Sports, Media, and Culture (SMAC)

On July 1, 2021, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) granted to Division I student-athletes the right to commercialize (i.e. make money from) their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL). The goal was to provide student-athletes with the same rights their non-athlete student peers have long enjoyed: the ability to earn compensation in exchange for their NIL by, for example, endorsing a product, selling their autograph, or giving sport lessons. One year after NIL legislation went into effect, the NIL landscape continues to evolve and change, leaving many confused about how to navigate these new opportunities. In this course, students will develop an understanding of: 1) what Name, Image and Likeness opportunities look like in real life, 2) the relevant NCAA, legal and policy guidelines, 3) the personal and environmental factors that can influence how people choose to engage in NIL activities, 4) their personal motivations, interests and goals related to NIL opportunities and, 5) the resources available to help them maximize their NIL opportunities while at ND. Students will be evaluated based on their engagement with guest speakers, collaboration with one another, and their performance in presentations, quizzes and a reflective essay.

The National Football League is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise intricately interwoven in the ever-changing fabric of our nation's socioeconomic, political, and cultural norms. Although fans see the nice shiny end product on Sunday afternoons, behind the glimmering LED screen, there are a multitude of factions, each with a seat at the table and its own dogmatic agenda, engaged in a tense, combative game of high-stakes liar's poker. This course will deconstruct the NFL machine and examine the key players involved in forging and fueling this cultural phenomenon. We'll analyze and discuss a variety of current topics and events all within the context of the back and forth, give and take, tug of war dynamic between NFL players, teams agents, coaches, media, brand partners, and front office personnel. We'll also examine the impact of recent league initiatives designed to foster meaningful change in the areas of social justice and reform. Through a transparent, wide-angled lens, we'll provide our students with a nuanced perspective and appreciation for the complex inner-workings of the NFL community and the foundational value of industry relationships rooted in servant leadership. The breadth and depth of experiential knowledge will encourage and empower practical and innovative application in the new millennium as our students explore career and community service opportunities at both the macro and micro-levels of professional sport.

The Play Like a Champion Youth Sports course will aim to introduce students to the challenges facing underprivileged and low income youth from accessing youth sports due to systemic structures including racism and sexism. Structured around the 2023 Conference, “Sports for All: Stronger Together, which is run by Play Like a Champion Today, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting equity and excellence in youth sports, the course will consider, in tandem with the conference, how communities might come together to transform sports programs for children from marginalized urban neighborhoods. The course will focus on building understandings of equity, equality, diversity, access, inclusion, and belonging in order to then provide guidance on how to coach youth who encounter structural barriers when trying to access youth sports and other opportunities. Coaching and mentoring youth requires building relationships based on trust that are rooted in compassion and understanding. Most importantly, coaches will learn from their athletes and athletes will learn from their coaches; it is a two-way street. Coaches serve in crucial roles as mentors to youth because they have the ability to demonstrate ethical leadership skills and in turn train and mentor youth to be compassionate leaders and effective communicators in their communities. To help our youth Play Like Champions we must first understand the ways in which we can support these future champions as they navigate potential experiences of trauma, gun violence, and discrimination due to enduring cycles of poverty and discriminatory structures of power. The Class will begin with an introductory seminar class on June 12th and conclude with a seminar class on June 19th.

How is race embodied and how are bodies racialized? How do gender, sexuality, class, size, perceived beauty, and ability mutually influence embodiment? This course considers anthropological and historical studies of the body, with a critical focus on Blackness. We investigate how Black human bodies are othered, valued, dehumanized, and experienced, across time and space, with a particular focus on the United States. Euro-American philosophies have constructed Black people as transgressive, in a variety of ways, and all these ideas have been inscribed on and through their physical bodies. This normative discourse shapes how Black people interact with the social world, so we will discuss, challenge, and critique these narratives and also consider how the body can be used as a site of resistance. We will engage topics like athletic training, bodily modification and perceptions of beauty, biomedical technologies, labor, disability, and illness, through texts like academic writing, music, podcasts, essays, news media, and social media. Overall, this class demonstrates how bodies are key sites for understanding politics, power, social hierarchies, economics, and social change in our contemporary world.

