The End of Sport Podcast

This episode is an interview that friend and repeat guest of the podcast, Karleigh Chardonnay Webb, did with Johanna in August 2023. Karleigh is an Outsports contributor and co-host of the Transition Defense podcast. She interviewed Johanna to analyze Hungary's sportswashing in light of Budapest hosting the World Athletics Championship last August and the announcement that World Aquatics is moving its headquarters from Lausanne, Switzerland to Budapest. 
Johanna begins with a more current intro that articulates why Hungary and its sportswashing matter in 2024 as global fascism continues to surge with the help of Putin, Italy, and the U.S. Right, and the movement's homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, and the like. She and Karleigh discuss how PM Viktor Orbán changed Hungary into an authoritarian state with fascist control, Hungarian attempts to resist it, and why more and more Hungarians are thinking of fleeing the state. The authoritarian, culturally imperialist IOC has long worked well with other authoritarian powers; Orbán uses the IOC and international sport to advance his political agenda in ways that are both similar to and distinct from the Stalinist and state socialist government of the Cold War era. The U.S. Right sees Orbán's efforts as a possible vision for the U.S., explaining CPAC's growing adoration and ties with the PM.
  
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

**Our apologies for the audio quality of this episode; we had some technical difficulties**
 
Nathan sits down with the incomparable Raewyn Connell to discuss a career shaping the academic study of masculinities. They explore the concept of hegemonic masculinity, its role in sport studies, and how it has changed over time; developments in the world of women's sport; trans exclusion policies; threats facing gender studies and the academy at large; and much more.
Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney and author of the selected and incredibly abridged list of books Gender and Power (1987) Masculinities (originally published in 1993), The Men and the Boys (2000), Gender (2009), and, in 2023 with University of Melbourne Press, Research, Politics, and Social Change–among an exceptionally long list of other books and articles that have literally shaped so much of the academy as we know it.
 
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.
 

Nathan is joined by the incomparable Patrick Blanchfield for a complex structural assessment of US gun violence and how his theoretical framework of gunpower can be used to unpack instances of gun violence in the world of sport.
Patrick Blanchfield is Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute, co-host of the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast, author of the forthcoming book Gunpower: The Structure of American Violence, and a host of incredibly insightful articles in venues such as n + 1, The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Nation, including an exceptional interview with Daniel Denvir in Jacobin. You can find him on Twitter @PatBlanchfield and Bluesky @patblanchfield.bsky.social.
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Matthew Hodler is Assistant Professor of Sports Media and Communication at the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island. Kyle Kusz is Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. We sit down with Matt and Kyle to discuss their 2023 publication “‘Saturdays Are For The Boys’: Barstool Sports and the Cultural Politics of White Fratriarchy in Contemporary America” in Sociology of Sport Journal and, more broadly, Barstool Sports.
 
The conversation ranges from a history of Barstool Sports, why it has been critiqued for racism and misogyny, and, ultimately, how we should understand its role in a conjuncture that has seen the rise of a MAGA fascist politics that aligns with Barstool's ideological tendencies.
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

In this special episode, Nathan first has the chance to talk again to NLRB GC Jennifer Abruzzo, this time about the college athlete organizing developments prompted by her September 2021 memo. Abruzzo talks about Dartmouth men's basketball's recent unionization and the ongoing case at USC before explaining why she finds the term 'student-athlete' so objectionable--even as universities continue to double down on it.
Then, Nathan goes for a deeper dive into all these issues with former NLRB chair Mark Gaston Pearce in order to analyze why these cases have played out the way they have, what's really at stake, and where we are likely to go from here.
Jennifer Abruzzo is current General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board.
Mark Gaston Pearce is a visiting professor and the executive director of the Workers’ Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center. He is a former Board Member and Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board who served by appointment of President Barack Obama for two terms, concluding in August 2018.
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.
 

Guy Harrison joins Nathan for a discussion of the Netflix sports doc as genre and its increasing influence in shaping how we understand sports. Then the two delve into the all-time definitive ranking of the best and worst Netflix sports docs/docuseries.
 
Guy Harrison is Assistant Professor and Director of Access and Engagement for the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism and Media where he studies diversity, inclusion, and representation in sports and new media. He is the author of On the Sidelines: Gendered Neoliberalism and the American Female Sportscaster (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique is Assistant Professor of History at UMASS Amherst where he studies the British Empire between the 17th and Early 19th centuries. He is the author of the manuscript The Experience of the Archive: Knowledge and the Making of the Early Modern British Empire (currently under contract with Yale University Press). His public-facing work has appeared in outlets such as The Daily Beast, Inside Higher Ed,and Teen Vogue.
Joe Darda is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University where he studies post-1945 American literature, culture and politics. He is the author of three books on the reconfiguration of race in the age of civil rights: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America (University of California Press, 2021), and Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War (University of Chicago Press, 2019). With the historian Amira Rose Davis, he coedited a 2023 special issue of American Quarterly titled “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.”
In this conversation, Asheesh, Joe, and Nathan unpack what it means to talk about higher education in 'crisis' today. We discuss how athletic department exploitation has served as a model for the university writ large, the ghastly restructuring and cuts at major public US universities, administrative bloat, artificial intelligence, the value of the humanities, and so much more.
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Liz Knox returns to the show to discuss four years of developments in the world of women's hockey and the rise of the PWHL from her perspective as an insider in the process and fierce advocate for just working conditions in the sport.
Liz Knox is a retired professional hockey goaltender, CWHL Clarkson Cup champion, CIS Brodrick Trophy winner, CWHL all-star captain, former co-chair of the CWHLPA, former member of the board of the PWHPA, and, crucially, member of the current executive committee of the PWHLPA.
Check out Lix Knox's podcast The Knoxy and Kax Show here. Check out Liz Knox on building the PWHL from the inside here. Check out a breakdown of the PWHL collective agreement from The Victory Press here.
 
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.

Johanna is joined by journalist, short story writer, and translator Karim Zidan to discuss how Israel's war in Gaza and genocide of Palestinian people has impacted, and been shaped by, people's sporting politics. We urge listeners to subscribe to Karim's substack Sports Politika if you don't already. He begins by contextualizing a scary, recent incident: when he was targeted by Israeli far-right MMA fighter Haim Gozali, who responded to Karim's accurate reporting of his horrific statements by writing Karim's name and that of a news site on artillery shells destined to kill Palestinians. The Israeli military created a "dystopian nightmare" per Palestinian artist Hazem Harb by turning Gaza's oldest football stadium, Yarmouk stadium, into a site of horror and dehumanization: it rounded up Palestinians, stripped them to their underwear, and detained them in the stadium. The historical precedents abound. 
 
Karim complicates "what an athlete's actions are worth" regarding various kinds of athlete activism and political engagement. Although we are glad for the collective ceasefire statement from John Carlos, Tariq Abdul-Wahad, Kenny Stills, Layshia Clarendon, and more. And we wonder: how many people had to die before it came out? We end by critiquing Western sporting imperialism and racism in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere for claiming to "lift up women oppressed by Islam" through sport. People are capable of liberating themselves using sport, such as Palestinian female karate champion Nagham Abu Samra tried to do by teaching girls and women in Gaza. Samra was murdered due to injuries from an Israeli airstrike in December. 

In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, Nathan and esteemed football scholar Tom Oates have a ranging conjunctural discussion about the state of American football, masculinity, and their place in the broader political economic and cultural landscape of US society.
Tom Oates is Associate Professor at the University of Iowa, where he holds a joint appointment with the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is the author of the 2017 book Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL(University of Illinois Press) and co-editor (with our friend Zack Furness) of The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives.