Sport history and the academy

Increasingly, merely publishing in academic journals seems ill-suited to the pursuit of social change. The timing, format, and circulation of such publications make them rather cumbersome. Here in Public Humanities, we are writing for an academic audience, specifically to urge these scholars to embrace advocacy and/or activism. This is a daunting “ask,” in many ways, as Canadian universities, and indeed universities elsewhere, do little to encourage and support such work. As Judith Butler explains, much of this comes down to universities’ academic priorities, or lack thereof, where institutions are “increasingly run by corporate administrators deploying neoliberal metrics.”Footnote ⁴ Universities adore the empty rhetoric of equity and inclusion, forming committees and task forces to illustrate their respective commitments to such initiatives, eating up the time and energy of faculty members who could otherwise make far more meaningful contributions to equity and inclusion both on campus and in the broader community. The university can devour one’s potential for resistance. Reflecting on her career to date, Nancy A. Hewitt, the decorated historian of American women’s activism, reflected that her own “activism has become university, rather than community, based.”Footnote ⁵ In North America, the quest for tenure, coupled with the precarity of most non-tenure track positions, places further limitations on emerging academics who, often despite their best intentions, find their activist inclinations smothered by an academy more concerned with appearances than meaningful social change. When it comes time to be evaluated for tenure, public work still carries little or no weight. In most instances, the contemporary North American university is a treacherous, normative force.

The lot of the sport historian is rather unique, presenting an array of complications. We are often housed in departments of kinesiology or human kinetics. This state of affairs began decades ago, when departments of history were hesitant to recognize the study of sport – rather than say war or politics – as a legitimate field of inquiry. Many history departments would not consider us historians at all. And to some degree, this critique is accurate. Not unlike Stuart Hall and others working in cultural studies during the 1960s and 1970s, sport historians are often interdisciplinary, in part due to the varied pedagogical demands they face in human kinetics and kinesiology departments. As noted in the editorial of the inaugural issue of the Journal of Sport History in 1974, these departments, previously labeled physical education, were the “main stimulus” for the creation of that journal and the subfield more broadly.Footnote ⁶ A sport historian, however, is rarely permitted to be only a historian. While our departmental colleagues in physiology, anatomy, and biomechanics operate in relatively defined areas, the sport historian finds their expertise stretched and applied to a whole array of disparate areas across both the humanities and social sciences. Over the last decade, for example, the lead author of this paper has been called on to teach not only history, but ethics, law, management, and sociology. He has sat on graduate examination committees spanning history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and management. One becomes, to use a phrase often uttered by our colleague Dave Humphreys, who specializes in sport medicine, a “Swiss Army Knife” of the department. This almost absurd degree of expected interdisciplinarity is a challenge but, although it rarely felt like it, an important opportunity for growth, providing a rare toolbox of theory, method, and practice with which to engage other academics.

It is still difficult, but not impossible, to find a supervisor for a sport-related study in Canada’s history departments. The first author on his paper, for example, has a BA and MA in history, but wishing to examine the social and culture history of sport, took a PhD in a kinesiology department, which was truly the only place with a supervisor of requisite experience and expertise. Colin Howell, the lead author’s MA advisor at Saint Mary’s University, has since retired and was not replaced with a sport-oriented hire. Christine O’Bonsawin is one of the rare exceptions, working in the history department at the University of Victoria. Eventually, an academic inertia built, whereby more and more supervisors were hired into kinesiology departments, rather than history departments, because they lack the traditional PhD in history and all its various nuances. The three other authors on this paper, for example, are all supervised by the first author in a kinesiology department, having themselves completed an undergraduate course of study in kinesiology. Occasionally, undergraduates from traditional history departments will make the transition over to kinesiology or human kinetics to study sport, but they will find a very different sort of education. For one, there are no language requirements for MAs in the historical stream of kinesiology/human kinetics. Whereas to study Canadian history for a thesis-based MA, the lead author of this paper was required to show reading comprehension of both French and English, the official languages of Canada, a valuable tool when navigating the political landscape of a bilingual nation. At the PhD level, candidacy exams are the norm in kinesiology, rather than the more exhaustive comprehensive exams of history. Although the value of comprehensive exams in a world with virtually every major work now at one’s fingertips is a topic of debate, the expectation that a job candidate for a post in a history department has completed a comprehensive exam, demonstrating multiple fields of expertise, is still very much a reality.

