Tag: North American Society for the Sociology of Sport

The 2026 NASSS conference in Calgary centers and explores the importance of time to how we imagine, experience, and make sense of sport and physical cultures. We often measure the body’s performance in increments of time, for instance in the seconds of the 100-meter dash or the basket scored just before the shot clock expires. Sport has a duration: the 90 minutes of a soccer match, for example, or the 80 minutes of rugby union. And sport often has a temporal rhythm, unfolding through seasons and off seasons that structure our investments of time, emotion, and (often) money. Here, time is a resource, and the ability to have and use time for sport or physical activity reflects broader structural inequalities of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, and social class.

This is a crucial time for our field. The Sociology of Sport analyzes the relationship between sport and structures of power, domination and social control and contributes to world-making via engagements with activists and social movements. NASSS as an organization has a long history of critically interrogating the bases of inclusion/exclusion in sport and beyond, examining the role of sport in normalizing the social structures of the nation, hierarchies based on race/gender/sexuality/ability/citizenship etc., and colonialism and postcolonialism in all its variations.

The theme spotlights the necessity for Ujima, collective work and responsibility. Thus, we challenge the membership to submit sessions that promote, stimulate, and encourage the values of mentorship, collaborative ingenuity, inclusive sport diaspora, and how you/we cultivate the seeds of cultural competence across the Sociology of Sport spectrum.

The theme “decolonizing sport sociology” focuses on the multiple contradictions we – individually and institutionally – confront in our research, teaching, and service. The contradictions mean that we all have a responsibility to challenge settler colonialism. The question is how do we continue to transform ourselves, institutions, and world? This isn’t simply a self-reflective exercise.

To challenge the ongoing realities of settler colonialism, decolonization starts by becoming critically aware of institutional whiteness, heteropatriarchy, manifestations of racisms and how they work to maintain settler colonialism. This centers Indigenous Peoples’ interests, theory, methodology, pleasures, and desires, and rights since settler colonialism obscures them.

As early as the first Olympic Games, sport has moved to the harmonies of music. Across the globe, sport and music occupy the same space to set the tone of a sporting event, serve as a backdrop for a performance, support an athlete in their development and preparation, or facilitate the delivery of fitness training. Sport and music forge communities, imbue national pride, and promote cultural identities.

Sessions may reveal how sport and music challenge the social, economic, and political landscape that often illuminate inequities of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, age, and so on. Session submissions may also demonstrate how the relationship between sport and music have influenced career industries such as media and film, event management, marketing & public relations, journalism, fashion, and beyond.

In keeping with the conference theme, sessions may highlight various ways in which scholars are exploring the double meaning of sport-related matter (as both consequential and substantial) and the alliterative intersections that make it so (e.g. politics-physics, politics-performances, politics-pedagogies, physics-performances, physics-pedagogies, performances-pedagogies).

Inspired by recent momentous cultural events, the conference theme questions and considers the role of sport sociology and sport sociologists in public engagement. In the context of growing economic inequality, we see public money being siphoned into private stadiums within professional sport, corruption within international sporting organizations, and U.S. college coaches being the highest paid employees in state institutions within ‘amateur’ sport.

On behalf of the 2015 conference committee, it is my pleasure to announce the release of the NASSS 2015 conference Call for Abstracts. You can go to the NASSS web site where you will find a list of the organized sessions for the 2015 conference. Cheryl Cooky, Conference Committee Chair.