At the center of my dissertation, Tackling the Everyday: Race, Family, and Nation in Big-Time College Football, lies the question: What is the lived experience of Black college football players, given the reality of living in a Black, male, athletic body at this tense American moment? Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork with Black players at universities in the southeastern U.S., my work has two main focuses. First, I examine the ways that these student-athletes navigate their everyday lives, given their need to negotiate ordered, rational spaces that ultimately privilege whiteness. I argue that American football, university academics, and the ‘serious’ real world beyond the world of play are all such normalizing spaces. Second, I consider recent acts of activism - like the NFL protest spearheaded by Colin Kaepernick - as they have brought the political onto the playing field in unexpected ways. Black players' experiences are used as a lens for scrutinizing how the sport itself represents particularly American values, priorities, and tensions.
Tackling the Everyday moves off the gridiron into the daily lives of the young Black athletes that sustain this American sport to show how their individual subjectivities are implicated by participation in a multi-billion dollar industry. Ultimately, my research demonstrates that Black college football players create meaning within their lives by producing distinct ideas of race that shape their own positionality, their personal ties, and how they navigate the various social worlds of which they are a part. Through the interconnectedness of race, affiliation, surveillance, and injury in their lives, my dissertation highlights Black players as teammates, as brothers, as sons, and as young, Black men.
