An Introduction to Sport Studies as a Public Service

Immediately after Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 United States presidential election, the Democratic Party spent its first days in the opposition asking itself: “Do we need our own Joe Rogan?”1 In 2024, Rogan, a former mixed martial arts commentator turned podcast host, commanded an audience of nearly twenty-two million listeners. His shock-jock-style podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, hit 1.2 billion minutes of watch time in the US alone. For years, the audience listened to Rogan flirt with controversial, offensive, and unfounded ideas, most notably questioning the coronavirus vaccine and praising antivax crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s run for president. Rogan's ultimate endorsement went not to RFK but to Donald Trump, whom the podcaster interviewed in the final days of the campaign, as well as future vice president J. D. Vance and Trump-booster and billionaire businessman Elon Musk.2Democratic presidential candidate and US Vice President Kamala Harris did not sit down for an interview with Rogan. Commentators scrutinized her decision when election results showed Harris bleeding votes from young male voters—Rogan's primary demographic. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein explained that for the campaign to “not go out of their way to go on maybe the biggest media platform in America that is actually culturally quite different from them and is reaching people they do not reach . . . says something about who the Democrats are comfortable having over for dinner.”3 Others insisted that going on Rogan's show was not enough. Nearly nine million people viewed a tweet by Elie Mystal of The Nation arguing that “people saying Harris should have done Joe Rogan are missing the point. That wouldn't have helped her. Liberals need to BUILD THEIR OWN JOE ROGAN.”4 Calls for a popular, left-wing media figure who could speak to young men and disaffected voters were so common after the election that Stephen Daisley of The Spectator called the Rogan discourse a “cliché.”5Cliché or not, the debate about how to reach voters was not just about Joe Rogan but about Democrats’ reliance on old media and the press to connect with persuadable voters. In the years leading up to the election, dozens of newspapers closed, local television news and national cable networks hemorrhaged viewers, and even digital journalism sites such as Buzzfeed News shuttered.6 Rogan's meteoric rise through podcasting reflected a collapse of traditional media formats. Americans increasingly learned about current events from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter/X, and TikTok—or they ignored the news altogether. Indeed, a poll taken in the final month of the US election found that people who paid “a great deal” of attention to the news were twenty points likelier to vote for Harris than those who did not pay attention at all.7 “During the careers of powerful Democratic Party members,” writes former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, “the press was the best way to reach the public. It was how we informed and persuaded. That world is gone. . . . We must learn to reach the voters who don't pay attention to traditional news.”8Pfeiffer's description of a media landscape driven by social media, podcasts, and algorithms applies not only to electoral campaigning but also to sport historians seeking to reach the public. For these scholars, Rogan is not an individual to emulate but rather an avatar of the collapse of traditional means of obtaining public attention. Like elected Democrats, scholars of sport have long relied upon traditional media to communicate their research with the public, but those avenues have dwindled. To effectively respond to sport historian Sarah K. Fields’ call to share “good stories” that “matter to more people,” academics must now discover new ways to make people care.9 To share their research with the public and garner recognition for these stories in today's media landscape, sport researchers must go beyond the press and other traditional venues.The information environment sport historians predominately participate in reflects media scholar Neil Postman's description of a reading-based culture. In the world most scholars inhabit, a “culture dominated by print” fosters an ecosystem defined by “a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas.”10 Academic success depends on one's ability to articulate ideas to colleagues and students through journal articles and academic books. Even during academic conferences, such as the annual North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) meeting, scholars often compose scripts and recite their manuscripts to the audience. Reading, a “serious” and “rational” endeavor for Postman, carries gravitas within academia.11 Naturally, when sport historians try to engage the wider public—which is often done “on the side,” in addition to their formal research, teaching, and service responsibilities—they turn to media reflective of this print culture.In today's public discourse, however, attention is won not through coherently written statements and articles but through entertainment and provocation. In 1985, Postman bemoaned that, “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.”12 Postman blamed television. He contended the medium, a “dynamic” display, “must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business.”13 Some cultural commentators, such as The