This interdisciplinary honors seminar examines how racial-ethnic categories are reproduced and reflected in U.S. sports and in transnational contexts. With both celebratory and critical themes, we will examine how sports offer key insights into social structure, individual agency, and state-corporate hegemony, and the relevance of sports for understanding racial-ethnic subjectivity.
While the curricular focus draws significantly from Latinx and Caribbean Studies, we will examine how racial-ethnic identities are configured in other continental and transitional settings, and how hegemonic and skewed categories of masculinity, femininity, race, ethnicity, and nationality are communicated in and through contemporary sports and their secondary and tertiary industries.
Students will have opportunities to conduct secondary research on their sport and/or athlete of choice, while also engaging with key texts across a variety of disciplines and subfields, ranging from cultural studies and queer studies; Latinx studies; history; anthropology; sociology; and more.
About Professor León-Roosevelt
K. Sebastian Leon-Roosevelt is an Assistant Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He specializes in crimes of the powerful and racialized social control, with substantive emphases on three related topics: a) food and drug regulatory regimes; b) civic & socio-legal (im)mobilities; and c) the colonial-carceral functions of contemporary justice systems.
León-Roosevelt is a former research contractor at U.S. Department of Justice – National Institute of Justice, and has extensive experience studying localized public safety challenges. These include medium and large-scale collaborative studies of the Colombian National Police, the Honduran National Police, U.S. jails, and the transnational capacity of MS-13 in the United States and El Salvador.
León-Roosevelt book, Corrupt Capital – Alcohol, Nightlife, and Crimes of the Powerful (Routledge, 2020), intimately describes and explains the social, political, and economic forces that make white-collar crime and corruption a staple feature of the nightlife economy. Methodologically, the research is innovative in advancing inquiry into ethically and logistically challenging environments while avoiding the voyeuristic and reductionist tropes historically associated with "dangerous fieldwork" in traditional criminological settings.
Additional works appear in Criminology & Public Policy; Critical Criminology; Crime, Law and Social Change; Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology; International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy; Journal of Psychoactive Drugs; the Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology; Race and Justice; among other refereed and public outlets.
In addition to his independent research agenda, León-Roosevelt is an active collaborator with colleagues both within and beyond his home departments. Ongoing research includes “COVID-19 and (Im)Mobility in the Americas", a transnational collaboration steered by Dr. Ulla Berg, which examines the impacts of COVID-19 on measures and processes of racialized social control, migration, public safety, and human rights. (Please visit inmovilidadamericas.org.) León is also a co-PI on a project funded by the Rutgers Center for COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness, where he and two RU colleagues are empirically documenting the relationship between COVID-19 and migrant detention and deportation within the state of New Jersey.
His overarching mission is to co-produce innovative scholarship and pedagogies that draw from ethnic studies, Latino studies, and both the humanistic and positivist social sciences to address preventable harms and racialized violence both in and beyond criminal justice settings.