(Re)Creating NASSS:
Communities, Axiologies, Politics and Praxis

The particular threat to the intellectual today [is “professionalism”] - not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and "objective.”
― Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual

To stop a system from being reproduced, you have to stop it from working… We learn how those who try to stop a culture from being reproduced are stopped. But in learning this, we also learn that reproduction is not inevitable, nor is it smooth, despite the failure to stop something from working.
― Sara Ahmed, Complaint!

“[W]ho we are and from where we speak” matters for the kind of knowledge we produce. … [O]ur identities predispose us to see or not see; listen to or not listen to; read or not read; cite or not cite; concern ourselves or not concern ourselves with specific Other peoples, issues, and societal dynamics. … To the extent that we wish to work for epistemic decolonization, we need to first acknowledge and then examine the link between our identities (of which our geographical origin is only one aspect), our scholarly practices, and the knowledge we produce. 
-Paula ML Moya, Who we are and from where we speak

"[H]ow we live, how we organize, how we engage in the world – the process – not only frames the outcome, it is the transformation. How molds and then gives birth to the present. The how changes us. How is the theoretical intervention."
― Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done

We find ourselves in a moment of urgency. Not only the neoliberal capitalist culture of urgency that characterizes so many of our institutional spaces, but the urgent question of who we are as scholars and as a scholarly organization and how we plan to respond to the ways in which lives and livelihoods are fundamentally threatened by fascist and genocidal states, institutions, policies, practices, and logics. As Ahmed’s work continues to remind us, institutions – including and especially violent institutions – constantly work to reproduce themselves and re-entrench their power, even as these same institutions hearken to “inclusivity,” “reconciliation,” “equity,” “anti-racism,” and much more. This includes, of course, genocidal institutions like settler colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the myriad institutional spaces that reproduce their logics and effects. Just as importantly, it also includes “the university” itself as both an “arm of the settler state” (to borrow from Sandy Grande) and a bastion of white supremacy in “the wake” of slavery (as beautifully theorized by Christina Sharpe). It also includes governments, athletic governing bodies, grassroots sports organizations, and more reproducing dominant power relations through, for example, actively working to render trans people ever more vulnerable while simultaneously running cover for those who pose the greatest threats in terms of gender-based violence. And, not least, it includes scholarly organizations, whose (in)actions must also be scrutinized in an era of “DEI” initiatives and amidst the dominant logics of academia generally and particular fields of study more specifically. We must ask ourselves hard questions about our own complicity in the very systems and processes we so often critique in our scholarly and popular publications, creative outputs, and classrooms.

The call for sessions for the 2023 conference in New Orleans included this important question: “has NASSS lived up to its purpose?” This year, we invite a return to this question and others as we work to reinvigorate our scholarly association and, perhaps, our collective scholarly practice as intellectuals and practitioners of sport and physical culture. In that spirit, we are curious again about NASSS’s purpose and we invite sessions that interrogate how such a purpose has been expressed over the history of the organization, what it is now, and what it might be as we imagine ourselves in the coming years and decades. Our curiosity also extends to the ways in which NASSS is, arguably, overdetermined by academia as a settler colonial institution, to the contradictions and tensions we encounter if and when we fashion ourselves as radical intellectuals in such spaces.

In particular, we look to questions of community, axiology, politics and praxis, inviting sessions oriented around such questions as:

What does (or might) scholarly community look like?
How do we foster a robust scholarly community that holds space for different paradigmatic assumptions, substantive interests, political commitments, social and occupational positionalities, etc.?
How do we invite “new” voices (e.g., junior scholars, scholars who may not currently “see” themselves in NASSS’s mission and vision) into community, hold space for their perspectives, commitments, and values?
What does being in community mean… what are the responsibilities we have to one another, to our disciplines, to our other communities, to the Indigenous lands most of us occupy as we do this work?
What are the responsibilities we have to those sitting at the table with us as well as those (still) too often denied a seat in the first place?

What axiology/ies underpin our work – what and how we research, teach, and engage in service work?
How do we define what is good, true, desirable, beautiful, acceptable, etc.?
How do we put those axiological assumptions and commitments to work, make them explicit, and reflexively revisit them as part of an ongoing practice?

What kinds of politics are possible and desirable in and through our scholarly work?
How might we respond to institutional, local, global, administrative, and other political pressures, violences, and possibilities of this moment and others going forward?
(How) does our research anticipate unknown vectors of oppression on the horizon and speak to the repetitive histories of marginalization, and the importance of interrogating perspectives that seek to maintain harm?

Where, when, and how will we create communities of praxis?
How might we marshal our skills and capacities, to contribute to the creation of a more just world, one that does not sacrifice so many to the logics of Empire, (settler) colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism?

While the organizing committee encourages dialogue around these most pressing issues, NASSS also welcomes session proposals that address other issues related to sport and movement cultures.