Atlantic's Megan Garber, have interpreted the internet's growing position as the main medium for communication in the twenty-first century as an expansion of Postman's concerns about television. For Garber, the dominance of entertainment and its blurring with reality appear as core concepts of the internet-era culture.14 The New Yorker's Jay Caspian Kang notes that arguing is a key feature of the internet as a medium.15 Journalist Chris Hayes emphasizes the importance of provocation to obtain attention. He describes the internet-era “attention age” as a place where “everyone had to shout to be heard,” but that “the people screaming the loudest” and not necessarily the most nuanced remarks “still get the most attention, partly because they stand out” from the cultural cacophony.16 In this environment of many voices, where “attention becomes the only thing that matters in public life,” the tactics that Hayes describes as “insidious,” such as “trolling, whataboutism, and conspiracism,” assume a significant presence in public discourse.17The seriousness of reading and writing within academic culture means scholars of sport may be poorly prepared for today's public discourse. For decades, those engaging in public history have shared their research through traditional formats that align with the scrutiny of the academic world and the tropes of the written sphere: newspaper op-eds, press reports, and blog posts. Those avenues for connecting with the public are shrinking. In 2023, The New York Times shuttered its sport section.18 Layoffs and ownership upheaval have beleaguered Sports Illustrated in the 2010s and 2020s.19 Institutions committed to journalistic rigor, such as Home Box Office's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, also closed in December 2023.20 Furthermore, as Americans increasingly learn about current events from social media platforms or tune out the news altogether, the audience of these traditional media avenues are increasingly homogenous. A poll taken in the final month of the US election found that people who paid “a great deal” of attention to the news were twenty points likelier to vote for Harris than those who did not pay attention at all.21 Academics relying on these outlets today find themselves talking to a smaller and declining audience—an audience that likely already shares their political opinions.Even when sport historians communicate through social media, they can easily find themselves in political silos. After the 2024 US election, left-leaning Twitter/X users fled en masse to the Bluesky social media platform.22 While the site may be a more accommodating space for academics to build community, professionally network, and organize themselves in the wake of Musk's Twitter takeover, the audience for popular scholarship on Bluesky already overlaps with that of traditional news media. As tech reporter Casey Newton quipped, “If you love the news, you're going to love Bluesky.”23As a result of these changes, sport scholars find themselves in a paradox. At the same time that historians Andy Linden and Alison Wrynn note “there are now myriad opportunities for the publishing of academic articles, and even more ways for scholars to disseminate their research to the field and the public at large,” Fields argues that the “academy in general and sport history in particular have moved further away from the general public and lay audiences.”24 The result is that critical, public scholarship about sport is read by those still attached to the remnants of the print culture, and social media content about sport is watched by individuals detached from institutions defined by the written world. Sport historians who rely on traditional public history formats such as op-eds and open access journals are preaching to the choir.We should not be content to preach to the choir. The “dramatic spectacle” of sport that historian C. L. R. James examines in Beyond a Boundary (1963) today serves as one of the loudest voices in Hayes's shouting match for public attention.25 Events such as the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and the European Football Championship continue to draw widespread public attention even as other monocultural forces fade away.26 The ubiquity of sport provides unique opportunities to connect with people who do not share our identities, opinions, and politics. Sport provides an entry point for these fans to encounter critical scholarship, diverse ideas, and new ways of seeing the world.In this special issue of the Journal of Sport History, we argue this reflection on scholarship is not about acquiring views, earning money, or building a reputation as a public intellectual. This call is about sharing with new and distant audiences the tenets of our research centering racial, gender, and sexual equity, Indigenous rights, and decolonization. We seek to bring new and diverse voices into the conversation. Scholars genuinely invested in these causes should not limit themselves to audiences already in agreement but strive to use sport to engage individuals who challenge us or are absent from our forms of discourse. This changing media environment demands scholars explore novel ways to reach the public. It may require engaging with platforms and people with which we have deep disagreements. Scholars interested in public history must decide for themselves whether and how to engage with individuals disconnected from their work who might share beliefs that are incompatible with their own. It is clear, however, that by