Sport. Race. Kinship. Masculinity.
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I'm a socio-cultural anthropologist whose ethnographic research uses sport to theorize race, kinship and care, gender, and the performing body. My work focuses on the lived experiences of Black football players.
Currently, I'm the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. I'm also affiliated with the Sports & Race Project.
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My research has been supported by various agencies, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
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In addition to my academic writing, my work has been featured in public venues and outlets like The Museum of Modern Art, The Guardian, and Scientific American.
Tracie Canada
Ethnographer and Anthropologist
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Photo by John West
FORTHCOMING BOOK
Cover art by Gabriela Pires
Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday lives.
Tackling the Everyday shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading "football family" narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America's favorite game.
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PREORDER NOW: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | University of California Press
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CURRENT RESEARCH
​My next ethnographic project will consider American football through the intersection of medical anthropology, care, and disability studies. There is a growing trend of white flight from football, with white parents in upper-income communities pulling their sons from the sport over the increasing threat of long-term injuries like concussions. Therefore, I'm interested in the families of young football players who live through injury, opt out of sport, or are concerned for their children’s sporting well-being but still allow them to play. To complement the quantitative work being done on the implications of sport injury, this project will contribute a human and social dimension to the now common discourse on the debilitating consequences of traumatic brain injury.
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A smaller, local project, "Integrating Tobacco Road Football, 1965-1975," takes seriously the lived experiences of the Black players who integrated the sport at four historically white North Carolina universities. By relying on qualitative methods – primarily archival and oral history research – I will explore the material and social contexts within which pioneering Black athletes were living and argue that social inequalities manifest in embodied athletic practice. Once completed, this research will contribute to the archival and ethnographic record the lived realities of Black football players who are often rendered invisible. Further, this historical project will contextualize the current moment of college football, which is riddled with systemic racism, labor and power exploitation, structural violence, and hegemonic masculinity.
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Public Scholarship
Media Interviews
News and Comments
"The myth of the college football family has nothing to do with love." The Guardian, February 2024.
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“(Exploitative Narratives in) Team Sports.” Museum of Modern Art R&D Salon. October 2023.
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"Caring Masculinities and Football Brotherhood." Revaluing Care, October 2023.
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"Damar Hamlin's Collapse Highlights the Violence Black Men Experience in Football." Scientific American, January 2023.
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"Plantation Politics at the NFL Combine." Anthropology News, September 2022.
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"The Spectacle of Black Family Trauma through the NFL Draft." First and Pen, May 2022.
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"'Colin in Black and White' Manifests the Power and Politics of Hair for Black Athletes." First and Pen, November 2021.
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"Anti-Blackness and College Football." Black Perspectives, July 2021.
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Republished: "Brotherhood and Anti-Blackness in College Football." SAPIENS, August 2021.
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"The NFL's Racist 'Race Norming' Is an Afterlife of Slavery." Scientific American, July 2021.
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"Special Focus: Engaging 'The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology'." History of Anthropology Review, April 2021.
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"Tackling Care and Capitalism in College Football." SAPIENS, December 2020.
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"A Kelleyan Approach to Anthropology." Society for Cultural Anthropology, July 2019.
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"For the Love of Football." Anthropology News, August 2018.
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"Passionate Doubleness: Genius and Struggle in the Life and Work of W.E.B. Du Bois." Berose, August 2017.
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“Trans athletes fight for inclusion in sports & racial economy of college football.” Edge of Sports on The Real News Network, October 2023.
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"Chat with Dr. Tracie Canada." A Chat in the Garden with Monique A.J. Smith, March 2023.
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"Black Bodies and Football." The Black Athlete Podcast, January 2023.
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"Sport, Kinship, and Black Football with Dr. Tracie Canada." The Dirt Podcast, December 2022.
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"Towards a Public Sociology of Sport." End of Sport Podcast, May 2022.
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"Slavery's Long Afterlife: Race Norming and the NFL with Dr. Tracie Canada." The Parley in All Blue Podcast, December 2021.
"The NFL's Racist Race-Norming and Brotherhood and Anti-Blackness in College Football with Dr. Tracie Canada." Sports as a Weapon Podcast, October 2021.
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"'Family,' Race, and College Football with Tracie Canada." End of Sport Podcast, September 2021.
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"Power Players: US Football and French Rugby." SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human, October 2018.
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"Reflecting on Byron Perkins' Trailblazing Path Ahead of the 2024 NFL Draft" - Joseph Williams for The Reckoning Magazine (April 23, 2024)
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"Sports and Society Course Applies Anthropological Practice to our Obsession with Athletes" - Kathryn Kennedy for Trinity Communications (March 22, 2023)
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"Canada Navigates the Worlds of College Athletes" - John West and Elizabeth Thompson for Trinity Communications (September 19, 2022)
"Super Bowl puts all of the NFL’s diversity shortfalls on Front Street" - Ray Marcano for The Grio (February 11, 2022)
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"The Dolphins Hired Mike McDaniel And Sparked A Black Identity Debate" - Yussuf Khan for First and Pen (February 7, 2022)
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"College Football and Anti-Blackness" - Charles Hallman for Minnesota Spokesman Reporter (September 8, 2021)
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EVENTS
I've been asked to present on and discuss a range of issues, including mentoring structurally marginalized students, ethnographic fieldwork practices, histories of Black anthropology, and connections between race, sport, and kinship. Here is a sampling of those events:
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