Students will work with a South Bend neighborhood to explore a structural challenge and, with the guidance of a local artist, respond to this challenge alongside community members in creating an artistic piece that serves the good of the neighborhood. This seminar will also provide a "hands-on" experience as students are exposed to practices of participatory research methods and the art-making process.

Sports play a big role in American culture. From pick up soccer and the Baraka Bouts to fantasy football and the Olympics, sports articulate American identities, priorities, aspirations, and concerns. They reflect our dominant values but also highlight our divisions and serve as a means to question those values. Athletes, organizers, spectators, fans, and the media all have a stake. This course will examine sport's role in American society and culture thematically, covering the late 19th century to present and paying special attention to sport as a physical performance (including issues of danger, drugs, disability, spectatorship, and fandom), sport as an expression of identity (the construction of race, gender, class, community, and nation), sport as a form of labor (with issues of power and control, safety, and amateurism), and sport as a cultural narrative (how do writers, historians, and the media attach meaning to it?). We will examine history, journalism, documentary film, and television coverage; topics will range from Victorian bicyclists and early college football to Muhammad Ali. Requirements include reading and regular discussion, a variety of short analytical papers, and a culminating project in which students will choose one course theme to analyze through a topic of their own choice.

Baseball is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Since the late 19th century, baseball has occupied an important place for those wishing to define and understand "America." Who has been allowed to play on what terms? How have events from baseball's past been remembered and re-imagined? What is considered scandalous and why (and who decides)? How has success in baseball been defined and redefined? Centering baseball as an industry and a cultural practice, this course will cover topics that include the political, economic, and social development of professional baseball in the United States; the rise of organized baseball industry and Major League Baseball; and globalization in professional baseball. Readings for this course will include chapters from texts that include Rob Rucks's How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (2011), Adrian Burgos's Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (2007), Daniel Gilbert's Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency (2013), Robert Elias's How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (2010), and Michael Butterworth's Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity During the War on Terror (2010). Coursework may include response papers, primary source analysis, and a final project.

With help from athletes such as Billie Jean King, Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James, Serena Williams, and Megan Rapinoe, Americans are growing accustomed to thinking about sports as embedded in the politics of gender, class, race, sexuality, and the nation. Consider the variety of places where sports happen, however, and the ways we develop and consume those places, and it becomes apparent that sports are also environmental in significant and complex ways. This course will examine the environmental politics of sports from conservation to climate change through the lenses of history and cultural studies. Course content will range from 19th century hunting, Indigenous surfing, and BASE jumping, to pick-up basketball, pro stadiums, and Notre Dame Athletics. Topical sections include outdoor sports and conservation, mountain sports and public land use, parks and recreation, stadiums and environmental justice, sports and climate change, and sustainability in the NCAA. Course requirements include regular reading and discussion, midterm and final essays, and a research project on a topic of the student's choice.

This course is a practical and conceptual immersion into the world of contemporary sports journalism. Students will learn how to write and report for multiple journalism platforms, including newspapers, magazines and digital media. Students will practice a variety of reporting techniques and study writing styles ranging from features to news articles to profiles, while also taking a rigorous look at the legal, ethical and cultural issues surrounding the intersection of media, sports and society. In addition, students will gain hands-on sports writing experience by preparing articles for the university's independent, student-run newspaper, The Observer.

Sport is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Data has always been a central part of professional sport in the US, from Henry Chadwick's invention of the baseball box score in the 1850s to the National Football League's use of Wonderlic test scores to evaluate players. This course focuses on the intersecting structures of power and identity that shape how we make sense of the "datification" of professional sport. By focusing on the cultural significance of sport data, this course will put the datafication of sport in historical context and trace the ways the datafication of sport has impacted athletes, fans, media, and other stakeholders in the sport industry. The course will also delve into the technology systems used to collect and analyze sport data, from the TrackMan and PITCHf/x systems used in Major League Baseball to the National Football League's Next Gen Stats partnership to emerging computer vision and artificial intelligence research methods. Readings for this course will draw on texts like Christopher Phillips' Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (2019), Ruha Benjamin's Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (2019), and Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2004). Class meetings will be split between discussions of conceptual readings and applied work with sport data and technology systems. Coursework may include response papers, hands-on work with data, and a final project. Familiarity with statistical analysis, data science, or computer science tools and methods is NOT a prerequisite for this course.

