Sport History Review (SHR) is the oldest academic journal in the field of sport history. First published as the Canadian Journal of the History of Sport in 1970, by the 1980s, it had a list of more than 400 subscribers across fifty countries.2 In 1996, under new editorship, the journal was rebranded as SHR and moved to a commercial publisher.3 During my first year as editor in 2016, I emphasized in an editorial that SHR “remained committed to promoting a diversity of approaches and topics of international interest” and I expressed “my hope that we can remain cognizant of earlier directions and legacies while also making space for new perspectives and approaches.” I called on researchers and scholars “to experiment, transform, and embrace new ways of writing to push the boundaries of our sport work; to engage more centrally with current debates; to consider the possibilities of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary conversations; and to imagine new directions.”4 I am proud of the work we have done over the past six years. Yet, I remain unsettled about the state of the journal and the field of sport history. Here, I reflect on my 2016 editorial and in particular the phrase I used—making space. I want to consider the notion of “space,” the space that we as editors, editorial boards, and publishers create and produce within the pages of academic journals, and the politics or more precisely the “possibility of politics” within these pages.5 Following Henri Lefebvre’s revolutionary work on sociospatial theory conceptualizing the social production of space, positioning space as both producing and shaped by social relations, I turn to the work of Doreen Massey to think about space “in a highly active and politically enabling manner.”6 Space is constituted by actions and, as Patricia Vertinsky writes, space is a practiced place that legitimizes and delegitimizes particular ways of being.7
Spaces—including the spaces created for scholarship in disciplinary journals—are never neutral. They are produced according to logics that serve to construct who and what is at home in these spaces. The dominant structures, logics, and practices of academia—not least of sport history—have and continue to produce institutional spaces that privilege whiteness and white men. Sara Ahmed interrogates this idea, pointing “not only to what has already been instituted or built but the mechanisms that ensure the persistence of that structure . . . white men refers also to conduct; it is not simply who is there, who is here, who is given a place at the table, but how bodies are occupied once they have arrived.”8 Spaces, such as those produced within the pages of academic journals, are constitutive of and constituted by particular bodies, how certain bodies are invited into that space, made to feel at home, and by the actions of these bodies. Since I began as editor in 2016, several published articles have been authored or coauthored by women, only a handful are about women’s sporting histories or gender, and even fewer are written by Black, Indigenous, or scholars of color, or are about Black, Indigenous, or people of color’s sporting experiences. Much of the work published during my tenure has focused on the sporting experiences of white men and white institutions with little attention to gender, (dis)ability, racialization, settler colonialism, or other key systems of power. To what extent are we seeing “new directions” in the pages of SHR? To what extent is SHR making space for new directions?
M. Ann Hall recently reminded us about the realities of mainstream academic publishing: “the content of any journal begins with the articles submitted.”9 While this is an important point, it also begs for a deeper analysis. We need to interrogate the conventions of the field as well as its ontological, epistemological, and axiological foundations; we must consider how we welcome or build space for authors, research topics, and methodologies with the effect of legitimating those who provide the submissions. In other words, it is vital to understand “the articles submitted” as products of the work of editors, reviewers, conference, and session organizers, and more. As a community of scholars, are we creating space(s) that welcome and encourage Black and Indigenous scholars, scholars of color, disabled scholars, scholars from the global south, or trans scholars, for instance, to submit to sport history journals? Or are sport historians—particularly those in positions of influence—too often reproducing the dominant logics of academic “homes?” Do we welcome “others” into these homes but fail to consider how the homes themselves might be merely renovated structures standing upon the foundations of spaces that remain hostile to those whose scholarship and lived experiences only occasionally grace the pages of journals and conference programs? Most importantly, how do we go beyond surface-level renovations and instead reimagine the foundations?
Scholars point to the whiteness of Western academic structures, curricula, research activities, and organizational cultures.10 Academic disciplines have long propped up and reproduced particular (white, Western) bodies of knowledge, erasing, obscuring, distorting, or marginalizing other frameworks in the process. Whiteness is both reflected and reproduced in a myriad of ways within the fields of sport history and sport studies, including through the demographics of faculty hires, curricular dialogues, and through our research activities, and publications.11 Importantly, this produces spaces that are, and feel, welcoming to some (bodies and bodies of work) and unwelcoming or hostile to others. As Christine O’Bonsawin (Abenaki) shares, for instance, “the academy has not been a safe haven for Indigenous bodies, nor the epistemologies, methodologies, and practices we bring into such places.”12 The pervasiveness of whiteness in sport history contributes to the difficulty of seeing and interrogating it; those who already have a “place at the table” often have difficulty seeing how the table is one structured by and for whiteness.13
When I wrote in 2016 that SHR was committed to publishing and promoting a diversity of approaches, I was speaking to the realities of the field of sport history and to the work that lay ahead. But editors and editorial teams need to be critiquing how and why we engage in “diversity work.” As Ahmed writes, when organizations and institutions engage in “diversity work,” they are ostensibly aiming to fix inequities by institutionalizing diversity.14 This is evident in the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion work universities are undertaking. More diversity workers are being hired, diversity policies approved, diversity weeks or events put onto our calendars. Ahmed points to the ways in which this “diversity work,” as it is being institutionalized, and in some cases mandated, “confirms the whiteness of what is already in place” and leads to generating the right kind of appearance, while rarely acknowledging, challenging, or more importantly dismantling the underlying power structures.15
When diversity becomes a form of hospitality, perhaps the organization is the host who receives as guests those who embody diversity. Whiteness is produced as host, as that which is already in place or at home. To be welcomed is to be positioned as the one who is not at home . . . . People of color in white organizations are treated as guests, temporary residents in someone else’s home. People of color are welcomed on condition they return that hospitality by integrating into a common organizational culture, or by “being” diverse, and allowing institutions to celebrate their diversity.17
Thus, without meaningfully engaging with the underlying assumptions and systemic power structures producing and produced by academic journals, this work is merely symbolic; it places the emphasis on changing perceptions. It presumes that a lack of diversity is the problem rather than a symptom of a system that works for some at the expense of others.
