“Why do they always look at me like that?” That’s what I think when I consistently see the same white men and women on the running trail in my neighborhood. My boyfriend and I recently moved to this neighborhood, motivated in part by the vast amount of running trails in the area. Granted, I see more people using the trails to walk their dogs in the morning, but I don’t mind the dogs. What I do mind are the constantly surveilling eyes that watch me as I jog over the bridge. I cannot help but think that their gaze is a response to both my being black and running on the trail. My blackness may be disrupting their racially homogenous space, and my activity may seem odd…or suspicious.

Over the past six months, I have been reading, researching, and writing about hyperandrogenism as it concerns sport and intersex athletes. And let me tell you, it has been an experience. The more I read, the more my own understandings of sex, gender, and sport become blurred and unclear. From Stella Walsh and Heinrich Ratjen in the 1936 Olympics, to the most recent ‘controversy’ around Dutee Chand, I am increasingly horrified, shocked, and fired up by everything I read and stumble across.

While the divide between players and executives in the National Football League (NFL) has rightfully dominated media sporting discourse over the last couple of years, a similar dilemma is quietly emerging in the National Basketball Association (NBA) – although for a different reason. One of the most prominent stories of the first half of the NBA season has been the seemingly deteriorating relationship between players and referees

Racial profiling in police forces is a systemic national problem. Even though the United States Constitution states that “all men are created equal” and prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, state police departments continue to abuse the law for the ‘betterment of society’. Looking through the lens of sociologist George Ritzer’s Weberian concept of “McDonaldization,” I argue that racial profiling has become McDonaldized in American police culture.

A new episode has just been posted by Somatic Podcast, the ongoing digital audio and critical sport studies project founded by Physical Cultural Studies alumnus Dr. Oliver Rick of Springfield College and current PhD candidate Sam Clevenger. In this episode, Dr. Rick explores the history of American suburbia and the relation of physical activity spaces to the development of suburban communities.

The way in which we understand pain, as a species, is a process of learning. As Arthur Frank writes about illness, so too is pain “about learning to live with lost control” (1995, p. 30). We shudder at the thought of lost control; we abhor it. To lose control is to lose one’s ability to function in society. If we cannot exercise control over ourselves, we are unwelcome.