Position
- Visiting Research Fellow in Social Sciences
Contact
- School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University, UK
Research interests
I am an interdisciplinary researcher working across the sociology of sport, media and cultural studies, and psychoanalytic theory. My research examines the relationship between sport, culture, and politics, with particular interests in race and racism, national identity, sportswashing, and the social and psychological dimensions of sporting experience. Drawing on critical and psychoanalytic theory, I explore how unconscious desires, fantasies, and forms of identification shape our relationships with sport, including the political antagonisms and ethical questions that emerge within sporting cultures. A central area of my research concerns online hate and abuse in sport, particularly the ways digital platforms, media practices, and institutional structures shape experiences of racism, misogyny and other forms of hostility. My current interests extend to gambling-related online harms and their consequences for athletes. Alongside this work, I continue to develop psychoanalytic approaches to sport, examining questions of subjectivity, enjoyment, and ethics, and what sporting experiences can reveal about contemporary social and political life.
Selected publications
Black, Jack. 2027. The Subject of Sport: Exploring Sport’s Psychoanalytic Significance. Bloomsbury.
Black, Jack, and Joseph S. Reynoso, eds. 2024. Sport and Psychoanalysis: What Sport Reveals about Our Unconscious Desires, Fantasies, and Fears. Lexington Books.
Black, Jack, Theo Lynn, Itoiz Rodrigo-Jusue, and Daniel Kilvington. 2026. “#JewGoal: Llanguage, Enjoyment, and the Persistence of Antisemitism in Online Gaming and Sports Communities.” New Media & Society 28 (9): 4963-4981.
Black, Jack, Jim Cherrington, and Samuel M. Clevenger. 2026. “Haunted Spaces and Unsettling Predicaments: An Interrogation of (Capitalist) Sport via the Work of Mark Fisher.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 29 (4): 687-706.
Black, Jack. 2025. “Revisiting the sport ethic: A psychoanalytic consideration of sport’s contradictions.” Sport, Ethics and Philosophy. DOI: 10.1080/17511321.2025.2556809
Black, Jack, Colm Kearns, and Gary Sinclair. 2024. “The Fetishization of Sport: Exploring the Effects of Fetishistic Disavowal in Sportswashing.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 48 (3/4): 145-164.
On idrottsforum.org
The Game’s Gone: Why Football is Always Dying (feature 261002)
Published 2026-10-20
