anti-colonial autoethnography in Sport

Sport scholars have increasingly drawn on autoethnography in their interrogations of physical cultural practices and spaces of various kinds, shedding important light on the embodied experiences of these undertakings as well as the workings of power.

The aim of this special issue is to delve into the (as yet under-realized) potential of autoethnographies of physical culture to contribute to an anti-colonial movement, taking up the challenge that “understanding sport as a ‘colonizing tool’ is not widely accepted in the discourse of sport sociology” (Whitinui, 2021, p. 3). 

I invite/encourage contributors to “draw connections between violences ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’… and radically imagine how our praxis can actively refuse the colonial trajectory designed by the settler state” (Chen, 2021, p. 745). It is here, I argue, that autoethnographic work has much to offer, both in terms of substantive and theoretical considerations of sport and physical culture and in terms of reflexive considerations of our own physical cultural practices as well as our research about them. All of this, I suggest, is part of the process of thinking through what Kanien'kehá:ka scholar Daniel Henhawk calls a “decolonizing praxis” (2013, p. 511).

 In terms of editorial/review process, I invite contributors to engage with each other and each other’s work as part of a broader project of responding to Carly Adams’ recent point in an editorial for Sport History Review : “Authors, editors, publishers, and journal policies and practices transform the academic journal into a space and constitute how the space is experienced and produced. It is not simply a place where academics submit and publish research, a vessel for publication and professional practice” (Adams, 2022, p. 3). Journals and journal editorial policies and practice, in other words, are also key sites of praxis as we work to unsettle the whiteness, able-bodied/mindedness, and other vectors of power structuring and structured by dominant disciplinary and academic conventions.  Contributors and I will collaboratively curate a review process that reimagines these principles and politics.