Housed as we are in kinesiology/human kinetics departments, the expectations for historians of sport are rather more in line with the sciences than the humanities. Academic outputs are measured primarily via the production of peer-reviewed articles, with books occupying a sort of confusing grey area, of little relevance to our colleagues in biomechanics, physiology and so on. This is of the most dire concern for sports historians hoping to make some kind of public contribution. The typical history output, the monograph, which when published via one of the major Canadian university presses, will indeed grace the shelves of bookstores and reach an audience beyond the strictly academic, is often out of reach. The constant churning out of articles for pay-walled journals, in language often inaccessible to the public, is the opposite of why many of us entered the field in the first place. Although a book still “counts” in kinesiology, albeit not to the same degree as in a history department, finding the time to write a monograph, where one can fully tease out the complexities of an issue, is a consistent struggle.

Once we overcome the scholastic snobbery that labels sport as unserious and unworthy of rigorous study and the science-oriented model of publishing in kinesiology and human kinetics departments, those of us who remain interested in public engagement must be flexible and creative. The immense push and prioritization of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in the academy has left historians, regardless of their department and orientation, struggling for funding and support. The march of capitalism, the marketization of the universities, where a degree’s value is seemingly reducible to the future paycheck it generates, does not help matters. For sport historians, these factors are blunted somewhat by the hyper-commercialization of sport and the consequent demand for “content” related to sport. Yet, it is this very hyper-commercialization that generates demand for our services for public print, audio, and video platforms is precisely what most of us seek to resist, change, and in some cases, overthrow. We find ourselves at a strange nexus of forces. There has always been a need for critical scholars of sport and culture more broadly. In some respects, the very existence of forms of oppression necessitates the creation and proliferation of scholars to mount resistance and fight for change. To this end, we agree with Stuart Hall’s contention that “the university is a critical institution or it is nothing” and emphasize the value of his work on conjuncture and contingency to public-facing historians of sport, engaged in critiques of contemporary systems of oppression.

Filling the (scholarly) silence

At the time we conducted our review of the sexual assault literature in sport history journals, we were all scholars at Western University, in London, Ontario. A city of about half a million residents, London was rocked in 2022 by revelations that eight members of the 2018 World Junior hockey team had been accused of sexual assaulting a local woman at the Delta Armouries Hotel. The civil case was quietly settled by Hockey Canada. Later, it was revealed that Hockey Canada frequently encountered such cases, maintaining an account for reaching settlements. The lead author used the online publication The Conversation to echo the voices of the CBC’s Shireen Ahmed and others who were quick to note the historical persistence of sexual violence in Canada’s national sport.Footnote ⁷ The Conversation is a vital platform for academics dealing with time-sensitive subjects, allowing for short “explainer” pieces to be published and distributed via the website’s affiliation with the Canadian Press. Although there is only so much one can explain in 800 words, the distribution of an article over “the wire” facilitates print, audio, and video interviews, providing additional opportunities to contextualize the article and the event it covers.

Certainly, there were popular print resources available regarding the toxicity of hockey culture. Over two decades before the 2022 Hockey Canada scandal, investigative journalist Laura Robinson published her book Crossing the Line: Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport, detailing the lengthy historical roots of the sexual violence crisis in Canadian junior hockey.Footnote ⁸ There was also Cathy Vine’s and Paul Challen’s book on the Toronto Maple Leaf Gardens sex scandal entitled Gardens of Shame. Footnote ⁹ In the book Dome of Silence, Sandra Kirby, Lorraine Greaves, and Olena Hankivsky (Reference Kirby, Greaves and Hankinsky2000) covered sexual harassment and abuse in Canadian sport, traversing the psychological and sociological. We also had first-hand accounts of the sexual violence perpetrated by junior coach Graham James, written by survivors Sheldon Kennedy, Theo Fleury, and Greg Gilooley.Footnote ¹⁰ Over in sport sociology, scholars like Kristi Allain ad Cheryl MacDonald considered the ways Canadian masculinities contributed to the sport’s toxicity.Footnote ¹¹ Teressa Fowler was doing similar work in education (Reference Fowler2021). Later, Walter S. DeKeseredy, Stu Cowan, and Martin D Schwartz would publish Skating on Thin Ice: Professional Hockey, Rape Culture, & Violence against Women, but that remained months off in the future.Footnote ¹²