A generation ago, students interested in media were likely journalism, broadcasting, or FTT majors aspiring to work full-time for big TV networks or newspapers. Today, that’s not usually true. Digital tools have blown open what it means to create and consume media. Whether you see yourself as a creative, a community organizer, an entrepreneur, or an influencer, you no longer have to launch your content through established channels, hoping to someday catch your big break. You could manage a YouTube channel with thousands of subscribers from your dorm room. Some of you probably already do. But how do you monetize such ventures? How do you turn a cool hobby or vision into a side hustle or career? In Media Entrepreneurship, we’ll explore how you can combine your passion, skills, and awareness of social needs to capitalize on the media's exciting new frontier. You’ll gain the knowledge, tools, and confidence to see creating your own digital media startup as a realistic possibility. And it’s not just about you. When you hear the phrase “media entrepreneur,” you might think of a tech bro pitching an idea to venture capitalists on Shark Tank. But, at its best, media entrepreneurship is an act of service. It’s about identifying community needs, building trust with audiences, and expanding whose voices we hear as a society. In this course, you’ll practice conceiving of a media project and working with a team to create a startup business plan.

This course is about telling great, factual stories within the realm of human endeavor we call sport. That is, you will read and write substantial nonfiction narratives, and your main subject of inquiry will be near-at-hand happenings in sport, play, and performance. You can call it longform sportswriting, literary journalism, creative nonfiction, or anything in between—and, indeed, this course will ask you to interrogate the boundaries between subgenres in the literature of fact. Through your ethical efforts in research, exploration, and storytelling, you will seek to define and describe real-world truth through the art of the longform essay. With guidance, you will look for potential stories locally—on campus, or nearby—request access and permission to tell those stories, and gather material en route to crafting meaningful narratives. Together, we will ask fundamental questions about the time-honored act of storytelling and explore the history of the “longform” narrative form. What impact—culturally, socially, politically—can a well-told story have? We will build personal toolkits for writing nonfiction while reading and discussing exemplary essays. We will ask big questions about the role of sport and play in culture, mindful of local significance: What is the relationship between play and identity, for instance? How do conceptions of race, class, or gender find expression (or deconstruction) in sport? How does socioeconomic division affect access to sport and play in America? Most fundamentally, in this course, we will write and share our work with others. This course requires the completion of a substantial writing project, among other assignments, and you should be prepared to spend time with real people and your writing subjects outside of class time, and often according to their schedules.

This class will survey the various historical and contemporary dimensions of Asian American experiences including immigration & integration, family & community dynamics, ethnic/gender/class identity, as well as transnational and diasporic experiences. We will explore contemporary and historical issues of racism, the model minority myth, inter-generational relationships, and the educational experiences of Asian Americans. To accomplish this, our class will pose such questions as: Who is Asian American? How did racism create Chinatown? Is there an Asian advantage? Coursework includes essays based on topics of your choice, presentations, and a creative narrative.

