Approximately a dozen colorful dragon boats and traditional Indigenous canoes float on the wather. Each boat is filled with people holding oars.

Traditional Indigenous canoes alongside dragon boats at the 2013 All Nations Canoe Gathering, on the unceded Sen̓áḵw waterways (False Creek, Vancouver, BC) (“Canoe-0104” photo by Rey Torres, granted special permission for non-commercial use)

The #LANDBACK campaign across Turtle Island is a movement organized to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands and governance. It is an active, sociopolitical, “Indigenous-led movement” that resists settler colonialism. In some ways, #LANDBACK also resists political and legal tools, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, used to justify claims of land “discovered” along water routes. While the former doctrine claims that a “discoverer” could take possession of land if it was deemed as “discovered,” British colonialists used terra nullius (land belonging to no one) to justify claiming, renaming, and settling, as they understood their relationship to “vacant land” as ownership.

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The lower body of a person with kneepads riding a skateboard down an asphault street is pictured. The person has one artificial leg.
Adaptive skateboarding and wheelchair motocross have grown in popularity, sparking discussions about their potential inclusion in the Paralympic Games. (photo by Kampus Production via Pexels)

Skateboarding has boomed globally over the last decade, and researchers have been quick to examine how intersecting social markers like race, gender, and age can influence people’s participation in this action sport. Yet, little research has considered disabled people’s participation in skateboarding and adaptive action sports, such as wheelchair motocross (WCMX), despite increased uptake among disabled people. Considering this gap, I explored the emerging adaptive action sports of skateboarding and WCMX.

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An ice hockey coach, dressed in black, leans over on the ice, holding her stick across her legs, talking to a young participant with a long pony tail and wearing a white jersey, with other participants standing in the background.
The Indigenous Girls Hockey Program and Indigenous Girls Hockey Jamboree serve as powerful examples of “doing hockey different.” In this photo, an ice hockey coach, dressed in black, leans over on the ice, holding her stick across her legs, talking to a young participant with a long ponytail and wearing a white jersey, with other participants standing in the background (photo courtesy of Ryan Francis).

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“…you begin to see how it’s all connected and the importance that we give these opportunities for Indigenous youth and Indigenous girls to be our future” ~Ryan Francis

On lands claimed by Canada, the ongoing project of settler colonialism targets Indigenous lives, languages, ways of knowing, connections to territory, and more. Settler colonialism is the claiming of lands already occupied by Indigenous peoples for the purposes of building wealth. It involves destroying Indigenous institutions and ways of knowing, while building what Daniel Heath Justice calls a “new social order” that is geared toward eliminating Indigenous peoples as Indigenous peoples. The violences of settler colonialism in the Canadian context include, for example, the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and how anti-Indigenous racism is embedded in institutions such as child welfare, the justice system, and higher education. As Tuck and Yang highlight, the violence of settler colonial invasion “is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation.

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In the foreground, a woman with a pink shirt runs while carrying a medicine ball. In the background, other women and men also run with medicine balls.
CrossFit workouts incorporate a variety of high-intensity exercises, such a running with medicine balls (photo by CrossFit Fever licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Most brands, especially those that generate more than $100 million in annual revenue, don’t begin with a story about vomit. Yet, according to CrossFit, Inc. founder and former CEO Greg Glassman, the “eureka moment” of his now astronomically popular fitness program began just like that—with a teenage Glassman, having subjected himself to a grueling combination of barbell push presses and pull-ups, barfing on his garage floor. At the center of CrossFit’s origin story and its subsequent success is the human body at its most beautiful, its most playful, and its most grotesque. Indeed, in a previous article in Engaging Sports, Matt Crockett and Ted Butryn compellingly argue how CrossFit expresses a collective anxiety surrounding how our bodies atrophy in increasingly sedentary workplaces.

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People wearing warm winter jackets sit in the foreground watching the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Olympics in McMahon Stadium. On the white field of the stadium are people in red jackets standing in a large square formation.
The Olympic torch is carried into McMahon Stadium during the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Canada (photo by Brian Woychuk licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Ignorance is an activity, it isn’t simply not knowing but a form of knowing supported by the socio-political system. –Lisa Slater

It is well documented that youth sport teaches young people life lessons – about themselves, the importance of teamwork, etc. In this short reflexive essay (drawn from a larger book project), I consider another kind of education at work in youths’ encounters with sport in settler states – countries founded upon the theft of land from Indigenous peoples: it teaches young settlers, in particular, about their place in the world, their “right” to live on stolen lands.

Here, I take up selected fragments of my childhood and youth, interrogating how my encounters with sport (as both a participant and a consumer) shaped my understandings of myself and my belonging on lands claimed by Canada. I consider, in the words of social scientist Lisa Slater, some of the “dimly lit memories” that provide clues to my developing sense of self.

