Towards a Social Justice Disposition in Communication and Sport Scholarship

Daniel Jackson,Michael Silk,Filippo Trevisan,Emma Pullen

doi:10.1177/2167479520932929

Daniel Jackson, Michael Silk + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/2167479520932929

Copy DOI

Abstract

In this introduction to a special issue on sport communication and social justice, we offer some reflections on the state of the discipline as it relates to social justice. We bring attention to the role of sport communication scholars in the advancement of social justice goals and articulate a set of dispositions for researchers to bring to their practice, predicated on internalizing and centralizing morality, ethics, and the political. Identifying the epistemological (under)currents in the meaningful study of communication and sport, we offer a set of challenges for researchers in the contemporary critique of the communication industries based on “sensibilities” or dispositions of the research to those studied. We then introduce and frame the 13 articles that make up this double special issue of Communication & Sport. Collectively, these articles begin to demonstrate such dispositions in their interrogation of some of the most important and spectacularized acts of social justice campaigns and activism in recent decades alongside investigations of everyday forms of marginalization, resistance, and collective action that underpin social change—both progressive and regressive. We hope this special issue provides a vehicle for continued work in the area of sports communication and social justice.

Highlights

In this introduction to a special issue on sport communication and social justice, we offer some reflections on the state of the discipline as it relates to social justice
We are drawn from differing disciplines: sociology, gender studies, disability studies, cultural studies, political communication, and journalism studies
Most telling is that Obregon and Tuft (2017) outline that the emerging communicative dimensions of social movements have yet to receive wide scholarly attention. This is especially important in the context of sport, where participatory platforms and user-generated content have the potential to disrupt traditional relationships between important constituencies including athletes, sports teams, governing bodies, the news media, and fans. As this special issue shows, Colin Kaepernick’s activism and the #TakeAKnee digital counter-public that coalesced around it are but one example of how social media platforms are transforming these processes between the emergence of new voices in sport that challenge the status quo and attempts by elite actors to retain influence and power

Summary

Physical Cultural Studies and Social Justice

Whilst perhaps embryonic and certainly contestable, the physical cultural studies turn in relation to the sociology of sport (see, e.g., Andrews & Silk, 2011; Silk et al, 2017) has put forth dispositions predicated on internalizing and centralizing morality, ethics, and the political. Drawing on Said’s (1994) notion of intellectual amateurism, this is a disposition that connects with the political realities of society and in which we are encouraged to maintain critical distance from official or institutional bodies—the communication industries for example—in speaking truth to power (Rizvi & Lingard, 2006; Said, 1994) As such, this is a stance that encourages “taking sides”: scholarship that suggests an alternative ethical approach that does not search for neutral principles to which all parties can appeal, does not see people as mere subjects, as outsiders excluded from the research process, and that breaks down the role of researcher as “expert.” It proffers instead a reciprocal or social-ethical approach that erases any distinction between epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics and is located within a feminist communitarian model that rests on a complex view of moral judgments as integrating into organic whole various perspectives—everyday experience, beliefs about the good, and feelings of approval and shame—in terms of human relations and social structures (Christians, 2005; Denzin, 2005). As this special issue shows, Colin Kaepernick’s activism and the #TakeAKnee digital counter-public that coalesced around it are but one example of how social media platforms are transforming these processes between the emergence of new voices in sport that challenge the status quo and attempts by elite actors to retain influence and power

Asking Difficult Questions

Findings

Introducing the Special Issue