remaining within existing media silos, we will never reach the vast numbers of people whose minds could be changed. Social media, in-person interaction with communities, and yet undiscovered strategies provide new avenues to grab, engage, and hold the public's attention. If scholars wish to be heard by new audiences at a time where everyone is shouting, they must utilize tools and platforms and engage people beyond those traditionally valued in academia.The articles and interviews in this special issue all grapple with ways we hold the public's attention as sport historians and our roles and responsibilities as public historians. Each piece acts as a reflection on how sport historians interact with the wider public—engaging and advocating for individuals beyond the realms we often inhabit as scholars.These papers began as a pre-conference workshop at the 2024 NASSH meeting in Denver, Colorado. The following questions framed the workshop and the submitted papers: How are sport scholars engaging with and disseminating information to the public?What are the successes and challenges of such plans?What can the general field do to improve its outreach to the public on a local, state/provincial, and/or regional level?How has our ability to communicate our research changed over time?How can we make our work simultaneously rich with academic rigor and yet compelling to the general society?How can the JSH, and other academic journals on sport and leisure, change to better convey historical research and tell “good stories”?How can our research provide a mutually beneficial outcome for ourselves, our subjects, and the public?The special issue begins with two curated conversations: one with Sarah Barnes and the other with Damion L. Thomas. Barnes is the curator for sport and leisure at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, where she works with the Order for Sport Collection. Thomas is the supervisory museum curator of sports for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, DC, where he also leads the museum's Sports and Race Initiative. Through these conversations, Barnes and Thomas share the ways in which sport histories are displayed and exhibited in the museums and how they have created spaces for collaborative, multidisciplinary, and community-based projects through their curatorial work.In the section that follows, Victoria Paraschak's article “Sport History in the Dark: Intertwining Sport History and Activism to Promote a Hope-Enhancing Environment” provides a provocative discussion of the way academic and activist approaches are intertwined in Indigenous sport histories through examples from her professional career path. Building on Rebecca Solnit's assertion that hope requires action, Paraschak describes the activities of “tempered radicals” like herself, who work within, while also challenging, the university system. She argues that public history done this way produces more meaningful sport histories, especially for marginalized individuals, while also calling for those engaged in producing and/or reading such histories to be co-transformed.Murray G. Phillips, Gary Osmond, and Kai W. Wheeler discuss principles of co-design for sport historians engaged in public histories with First Nations communities. The concept of co-design is an emerging practice, predominantly in the health disciplines, which has generated a body of knowledge about working equitably, appropriately, and respectfully with First Nations communities toward mutually beneficial outcomes. In the article, they evaluate co-design practices and approaches through their experiences conducting historical projects with several Australian First Nations communities in the Torres Strait Islands, Papunya and Yuendumu in central Australia, and the Queensland communities of Barcaldine, Cherbourg, and Yarrabah. Phillips, Osmond, and Wheeler call for sport historians who research with First Nations communities to consider co-design principles to help ensure that outputs are culturally responsive, responsible, and beneficial.Jacob Fredericks, in his article “Teaching Sport History as a Public Service: Critical Pedagogies and Public Sport Histories,” examines the role of public sport history as a critical pedagogical tool in higher education, particularly within sport management and kinesiology programs in the United States. He argues that sport historians can and should draw on public sport histories, such as museum exhibitions, to encourage students to question social structures within the classroom. Centering the museum exhibit Running for Civil Rights: The New York Pioneer Club, 1936–1976 by the New York Historical Society in 2023–2024, Fredericks discusses how public sport history can offer novel interpretations to respond to contemporary social issues, such as racism in sport. He argues that by integrating public sport history into curricula, educators offer a public service by demonstrating the significance of sport histories to students who aspire to careers in the sport industry.Joshua Bland highlights the potential of critical heritage studies (CHS) as a useful tool for sport historians who wish to situate their research at the intersections of contemporary sporting culture(s), the sporting past, and power. By explaining and drawing on his research on English football fandom as cultural heritage, Bland argues that CHS may enable sport historians to better understand the processual and power-laden nature of historical interpretation. 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