Teach-ins as Performance Ethnography: Athletes’ Social Activism in North American Sport

On November 9, 2015, the president and chancellor at the University of Missouri resigned in response to protests and threat of the football team's boycott (Svrluga, 2015). The unrest and racial disharmony that surfaced at Mizzou had been building for years and, in fact, has been evidenced since on many other campuses across the United States (Gross, 2015). In this article, we use performance ethnography (Denzin, 2003) to demonstrate social activism as enacted by college athletes historically and in recent years. Denzin advocates using performance ethnography as a way to imagine and perform “a society in which differences are honored” (p. xiii). Thus, our resistance can be “shaped by how we read, write, perform, and critique culture” (p. xiii). The authors are graduate students and faculty members who are invested in enacting social justice at our individual colleges and universities.