Collegiate Sport as Biopolitical Dispositif

Download or read book Collegiate Sport as Biopolitical Dispositif written by Kristopher White and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I am chiefly interested in the educational experiences of black collegiate athletes. Throughout the project I build upon previous research investigating the macro-, meso-, and micro-level challenges of United States society that influence the educational opportunities of black collegiate athletes. Specifically, this dissertation aims to interrogate the social, political, cultural, and economic relations within United States society from the period of enslavement up to the contemporary era of exploitation that influences the lived experiences of black bodies and the educational experiences of black collegiate athletes. In the literature review, I work through the intercollegiate sport marketplace and "collegiate sport model" as they developed during the political economic rise of neoliberalism. From there, I give more detail on how the neoliberal logics of collegiate sport complicate the NCAA's mission of providing a quality education for "student-athletes" and the adverse effect this particularly has on black collegiate athletes. After I bring attention to the historical and contemporary challenges for black athletes, I go on to connect these experiences to broader social, political, and economic institutional issues within the US education system and medical field. To better make sense of how these institutions in United States society, since slavery, have discursively, and materially, constructed the framework from which black athletes derive their subjectivities and educational experiences, in the latter portion of the literature review I use a biopolitical analysis to illustrate the collegiate sport dispositif. In addition to bringing in this biopolitical theoretical approach, in Chapter 3 I explain how I added another component to this line of literature through interviewing black collegiate athletes and having them complete a concept map. Unlike many previous studies, that only utilized interviews, in this study I have 15 black collegiate athletes diagram their experiences through a concept map that allowed me to analyze the interview conversations in addition to the participants' visual representation. Using this empirical material, I analyzed the position of black collegiate athletes within wider social structures and biopolitical institutions that condition their lived experiences, make them subject, and construct the framework from which they derive their educational experiences. In Chapter 4, I amplify the voices of these 15 black collegiate athletes to articulate their educational experiences as they are positioned within the collegiate sport dispositif. Finally, in Chapter 5, I discuss how the collegiate sport dispositif works to make black collegiate athletes subjects and frame their existence in a way that binds their lives to the exigencies of revenue generation for the collegiate sport marketplace, which leaves them as dehumanized commodities in detrimental educational situations. Lastly, I further discuss how this is intensified in the NIL era and the implications for the future.