The Department of Anthropology and The Sports and Society Initiative bring Tracie Canada to campus to discuss her book: Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football. Limited copies of the book will be available for free to students.
College football, with its prestige, drama, media, and money, is a core feature of the sporting landscape in the US. However, the promises of an “amateur” system that offers a “free”
education contradict the reality. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Dr. Canada describes how this system particularly harms, disadvantages, and exploits the Black men who are demographically overrepresented on gridirons across the country. In this talk, she highlights how she engages multiple audiences in her ethnographic writing, which details how Black college football players tackle the systems that structure their everyday lives, and who helps them do it.
Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and director of the HEARTS (Health, Ethnography, and Race through Sports) Lab at Duke University. She is a Black feminist anthropologist and ethnographer whose research uses sport to theorize race, kinship and care, gender, and the performing body.