SABRINA RAZACK, PhD
I am currently the Senior Project Lead for 'Generation 2026', with the Centre for Sport and Human Rights, an initiative aimed at promoting the rights of children for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The role involves working collaboratively with host cities to develop and implement opportunities for active child citizenship. The intention of the project is to increase capacity and affect change through awareness of child rights and safeguarding in sports. I am also an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, University of Toronto. I have previously worked with Canadian Women & Sport and the Toronto 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games. My PhD thesis involved a case study of the Black Girl Hockey Club and examined the intersections of physical activity, sport, social movements, media, race, gender, class and culture.
Other interests include critical pedagogy in physical education and creating more inclusive and equitable sporting practices and spaces for all populations to thrive and through movement cultures.
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RESEARCH INTERESTS
Researching the media has been the primary focus of my scholarly endeavours. This research has typically examined events or individuals that illuminate and complicate the intersections of gender and race, understood through the political economy of the sports-media complex. For me, understanding the symbolic meanings of sport, alongside
cultural representations of bodies, began to illuminate the media’s role in producing and reproducing hegemonic formations of gender and race. It is here that digital media became of interest as these offered a means through which to cleave open spaces and processes that contest dominant ideologies in sport, while attaching to, aligning with or making possible social movements in and through sport. Overall, I have critically interrogated sports media
production and its associated (mis)representations, particularly through historicizing and contextualizing specific sports events and/or athletes. A related area of my research has been the question of whether and how digital media platforms and economies encourage and facilitate the organization of sport and the activities of athletes in ways that align with social movements.
While recognizing the difficulty of definitively measuring the ‘success’ of digital sports media and related social movements, I see my work as part of an ongoing investigation into, and consciousness raising for, sport and social movements, with a focus on technology, gender and race.