There was nothing in the leading sport history journals – Sport History Review, Sport in History, Journal of Sport History, International Journal of the History of Sport – that dealt explicitly with sexual violence and hockey in Canada. In fact, there were no articles in these journals dedicated to sexual violence in Canadian sport, period. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed in Silencing the Past, “Each historical narrative renews a claim to truth.”Footnote ¹³ Historians present a version of the past. A simulacrum. This is not widely accepted in sport history. As Murray G. Phillips explains in Deconstructing Sport History, “Realism is the ontological position many sport historians assume as they purport not only to have access to the past, but what they describe is the knowable reality of the past rather than impressions constructed by historians.”Footnote ¹⁴ But regardless of how fleeting, slippery, and fluid this history, or that history, oral, written, or performed, might be, it nonetheless represents a version of the past one can interact with and turn over in their mind. It permits a degree of connection through space and time. The authors working in the popular press have provided something for the study of sexual assault in Canadian sport that academic sport historians have not: an impression of the past. An impression. Something the public can at least wrestle with and assess. Folks like us, the current authors, have done too little, for too long. But where to start?

In the article for The Conversation, “Hockey Trouble,” our lead author examined what Stuart Hall would call a conjuncture, or the multiplicity of forces that produced a particular moment. It was an inadequate approach for such a short piece but, given the lack of material in the sport history journals, few other approaches seemed obviously superior. How was it that eight-star hockey players could be accused of sexual assault and the public not know? After all, millions of public dollars were funneled into hockey in Canada. Surely citizens had some claim to information about the state of things? And how could the handling of this case be kept so utterly undercover that these athletes could still progress to the professional ranks? What kind of a society permits that? The answers to these questions are not simple. They cannot be teased out in an 800-word essay for The Conversation, but one could point to the various forces at work, particularly misogyny and nationalism. An 800-word essay, however, necessarily requires a writer to dispense with some of their ideas, particularly those requiring space for nuance. In this case, the role of capitalism, of hockey players as the raw materials of a profit-making enterprise, had to be dispensed with. So too did any robust discussion of the intersection of the broader economic, social, and cultural forces of the conjuncture, or what the intersectionality of the players’ privilege, following Crenshaw,Footnote ¹⁵ could tell readers about hockey and hockey players in Canada. If these players were not universally white, straight, male, elite hockey players, would the system be so keen to protect them?

Stuart Hall, a history of the present, and resistance for the future

One of the reasons sport historians may shy away for the sexual assault crisis in Canadian hockey is likely a perceived lack of historicity. From this vantage point, it’s too “new” a crisis to warrant the consideration of historians, certainly in public forums, where scholars of sport sociology, psychology, and management seem at first blush better aligned to the task at hand. I want to challenge this assumption via what Stuart Hall called the “history of the present.” What Hall means here is not some blow-by-blow chronicling of the here and now – though this too is important – but rather the use of conjunctural analysis to consider how the interplay of social forces through space and time come to constitute very real contemporary moments. To understand what is happening now, one must understand the forces that emanate from the past. Thus, conjunctural analysis is a history of the present. As historians, whether sports historians or otherwise, we are acutely attuned to these very forces and how they correlate with current affairs. Nothing springs into existence from a vacuum. We have arrived at this point, at this conjuncture, some how, for some reason, in service of some normative purpose. The crisis, in this instance, the crisis of sexual assault in Canadian ice hockey, somehow fits within the hegemony of the day.

The norms of sport, however, did not evolve within a domestic vacuum, but rather as part of a broader international sporting order, atop which sits the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In 1976, Sociologist Jean-Marie Brohm suggested that the IOC was a Western imperialist power, a “world government of sport,” intended to reinforce bourgeois, capitalist hegemony.Footnote ¹⁶ Although we agree with Brohm’s contention regarding the international orientation of elite sport in Canada and elsewhere, we see more room for opposition, resistance, and change than Brohm suggests. Although international sport, and by extension elite Canadian sport, is deeply saturated with an imperialist, capitalist rationale, this need not be inevitable. In his own critique of Brohm, sociologist Richard Gruneau, deploying something more akin to the cultural Marxism of Raymond WilliamsFootnote ¹⁷ and others, contends that “sports, like all cultural creations, have the capacity to be either reproductive or oppositional, repressive or liberating.”Footnote ¹⁸ Following Hall, we see the future as contingent and open to be shaped. There are forces and structures, of course, that constrain the avenues and possibilities for change, but they do not extinguish resistance and preclude a continuation of the status quo. Instead, we embrace the hope posited by Hall, who argued the “future is not already wrapped up in its past, that it is not part of an unfolding teleological narrative whose end is known and given in its beginning.”Footnote ¹⁹ Even the existence of something like the IOC, and the international sporting order, is contingent.