Football is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Since the late 19th century, football has occupied an important place for those wishing to define and understand "America." And Notre Dame football plays a central role in that story, with larger-than-life figures and stories, from Knute Rockne's "Win one for the Gipper" line to the 'Four Horsemen' backfield that led the program to a second national championship in 1924. The mythic proportions of the University's football program cast a long shadow on the institution's history, cultural significance, and traditions. This course focuses on Notre Dame football history as an entry point into larger questions about the cultural, historical, and social significance of football in the U.S. Who has been allowed to play on what terms? How have events from Notre Dame football's past been remembered and re-imagined? How has success in Notre Dame football been defined and redefined? In particular, the course will focus on how Notre Dame football became a touchstone for Catholic communities and institutions across the country navigating the fraught terrain of immigration, whiteness, and religious practice. This course will take up those questions through significant engagement with University Archive collections related to Notre Dame football, working toward increased levels of description and access for these materials. This course will include hands-on work with metadata, encoding and markup, digitization, and digital preservation/access through a collaboration with the University Archives and the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. Readings for this course will include chapters from texts such as Murray Sperber's Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football (1993), TriStar Pictures' Rudy (1993), Steve Delsohn's Talking Irish: The Oral History of Notre Dame Football (2001), Jerry Barca's Unbeatable: Notre Dame's 1988 Championship and the Last Great College Football Season (2014), David Roediger's Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (2005), David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), and Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (1995). Class meetings will be split between discussions of conceptual readings and applied work with library and information science technologies and systems. Coursework may include response papers, hands-on work with data, and a final project. Familiarity with archival methods, library/information science, data science, or computer science tools and methods is NOT a prerequisite for this course.

Game Day Media will delve into the preparation and performance of game day media opportunities: play by play personnel, color analysts, Public Address talent, news conference moderators and more. This is a 50/50 zoom and in person class. Students will record play by play/analyst segments from campus sports, conduct pre-game interviews and post-game news conferences and observe the intricacies of public address announcing.

This course aims to change the way you think not only about the way that we play games, but also about the way that video games teach their players to behave within their digital worlds. This course will encourage students to reflect on and utilize their lived experiences as players, and utilize these experiences to locate themselves within their analysis and writing as well as their design practices. This course will undertake an intensive, interdisciplinary focus on the history of video game development, representation in video games, and the languages that digital games work in as well as decolonial theory and diverse theories of design. This class will engage with a variety of scholarly texts, video games, media posts, videos, and design exercises, in order to illustrate the ways in which video games have shaped the ways we play, think, and behave within their spaces. Students will be required to write and design around these lessons and address and push back against the problematic behaviors and colonial narratives around violence, race, gender, sexuality, and relationship to the land that these gamic languages and lessons have created.

This class examines the social, spatial and intellectual history of "integration" in the United States and Europe, from the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762) up to the so-called "global revolutions" of 1968. Students will gain a comprehensive introduction to how peasants, (im) migrants, people of color, and other disempowered populations negotiated confraternity and inclusion - despite tenacious subjugation and exclusion - within and across Western nation-states and colonial possessions. Related topics range from "Indian removal" to religious persecution; from absolutist monarchies to gender discrimination; and from legalized slavery to histories of genocide. Our seminar, eclectic in scope and method, will put particular emphasis on transnational histories of social movements and cultural transformations. In addition to four short writing assignments (4 - 5 pages, double-spaced) connecting two or more course readings, students will develop a final paper (7 - 8 pages, double-spaced) based on cumulative sources, including texts such as: Alexander Pushkin's The Moor of Peter the Great (1837), Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2017), Todd Tucker's Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan (2004), and Winston Churchill's "United States of Europe" speech (1946). No prior background in American or European history is either required or assumed.

What does it mean to be American? Wilderness, as an idea, a set of places, and a political process, is a big part of the answer. Writers, historians, painters, photographers, and politicians have described American landscapes as wild from colonization into the 21st century to great effect. Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold famously anchor the history of popular environmental thought. But wilderness is not simple. Because places are constantly constructed and reconstructed through culture as well as politics, wilderness has taken shape in concert with relationships of gender, class, race, and nation. National parks protected distinctively American landscapes starting in 1872 by removing the Native American peoples who inhabited them, and the 1964 Wilderness Act built from that legacy. Today Congress has designated about 5% of the United States (over half in Alaska) as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System, and arguments over the protection of public land continue to divide local and national communities. This class will explore how the idea of wilderness, the places associated with it, and the politics surrounding both have developed from the 19th century to today. It will examine how wilderness has underscored our national identity but largely failed to recognize the diversity of American society and culture. Along the way we will discuss literature, history, visual culture, politics, and popular media, and explore historical relationships between wilderness and art, outdoor recreation, public land management, and consumer culture.