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A screenshot of the NBA Live video game shows WNBA players Brittney Griner and Maya Moore with smoothed muscles and an "hourglass figure".
A screenshot from the NBA Live video game with Brittney Griner of the Phoenix Mercury and Maya Moore of the Minnesota Lynx (Photo owned personally by the author)

On March 6, 2023, video game company Electronic Arts (EA) announced the introduction of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) to their FIFA franchise. This inclusion, just like with the WNBA in EA’s NBA Live franchise, was initially celebrated as a step forward to gender equality in sport and the video game industry. However, this celebration faced pushback from many athletes about the (un)likeness of their digitized counterparts and how the game rates certain athletes’ performances. Subsequently, athletes’ public outcry drew pushback on social media, with some users urging NWSL athletes to stop making this a gender issue, arguing that it is just a technical problem because men, too, have been misrepresented in video games. In this article, we provide a different perspective on the misrepresentation of female athletes. Instead of saying “yes, the misrepresentation is about gender inequality,” or “no, it is merely a technical issue,” we want to argue, “yes, the misrepresentation may be due to technological limitations, but how these athletes are misrepresented can be a gender issue that hinders the good intention of advocating for equality.”

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I sign with the words "RuPaul's Drag Race" written at the top, with an image of RuPaul below with black and white checkered flags in the background. RuPaul is wearing a red jumpsuit with a white belt and long blonde hair.
RuPaul’s Drag Race sign at San Francisco Pride (by Loren Javier licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0)

RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) is a reality television show where drag queens—performers, who are typically but not always men, that dress up as glamourous and often overstated women—contend for the title of “America’s Next Drag Superstar” and a $100,000 cash prize. In each episode, the queens compete in challenges that involve activities such as acting, sewing, dancing, comedy, and singing. The two queens who do the worst in the challenge that week compete in a lip-sync “smackdown” to a song chosen by RuPaul—the creator, co-producer and main judge of the show, who also is a drag queen—with the loser being eliminated from the show. The competition continues like this weekly until only four contestants remain, at which point they participate in a final challenge for the crown. The popularity of RPDR is evidenced by the fact it has spawned a variety of spin-offs in multiple countries.

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Deion Sanders, a Black man who coaches the Jackson State University football team, is pictured on the sideline using a knee scooter due to an injury.
Coach Deion Sanders on the Jackson State sideline at the 2021 SWAC Championship (photo via 2C2K Photography licensed under CC BY 2.0)

For many people across the U.S., the summer of 2020 felt as if racial tension reached a fever pitch. The murder of George Floyd was met with anger, outrage, and a great deal of political banter among elected officials. Following the summer of 2020, there was a wave of discussion about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across the sporting/corporate world, along with a related “resurgence” of attention to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), with a particular focus on athletics. But please don’t call it a comeback, ‘cause HBCUs have been here for years. It is only now that the national sports media has shone a spotlight on decades of systemic financial and racial inequalities that have led to top Black students and athletes being lured away from HBCUs to predominantly white institutions (PWIs).

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A young softball players stand on base, ready to run. Two fielders stand in the background.
Currently, most sports take place in sex segregated settings, such as this girls’ youth softball league (photo by North Charleston, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0).

Sex segregated sport is increasingly untenable. As sports authorities and politicians enact flawed attempts to regulate who can and cannot participate in women’s and girls’ sports, the shaky foundations of the current system reveal themselves. Yet gender-integrated sports are perceived as unthinkable to many because they confront taken for granted beliefs about women’s inferiority to men. Sport is the only remaining institutional realm where sex segregation is permissible and, as such, it maintains and reproduces gender inequality. More than any other institution, sport showcases the cultural system of binary sex difference and makes it appear natural. Even people who, on all other fronts, believe in women’s equality to men, find themselves compelled by the argument that men are athletically superior to women. Gender expansive athletes, including trans, non-binary, and intersex athletes, threaten our social, economic, and political systems with disarray.

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The FIFA men's World Cup trophy, a gold ball being held by robed figures, sits on the grass with blurred stadium seats in the background
How might a “thinking fan” go about watching the upcoming FIFA men’s World Cup in Qatar? (photo via insidersport.com)

The increasing public recognition of direct links between sports, social issues, and politics poses a challenging question: what should we watch? If we watched the 2022 Beijing Olympics despite concerns about IOC policy and China’s human rights record and repressive surveillance, does that make us bad people? If we watch the 2022 World Cup in Qatar despite concerns about FIFA motives along with the rights of migrant workers and LGBTQ people, does that make us complicit?

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