Xenophobia/Eurocentrism within Sport Management Academia: An Evil to Fight

By Umer Hussain

Umer Hussain is a post-doctoral research associate at Texas A&M University. Hussain’s research focuses upon understanding the intersection of race, religion, and gender in the sporting context.

While recently attending our leading sport marketing conference, I met numerous international students studying in the prominent sport management programs in the United States. During informal conversations with the students, I found every other non-Western international student complaining about exclusion and structural racism within their programs and, overall, in sports management academia. This made me wonder why academic bodies and diversity scholars are silent about structural racism within their own realm. Is this not our first obligation to fight against structural racism within our own academy before discussing racial injustices within the sport industry? I believe shutting our eyes to structural racism within sports academia is no more an option. We in this field have a duty to raise our voice and untangle how racism within the academy is limiting the growth of the sport management academia.

Historically, the realm of sport management was developed in the Global North. Therefore, most of the knowledge has been produced by scholars in the Western world. This has led to a common belief that Western scholars have the birthright to control the body of knowledge and academic institutions. The control of Western scholars on the sport management realm has also led to a biased understanding that scholars from the Eastern World have a limited understanding of sporting phenomena. The implicit bias against non-Western scholars has developed a narrative that non-Western scholars can be good in research but not in teaching sporting phenomena. For instance, it is a commonly held belief in academia that scholars from East Asia (e.g., China and South Korea) are good at statistics while they have limited teaching abilities. Similarly, men scholars from the Muslim World are considered intellectually weak; on the other hand, Muslim women scholars are understood as objects which need freedom from their religion and culture.

The xenophobic approach of stigmatizing scholars’ identities has serious negative repercussions for expanding our field, as we are trying to limit the multiplicity of teaching pedagogy and understanding of sporting phenomena from non-conventional perspectives. Moreover, a xenophobic approach towards non-Western scholars also limits ‘the freedom of thought,’ which is the most important driver in expanding any scholarly realm. Thereby, sport management academics need to devise ways to fight the common evil of ever-growing xenophobic attitudes in the sport management realm within the United States. Covid-19 pandemic, with all its travel restrictions, has already led to restricting globalization of the sport management realm. If any action is not taken, especially from the sporting societies, it will lead to further confining the sport management realm into a privileged Euro-American scholarly realm with no future.

Chen and Mason (2019) have previously underscored that sport management scholarship is embedded in settler colonialism. Thereby, non-Western scholars need to clean the colonial prejudice present in the scholarship (Chen & Mason, 2019). However, I argue that we need to go beyond cleaning the racial prejudice within scholarship by opening a serious debate about the ‘inclusivity’ with ‘accountability’ within sporting management academia. For example, scholarly bodies need to develop an accountability mechanism via which all the racist programs should be identified and prohibited from scholarly debates. In addition, sporting scholarly societies need to identify ways to promote a global perspective of sport rather than focusing upon limited Eurocentric scholarship. Additionally, sporting societies should offer an environment where controversial issues, such as White supremacy within sport management academia, should be raised and debated. Thereby, the focus of scholarly bodies should shift from ‘diversity inclusion’ to ‘diversity inclusion with accountability.’ Lastly, it is not only the job of non-Western scholars to challenge the prejudice in our field; it is a moral and professional obligation for Western scholars as well to open their eyes to continually growing xenophobia within sport management academia.

Reference

Chen, C., & Mason, D. S. (2019). Making Settler Colonialism Visible in Sport Management. Journal of Sport Management, 33(5), 379–392. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsm.2018-0243