From the Olympics to Formula 1, sports are a central part of global culture and everyday life. Our experiences of sport, however, are largely shaped—and often even constructed—by media. Rather than simply presenting sports, media play an active role in producing the values, identities, emotions, and conflicts we associate with sport. This course examines the historical roots and current conditions of the convergence of corporate sport and corporate media. We will analyze how media—from early 20th-century newsreels to live Twitch streams—do more than distribute sports content; they shape its cultural meanings and social impact. Centering sport media as both an industry and a cultural practice, we will explore how it intersects with issues of gender, race/ethnicity, labor, nationalism, and globalization. By analyzing the forces shaping sport media production and the meanings audiences make of them, we will consider the ways sport media production and consumption might be reimagined. Assignments in the course include a variety of reflection and application projects, as well as larger research project.

This course explores the emerging sub field of Black geographies through an American studies framework. Black activists and artists as well as scholars in geography, Africana studies, anthropology, history, and many other fields have begun to use Black geographic theory as an analytic: to think critically about Black space making practices, to recover hidden and suppressed histories, to reorient Black folks relationship to the environment, and to grapple with the ways power is shaped differently at various scales in various places. In this course, we will examine the development of Black geographies as a school of thought in field geography. We examine its relationship to the field of Black Studies through Black Feminist Thought, the Black Radical Tradition, and Black ecologies. And finally, we will think carefully and critically about the way Black spaces and places are produced in the Americas (and slightly beyond) to understand how the Americas have been underwritten socially, culturally, economically, and politically by Black geographies.

Applied Multimedia for Journalists - The main focus of this course is that students will learn how to shoot and edit videos. It will briefly touch on how to produce audio stories and podcasts. Students will also study the legal and ethical issues surrounding the use, creation and publication of digital media. The use of drones and the legal issues surrounding them will also be discussed.

The course is designed to raise students' ability to recognize and resolve ethical issues in sports, but also more broadly in business, accounting and life. Accordingly, this course will ask students to examine a variety of issues through various ethical lenses. Topics will vary from semester to semester, but are likely to include the ethical dimensions of: college athletics, including amateurism, compensation, and unionization; wellness, focusing on everything from finances to doping; corruption, including gambling, college academic and admissions scandals, and FIFA; and sports and the common good, i.e., can sports advance issues as diverse as gender and racial equity and sustainable economic development in the form of stadium construction and hosting the Olympic Games. In addition to critical thinking, students will be well served by curiosity, skepticism and keeping an open mind. Requirements typically include in-class participation, a presentation on a current ethical issue in sports, and two exams.

Game Day Media will delve into the preparation and performance of game day media opportunities: play by play personnel, color analysts, Public Address talent, news conference moderators and more. This is a 50/50 zoom and in person class. Students will record play by play/analyst segments from campus sports, conduct pre-game interviews and post-game news conferences and observe the intricacies of public address announcing.

In this course, students will study the history of boxing in the United States and learn a great deal about the craft of boxing, what commentators have called "the sweet science." They will do so in conventional and innovative ways. The course will explore the story of boxing in America from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It will start in England and colonial America, move to places like nineteenth-century New York, New Orleans, and the California mining camps where boxing was transformed from a gambling pursuit among the working class into a mass spectator sport, examine the time when boxing became ascendant in America, and end in the late twentieth century when boxing was entangled with urban decay and changing race politics. The story of boxing is the story of America. The class will look at the rise of cities, mass migration, changing understandings of race and class, urban history, and the fortunes and misfortunes of postwar American culture. Now for the innovative. Students will also learn about the finer points of craft, how training for boxing changed over time, and how technique developed. They will do so by doing it themselves. They will learn to throw a punch and to defend. They will practice footwork. They will train as boxers did and still do. By doing all this, students will come to appreciate the finer points of a dynamic and changing sport, one tied to America's past. Each class session will include this sort of active learning, turning what we learn from reading and discussion into the kinetic.