Assuming one accepts this justification for critical, social interventions by historians, how does one adequately engage such subject matter. To tease out all the forces at work at this conjuncture, typically requires the time, support, and space to perform a lengthy, book-length analysis akin to Policing the Crisis. Footnote ²⁰ Written by Hall, in collaboration with John Clarke, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis was a monumental achievement, illustrating the power of conjunctural analysis for problematizing the oversimplified narratives around crime in British society. Yet, Policing the Crisis is a tome. Given the current publishing landscape, such a volume would take ages to get to print. The Conversation and similar outlets offer nimble, polished publishing and are a wonderful tool when used in conjunction with social media and additional print, audio, and video interventions, but are likely too limited for our purposes. The backlog at academic journals, their expectations and privileged circulation (if somewhat improved by open access), as well as the specter of AI peer review, raises questions about the value of such platforms for public-facing, socially engaged scholarship.

The same can, and should, be done regarding the abuse crisis in Canadian sport. The medium for such work might be different. Although edited collections are common enough in sport history, full-fledged collaboration, like that in Policing the Crisis, is not. It is, we think, a wonderful opportunity, with massive potential for social change. When Policing the Crisis was first released in 1978, the internet was still several years in the future and would not be suitable for a collaborative project in the humanities for many years more. Hall and colleagues did have, of course, the then thriving Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Such initiatives seem rather distant from the individualism and competition we see across the contemporary academic landscape, where the “publish or perish” mantra pushes scholars further and further apart. Yet, sport history seems ripe for the revival of a truly collaborative, public project. We argue this should be an interdisciplinary endeavor. The disparate subjects often taught by sport historians – and indeed many sport sociologists – leaves us well-suited to initiate such a project.

The lead author already dabbled in the formation of such a project via Scholars Against Abuse in Canadian Sport (SAACS), whereby an interdisciplinary group of over 150 scholars, from professors to undergraduates, came together to echo and amplify calls for a national inquiry into maltreatment in Canadian sport issued by athlete groups and advocates including Gymnasts for Change, Figure Skating for Change, Fencing for Change, and Global Athlete. We also allied ourselves with the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children, which monitors the federal government’s implementation of the United Nation’s Convention for the Rights of the Child. We wrote letters, submitted a brief and testified before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, and worked behind the scenes to assist survivors.Footnote ²¹ None of this work carried much weight for any of our membership’s tenure or promotion files. Yet, it was a moment at which scholars in the institutional, university- and college-sense of the word, collaborated with what Gramsci would call organic intellectuals including former coaches and athletes, on a relatively large scale, providing for a depth of analysis and impact I think few of us imagined. Although we did not topple the sport system or build it anew, the struggle challenged the normative, hegemonic culture. As Hall explains, “The fact that the other side is not going to be overthrown does not mean that important concessions and gains cannot be won.”Footnote ²² Although the federal government has refused, thus far, to deploy a national inquiry, both the Standing Committee on the Status of Women and Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage have completed studies urging the government to do just that. The pressure is mounting.

What can we do next? Should we focus our attention on filling the void in the sport history literature on sexual assault in Canadian sport? Yes, but that alone will not secure change. We propose a different project. An online history of the present. A conjunctural analysis of the sexual assault crisis in Canadian sport, with collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and the engagement of organic intellectuals at its core. A collaborative, living, online project that builds and highlights the forces at play in the current conjuncture, while we at the same time perform interventions in print, audio, and video, directing the public back to a free resource. Will the current administrations of Canadian universities sing our praises and value such work? No. But we must accept that going into such a project. This is not a project for us. It’s a project for the future of Canadian sport, for our children, for their children, who deserve something better than the rampant exploitation and flimsy patchwork solutions offered up by the Minister of Sport, Sport Canada, and all their varied partners who prop up this abusive, win-at-all-costs system. A history of the present to secure a better future.