Thursday, April 27, 2023 | 3:30 - 5:00 pm CDT

Online

FREE and Open to the Public (Registration Requested)

Professional captioning provided

Mary G. McDonald: Homer C. Rice Chair of Sports and Society, ADVANCE Professor, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, Georgia Institute of Technology

Moderated by Douglas Hartmann: Professor of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

In recent years, WNBA players have received media attention for their activism off the court, including in their fight against police brutality, institutional racism, and gun violence. These developments build upon a rich history of competing ideologies and economic forces, which continue to shape the league and broader culture. Drawing upon feminist and cultural studies perspectives, this conversation will return to the 1997 founding of the league and trace the neoliberal, racialized, and gender politics at play. How has the WNBA linked itself to a type of postfeminism by projecting images of empowerment and rugged individualism without sufficiently attending to cultural barriers within and beyond the sport? Beyond this, how do sports help to reveal the contested terrain of gender and race relations?

About the Presenters

Mary G. McDonald (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is the Homer C. Rice Chair in Sports and Society in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. McDonald also serves as the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts ADVANCE professor working with the other five ADVANCE professors representing each college as advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Georgia Tech. A past president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, Professor McDonald has published more than 50 refereed articles and book chapters and co-edited Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation, a foundational work in the field which earned a Choice award as a top academic title. Dr. McDonald recently co-edited two additional anthologies, Sports, Society, and Technology: Bodies, Practices, and Knowledge Production with Jennifer Sterling (Palgrave, 2020) and Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussions with Matt Ventresca (Routledge, 2020). Her research focuses on American culture and sport including issues of inequality as related to gender, race, class, and sexuality. She has edited or co-edited special issues of the Sociology of Sport Journal devoted to “(Post)Identity and Sport” and “Whiteness and Sport” as well as special issues centered on “Doing Sport History in the Digital Present” for the Journal of Sport History and “Innovations in Sports for Development Research” for Third World Thematics. She is a frequent speaker on these and other subjects in professional forums and other venues. Professor McDonald is the 2018 recipient of the Service Excellence award from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, the highest honor conferred by that organization in recognition for long-time service and intellectual leadership within the field. As Homer C. Rice Chair, she directs the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts initiative in Sports, Society, and Technology.

Dr. Douglas Hartmann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath (Chicago, 2003), and co-author of Migration, Incorporation, and Change in an Interconnected World (Routledge/Taylor Francis 2015, with Syed Ali). Hartmann’s work has also appeared in the American Sociological Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, and Social Problems; recent media appearances include CBS This Morning, BBC Radio 4, and HBO’s “Level Playing Field” sports documentary series. With Chris Uggen, he publishes The Society Pages, an open access social science hub, and co-edits the “Critical Issues in Sport and Society” series at Rutgers University Press. Professor Hartmann he is former editor of the American Sociological Association magazine Contexts, is a past president of the Midwest Sociological Society and co-Principal Investigator of the American Mosaic Project and the Kids’ Involvement and Diversity Study (KIDS). Hartmann is currently working on a new book about the contested new politics of athlete activism and Black Lives Matter tentatively titled “Take-a-Knee Nation.”

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IAS Thursdays

IAS Thursdays | The WNBA: Sport as Spectacle and the Politics of Sport

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IAS Thursdays | The WNBA: Sport as Spectacle and the Politics of Sport

Related Events

Contact

Affiliation

Connect

Twin Cities Campus