This course explores the history of American sport in global context. American football was one of a number of sports (including soccer, rugby and various "football" games) that emerged from common roots. Ice hockey began as a Canadian sport but grew popular in parts of the United States by fusing Canadian talent and management with American capital. Basketball was invented in Massachusetts by a foreign-born educator who viewed physical education as a religious calling, and his creation grew internationally, with the international game developing important differences from the American game. Since the time of sporting goods baron Albert Spalding, businessmen and politicians have used sport to try to market specific products, the American way of life, or a diplomatic agenda. Alone among the industrial nations, the United States developed a talent-development system centered on schools and colleges, with distinctive results - both for the athletes, and for higher education. This course will consider these and other issues.

This course aims to accomplish the following: 1) to develop students' understanding of the Cold War and its major political developments; 2) to develop students' understanding of the ways sports and society influence and reflect political developments; 3) to see sports programs as a reflection of the nation-states in which they develop, and to use athletic traditions in different nations to develop students' understanding of different societies; 4) to improve students' ability to use contemporary periodical sources in historical research; and 5) to improve students' analytical reading and writing skills through readings, exams, and a paper.

In the modern world, sports and sport-like spectacles are a source of livelihood, entertainment, and social interaction for huge swathes of the global population. Fans and practitioners of physical feats of strength were likewise a major component of ancient Greco-Roman society, from the earliest Olympic Games at the dawn of Greek history to the gladiatorial contests and chariot races that characterized the most decadent phases of the Roman Empire. The purpose of this course is to provide an interdisciplinary examination of the origin and nature of sport and spectacle in the Classical world and to compare the role that athletics played in ancient society to the position it occupies in our own lives - from the point of view of athletes, spectators, and patrons alike. Topics covered will include: Near Eastern precursors to Greco-Roman sport; the development of Greek and Roman sport and spectacle through time, the Olympic Games; the role of religious thought in ancient sport; the position of the athlete within society; ancient and modern rewards for athletic valor; athletes in architecture, literature, and art; and the political appropriation of athletes and athletics. The course will focus mostly on formal athletic contests in ancient Greece and on athletic spectacles in ancient Rome, but general recreation and physical education will be considered as well.

This interdisciplinary course explores the FIFA World Cup as a global phenomenon that transcends sport. Focusing on the upcoming men’s FIFA World Cup 2026, co-hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada, students will examine how such a tournament can shape international identities, global economies, and societal change. From its origins in the early 20th century to its role in contemporary geopolitics, the course investigates key tournaments, legendary players, and landmark moments that have defined the game and the self-understanding of European nations like (West) Germany. Special attention will be given to the role of the World Cup in shaping national identity within the European context, as well as its impact on fan culture, international cooperation, media representation, and economic development. Students will work with a variety of sources, including documentaries, social and traditional media, academic and literary texts, and match footage.

This course explores how ideas about race and racism have been intertwined with scientific, medical, and technological developments, shaping society since the 18th century. While recognizing that race is fundamentally a social construct, the course delves into scientific efforts to quantify, measure, and categorize individuals by race from early anthropometry to contemporary developments like the Human Genome Project and artificial intelligence. By critically analyzing scientific theories that produced and built upon ideas of racial hierarchy, students will develop a deep understanding of how race, racism, and racial inequality have been embedded into scientific knowledge, and thus, societal understanding. Students will also examine the historical context of racial disparities in healthcare, including the development of racialized medical theories, and will explore the role of technology in reinforcing or challenging racial biases, from the early days of photography to modern AI and surveillance technologies. This course is tailored for students with interests in the history of science and the production of scientific knowledge, as well as those curious about the origins of scientific racism and racial inequality.

