Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is a Black feminist anthropologist and ethnographer whose ethnographic research uses sport to theorize race, kinship and care, gender, and the performing body.

College football, with its prestige, drama, media, and money, is a core feature of the sporting landscape in the U.S. However, the promises of an “amateur” system that offers a “free” education contradict the reality. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Prof. Canada will describe how this system particularly harms the Black men who are demographically overrepresented on gridirons across the country. In this talk, she will highlight how she engages multiple audiences in her ethnographic writing, which details how Black college football players tackle the systems that structure their everyday lives, and who helps them do it.