initial analysis of how cisgender, white, and heterosexual sexual assault and predators and sport contribute to the anti-trans movement. Where do we see this happening most clearly? Swimming, which you may have guessed if you’re familiar with the work of Frankie de la Cretaz in this article for the Nation and their episode with us about it, and Johanna’s Guardian piece last summer. She discusses the revelations from Katie Strang’s first article for The Athletic about University of Kentucky’s swim coach, Lars Jorgensen. Two sportspeople – including a former swimmer and trans man - filed a lawsuit against the UKY Athletic Department that it allowed Jorgensen to “foster a toxic, sexually hostile environment within the swim program and to prey on, sexually harass, and commit horrific sexual assaults and violent rapes against young female coaches and collegiate athletes who were reliant on him.” The school’s Title IX office repeatedly discouraged victims to come forward.
The announcement of this lawsuit also comes a few weeks after ICONS (Independent Council on Women’s Sport) organized a lawsuit that included Riley Gaines and 15 other cisgender female college athletes against the NCAA to ban transgender women from all sports. Gaines has been one of Jorgensen’s defenders, as she swam for Jorgensen when she tied with Lia Thomas. Jorgensen, Gaines, and his other supporters show how the anti-trans movement is extremely dangerous to athletes and people of all genders. Solidarity with all survivors of sexual assault and trans people. Remember that transgender people are four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crimes like rape and sexual assault.
Jorgensen’s lawyer has since announced publicly that they are blaming the rape allegations on “NCAA Woke Philosophy.” By using the accusation of “wokeness,” Jorgensen’s team proves how the movement’s anti-trans actions are deeply connected with their beliefs on racism, misogyny, and more. 
 
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Episode 135: Hungary, Sportswashing, and Global Fascism

This episode is an interview that friend and repeat guest of the podcast, Karleigh Chardonnay Webb, did with Johanna in August 2023. Karleigh is an Outsports contributor and co-host of the Transition Defense podcast. She interviewed Johanna to analyze Hungary's sportswashing in light of Budapest hosting the World Athletics Championship last August and the announcement that World Aquatics is moving its headquarters from Lausanne, Switzerland to Budapest. 
Johanna begins with a more current intro that articulates why Hungary and its sportswashing matter in 2024 as global fascism continues to surge with the help of Putin, Italy, and the U.S. Right, and the movement's homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, and the like. She and Karleigh discuss how PM Viktor Orbán changed Hungary into an authoritarian state with fascist control, Hungarian attempts to resist it, and why more and more Hungarians are thinking of fleeing the state. The authoritarian, culturally imperialist IOC has long worked well with other authoritarian powers; Orbán uses the IOC and international sport to advance his political agenda in ways that are both similar to and distinct from the Stalinist and state socialist government of the Cold War era. The U.S. Right sees Orbán's efforts as a possible vision for the U.S., explaining CPAC's growing adoration and ties with the PM.
  
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Episode 134: Masculinities and Sport with Raewyn Connell

**Our apologies for the audio quality of this episode; we had some technical difficulties**
 
Nathan sits down with the incomparable Raewyn Connell to discuss a career shaping the academic study of masculinities. They explore the concept of hegemonic masculinity, its role in sport studies, and how it has changed over time; developments in the world of women's sport; trans exclusion policies; threats facing gender studies and the academy at large; and much more.
Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney and author of the selected and incredibly abridged list of books Gender and Power (1987) Masculinities (originally published in 1993), The Men and the Boys (2000), Gender (2009), and, in 2023 with University of Melbourne Press, Research, Politics, and Social Change–among an exceptionally long list of other books and articles that have literally shaped so much of the academy as we know it.
 
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.
 

Episode 133: Gunpower and Sports with Patrick Blanchfield

Nathan is joined by the incomparable Patrick Blanchfield for a complex structural assessment of US gun violence and how his theoretical framework of gunpower can be used to unpack instances of gun violence in the world of sport.
Patrick Blanchfield is Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute, co-host of the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast, author of the forthcoming book Gunpower: The Structure of American Violence, and a host of incredibly insightful articles in venues such as n + 1, The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Nation, including an exceptional interview with Daniel Denvir in Jacobin. You can find him on Twitter @PatBlanchfield and Bluesky @patblanchfield.bsky.social.
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Episode 132: The Barstool Sports Episode

Matthew Hodler is Assistant Professor of Sports Media and Communication at the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island. Kyle Kusz is Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. We sit down with Matt and Kyle to discuss their 2023 publication “‘Saturdays Are For The Boys’: Barstool Sports and the Cultural Politics of White Fratriarchy in Contemporary America” in Sociology of Sport Journal and, more broadly, Barstool Sports.
 
The conversation ranges from a history of Barstool Sports, why it has been critiqued for racism and misogyny, and, ultimately, how we should understand its role in a conjuncture that has seen the rise of a MAGA fascist politics that aligns with Barstool's ideological tendencies.
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Episode 131: College Sport NLRB Extravaganza

In this special episode, Nathan first has the chance to talk again to NLRB GC Jennifer Abruzzo, this time about the college athlete organizing developments prompted by her September 2021 memo. Abruzzo talks about Dartmouth men's basketball's recent unionization and the ongoing case at USC before explaining why she finds the term 'student-athlete' so objectionable--even as universities continue to double down on it.
Then, Nathan goes for a deeper dive into all these issues with former NLRB chair Mark Gaston Pearce in order to analyze why these cases have played out the way they have, what's really at stake, and where we are likely to go from here.
Jennifer Abruzzo is current General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board.
Mark Gaston Pearce is a visiting professor and the executive director of the Workers’ Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center. He is a former Board Member and Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board who served by appointment of President Barack Obama for two terms, concluding in August 2018.
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.
 

Episode 130: The Definitive Netflix Sports Rankings

Guy Harrison joins Nathan for a discussion of the Netflix sports doc as genre and its increasing influence in shaping how we understand sports. Then the two delve into the all-time definitive ranking of the best and worst Netflix sports docs/docuseries.
 
Guy Harrison is Assistant Professor and Director of Access and Engagement for the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism and Media where he studies diversity, inclusion, and representation in sports and new media. He is the author of On the Sidelines: Gendered Neoliberalism and the American Female Sportscaster (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Episode 129: Higher Ed 'Crisis' with Asheesh Kapur Siddique and Joe Darda

Asheesh Kapur Siddique is Assistant Professor of History at UMASS Amherst where he studies the British Empire between the 17th and Early 19th centuries. He is the author of the manuscript The Experience of the Archive: Knowledge and the Making of the Early Modern British Empire (currently under contract with Yale University Press). His public-facing work has appeared in outlets such as The Daily Beast, Inside Higher Ed,and Teen Vogue.
Joe Darda is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University where he studies post-1945 American literature, culture and politics. He is the author of three books on the reconfiguration of race in the age of civil rights: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America (University of California Press, 2021), and Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War (University of Chicago Press, 2019). With the historian Amira Rose Davis, he coedited a 2023 special issue of American Quarterly titled “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.”
In this conversation, Asheesh, Joe, and Nathan unpack what it means to talk about higher education in 'crisis' today. We discuss how athletic department exploitation has served as a model for the university writ large, the ghastly restructuring and cuts at major public US universities, administrative bloat, artificial intelligence, the value of the humanities, and so much more.
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.