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People have an innate and fundamental need to belong (i.e., to establish and maintain high-quality and enriching relationships with others). Belonging is important to our personal and professional lives, and culture is often the conduit filtering our sense of belonging. Some organizations are culturally inclusive wherein a culturally diverse array of individuals feel connected and have a sense of belonging. In contrast, others are marred by cultural exclusion, leaving some individuals culturally disconnected, culturally disengaged, and lacking a sense of belonging. This article posits cultural belonging as the “impoverishing errand” that kinesiology must accomplish. It discusses personal and positional culture, organizational culture, and the leadership needed in kinesiology to create institutional environments that support and sustain inclusive cultures of belonging for faculty, staff, and students. In so doing, it illustrates the need for the philosophical/ideological and managerial focus on people-centered leadership that normalizes cultural inclusion.

Faculty with personal and professional identities that are marginalized in higher education experience identity taxation, which is the experience of greater physical, mental, emotional, or psychological labor beyond what is experienced by faculty members with dominant-group identities. Inequities in service work contribute substantially to this taxation. Here, we describe persistent inequities in service work in academia, the impacts and consequences of those inequities, and strategies from the literature and our own experiences to make service work more equitable. We then detail two case examples for how we implemented some of these strategies in our kinesiology department, including (a) adopting an equity-based model of service work for required department and college service committees and (b) applying an equity lens to a faculty search committee. Finally, we reflect on our successes and areas for improvement.

Over the past decade, enrollment in the exercise science graduate program at Texas State University has shown consistent growth. However, the program’s level of diversity has been low, as indicated by the college’s equity audit report. In response to the imperative of social justice and equity in the field of kinesiology, this article presents one recruitment strategy and two retention strategies aimed at fostering inclusivity in the graduate program. The recruitment strategy describes the steps to establish a partnership with Huston-Tillotson University (a historically Black university). This partnership serves as a means to create a pathway for underrepresented students to pursue graduate studies in exercise science. The two retention strategies explain how a peer-mentoring program and alumni connect can be used to foster an inclusive experience for current students and recent graduates and to promote student success and retention. The benefits of each strategy and suggestions to implement the strategies are also described.

Kinesiology programs seeking to prepare an inclusive workforce are committed to recruiting and retaining graduate students who represent the demographic diversity of our country, communities, and undergraduate universities. Plans for enhancing diversity, including partnerships between historically Black undergraduate institutions and graduate programs located on predominantly White campuses, must incorporate equity-focused strategies. In this article, four Black women with various experiences as students and faculty at predominantly White institutions and historically Black colleges and universities offer their advice on equity-focused approaches to graduate student recruitment and retention. This article is meant to provide nuanced understandings of the benefits and challenges of such approaches for students and faculty of color.

In 1904, Edmond Desbonnet launched La Culture Physique, a magazine that presented itself as scientific and entertaining in its promotion of strength athletes. La Culture Physique prioritized photomechanical imagery to demonstrate the visual merits of the conditioned human body. A surprising number of women feature in nearly each month’s issue. The magazine represented these athletes using a number of editing techniques that made their bodies seem remarkably muscular and yet conventionally feminine. But the specific formal qualities of the publication—such as paper quality, printing technology, and size—helped mask the work that went into making its subjects appear real. La Culture Physique is one of very few extant sources wherein the muscularity of specific women is promoted alongside men’s during a period when gender disparity was deeply engrained in French society. La Culture Physique worked within and at times pushed against dominant French cultural values articulated around concepts of gender and belonging, using a set of tools that packaged its contents and form as works of art: as legible, desirable, and collectable. This paper demonstrates that these same tools also helped the publication maintain its veneer of authority. La Culture Physique has yet to be examined from an art historical perspective. This paper seeks to remedy this by arguing that La Culture Physique’s 1904 issues are a crucial source of historical and visual documentation for scholars interested in how women participated and were represented in early French physical culture.

Throughout the course of ballet dance history, White ballerinas have maintained the spotlight—subsequently leaving limited representation of Black ballerinas. However, other forms of dance, such as hip-hop, may yield greater representation of Black dancers due to hip-hop’s origins during the Harlem Renaissance. The current work examined if perceivers stereotype ballet and hip-hop as dance forms more suited for White or Black dancers, respectively. Two hundred sixty-eight online participants completed explicit and implicit (implicit association test) stereotyping measures examining endorsement of the ballet = White and hip-hop = Black stereotypes. In step with predictions, results showed that individuals were more likely to explicitly and implicitly endorse White women as ballerinas and Black women as hip-hop dancers. In addition, participants with ballet and hip-hop dance experience were less likely to endorse the stereotype that ballet dancers are White and hip-hop dancers are Black. Moreover, less stereotype endorsement also predicted greater likelihood of seeing a ballet or hip-hop performance in the future. These findings suggest that perceivers hold expectations about racial identities of dancers in ballet and hip-hop dance. Future directions regarding the role of race and stereotyping in the world of dance and the performing arts are discussed.

Objectives: Women are underrepresented as participants in sport and exercise science research, and most of the research is of low quality. To reduce the gender data gap, it is imperative to understand where this bias originates. The purpose of this study was (a) to evaluate the proportion of first and last author, and editorial board gender, and (b) to explore the association between gender and quality of female-specific research methods. Method: Studies exclusively investigating female participants (2014–2021) were extracted from a larger data set and updated through 2022. First author, last author, and editorial board gender were determined (e.g., from gender pronouns on institutional profiles, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate). Where applicable, study methodology was assessed by giving each study a quality score (0–1) based on key methodological considerations. Descriptive statistics were used to describe author and editorial board gender frequencies. Analyses of variance were used to investigate the associations between gender and female-specific methodological quality. Results: Within 438 female-only studies, data revealed a greater proportion of women first authors (55%) and men last authors (62%). There was an association between women authors (first, last, and both) and higher quality score for female-specific methods across all journals (p = .00–.04). The two lowest-ranked journals for quality score demonstrated worse gender parity within their editorial board (0%–12% women). Conclusions: The results from this study show that most female-only studies were senior authored by men. However, studies led by women had higher quality of female-specific methods. Future research is needed to explore gender distribution of senior academics.