My intent here is not to propose strategies or write new policies for SHR to become more diverse, as I fear this would only be what Ahmed calls a “non-performative,” focusing on the policy or stated commitments and not changing practices and actions. In a recent Journal of Sport History special issue commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the North American Society for Sport History, Lindsay Parks Pieper and I wrote that as a community of scholars, sport historians are “collectively responsible for a field that has often failed to interrogate the kinds of histories told and by whom. Our organization [North American Society for Sport History] and the field of sport history are guilty of and complicit in the ongoing silencing of stories, perspectives, and worldviews from outside ‘the canon.’”18 SHR has contributed to perpetuating this and I acknowledge my/our complicity in manufacturing a field that continues to value and privilege certain bodies, voices, and analytic foci. As an international community of scholars, we must work together, not to “add diversity and stir,” but to question and transform the foundations of our field, our organizations, and our academic journals and change our institutional practices. As sport historians, we need to take up the failure of our field to think outside of conventional ways of knowing, to refuse the status quo, to embrace counternarratives “to make visible the complex, historically specific, matrices of social inequalities that surround us”19 as we look to the future. We need to interrogate how “conventional” ways of knowing are, indeed, constitutive of the kinds of systemic violence that continue to marginalize, and mark as illegitimate, students and scholars who too rarely see themselves, their sporting experiences, their histories, and their scholarly interests represented in presents, futures, and pasts. The process of making space must focus on dismantling the established logics, structures, and axiological assumptions of sport history; only then can we collaboratively reimagine and rebuild an academic field that is “home” to everyone.
Notes
I am grateful to Janice Forsyth, Jason Laurendeau, Malcolm MacLean, Ornella Nzindukiyimana, Christine O’Bonsawin, and Lindsay Parks Pieper for their insightful, generous, and candid feedback. Much of this editorial comes from thinking they have inspired. My use of “step up” in the title is in reference to Christine O’Bonsawin’s compelling article: “‘Ready to Step Up and Hold the Front Line’: Transitioning from Sport History to Indigenous Studies, and Back Again,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 34, no. 5–6 (2017): 420–426.
Alan Metcalfe, “Editorial,” Canadian Journal of History of Sport/Revue Canadienne de l’historie des sports 26, no. 2 (1995).
For a detailed history of Sport History Review, see M. Ann Hall, “Fifty Years of Sport History Review,” in Routledge Handbook of Sport History, eds. Murray Phillips, Douglas Booth, and Carly Adams (London: Routledge, 2022), 332–338.
Carly Adams, “Editor’s Note,” Sport History Review 47, no. 1 (1996): 1–2.
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 250.
Ibid, 250.
Patricia Vertinsky, “Locating a ‘Sense of Place’: Space, Place, and Gender in the Gymnasium,” in Sites of Sport: Space, Place, Experience, eds. Patricia Vertinsky and John Bale (London: Routledge, 2004): 8–24.
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017), 153.
Hall, “Fifty Years of Sport,” 337.
Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Frances Henry, Enakshi Dua, Carl E. James, Audrey Kobayashi, Peter Li, Howard Ramos, and Malinda Smith, The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2017); Gregory Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and About Indigenous Peoples (Brush Education, 2018). Tameera Mohamed and Brenda Beagan, “‘Strange Faces’ in the Academy: Experiences of Racialized and Indigenous Faculty in Canadian Universities,” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 22, no. 3 (2017): 338–354; Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, “‘We are all for Diversity, But . . . ’: How Faculty Hiring Committees Reproduce Whiteness and Practical Suggestions for How They Can Change,” Harvard Educational Review 87, no. 4 (2017): 557–580.
Jessica Nachman, Janelle Joseph, and Caroline Fusco “‘What If What the Professor Knows Is Not Diverse Enough for Us?’: Whiteness in Canadian Kinesiology Programs,” Sport, Education, and Society (2021, Ahead of Print): 9. Accessed online on March 28, 2022 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13573322.2021.1919613. See also, Maureen Smith and Kathy Jamieson, “The Way We Never Were: Postracial Kinesiology in America,” Kinesiology Review 6, no. 2 (2017): 167–177.
O’Bonsawin, “Ready to Step Up and Hold the Front Line,” 422.
See Sara Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism, Borderlands 3, no. 2 (2004).
For a discussion on how diversity is institutionalized see Ahmed, On Being Included, 22–32.
Ahmed, On Being Included, 85.
Vertinsky, “Locating a ‘Sense of Place.’”
Ahmed, On Being Included, 43. Emphasis in the original.
Lindsay Parks Pieper and Carly Adams, “An Introduction to ‘50 Years: The North American Society for Sport History (NASSH),” Journal of Sport History 49, no. 3 (2021): 250.
Mary McDonald and Susan Birrell, “Reading Sport Critically: A Methodology for Interrogating Power,” Sociology of Sport Journal 16, no. 4 (1999): 295. For a discussion on failure as transformation see J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