What do terms like “structural,” “systemic,” or “institutional” racism mean? What are the structures, systems, and institutions that historically have contributed, and continue to contribute, to racial injustice in the United States? Most importantly, how can understanding these concepts help us dismantle the barriers to racial justice in America? This course will focus on the ways that the law and the legal system in the United States has been a tool to create and sustain racial inequity, as well as the reforms, both historic and ongoing, to redress them. Course materials will include cases and commentary. Together, we will examine legal structures in the areas of housing, education, banking and finance, voting, employment discrimination, criminal law, and environmental justice, among others. The course will draw from the Klau Institute’s archives in its five-year long Building and Anti-Racist Vocabulary lecture series featuring authors, public intellectuals, faith leaders, and external and internal members of the academy. Throughout the course of the semester, students will compose a variety of short papers, lead classroom discussions, and complete a final project incorporating independent research on related topics.

This course will focus on the application of psychological concepts and current research to the enhancement of performance in both sports and fitness activities. An emphasis will be placed on techniques and strategies that have been used effectively to maximize athletic performance. Topics include overview of the field, motivation, personality factors, self-concept, team development, leadership, psychological skills training, and exercise adherence.

This course delves into the intersections of art, culture, and public health, particularly Hip Hop as a form of public health knowledge acquisition. Through an examination of various texts, archives, and research methods such as ethnography, autobiography, and social and oral history, students will explore how different forms of creative and cultural expression force us to reimagine what health justice looks like, feels like, and sounds like. Students will also reflect on Hip Hop and its presence in everyday life, from questions about narrative medicine to its use in public health campaigns.

Educational Psychology examines questions about development, learning and achievement in schools. In this course we will explore fundamental questions such as (a) What is intelligence? Is it fixed or changeable? What are the implications of conceptions of intelligence for achievement? (b) How does learning occur? What are the implications of different theories of learning? Is there a "correct" theory of learning? Does learning differ in different subject areas? (c) What motivates student learning? Can instruction be "motivational"? (d) What is "good" instruction? How do theories of learning relate to instructional practices? (e) How do aspects of school context, such as interaction with peers and teachers, and school culture, influence learning, motivation and achievement?

Alcohol Use Disorder is a chronic relapsing brain disease. But when presented on screen, it's entertainment. Why do we laugh, why do we cry, why do we emulate fictional characters whose drinking habits result in a life of debilitating addiction? From James Bond to Jonah Hill, the psychology and seduction of alcohol on film, television, and online will be analyzed. Furthermore, what is the relationship between the manner in which alcohol use/abuse is presented on screen and the manner in which alcohol is used and abused on, for example, college campuses? Surveying recent film history, we will examine how alcohol is used in story structure, as a character flaw or strength, and as a narrative device in the story arc of films across multiple film genres, (teen rom-coms, sports films, etc). Why do characters drink, where do they drink, and how does the result of their "getting drunk" advance the narrative? We'll also look at non-fiction media that tackle issues of addiction, as a way of comparing character development in fictional films to the results of this same behavior in everyday life. Film materials will include weekly screenings outside of class, and academic articles relating to the portrayal and analysis of alcohol use in film and television, including the business of marketing alcohol from social media to televised sports. From the psychological perspective we will discuss the topic and process of social influence and how the presence of others influences our behavior. Questions of interest will include the following: what are the mechanisms by which group influence unfolds? How and why might we be persuaded? Does the manner, and if so how, in which alcohol use is portrayed in movies and the media reflect the processes and principles of social influence? Readings will include chapters on social influence, persuasion and academic articles evaluating the manner in which alcohol is portrayed and advertised and the effect this has on alcohol consumption. In addition, issues of addiction will be discussed - from understanding the basis of addiction to examining the efficacy of addiction treatment.

Enlightenment anatomists journeyed to Peter The Great’s collection of monsters to study the human body. In 1800s London, Humphrey Davy discovered potassium, sodium, and chlorine at the newly built Royal Institute, which he funded from hugely popular, public lectures he gave. Private firms bolstered their R&D by hiring research scientists after WWI. An integration of private management methods and production techniques, federal money, and scientists who were previously cloistered in universities built the atomic bomb. The above anecdotes gesture at an intimate relationship between science and the public. To explore the entanglement of science and the public, this class offers a “survey” of science beginning in the Enlightenment and ending in the late twentieth century. Rather than covering every scientific development over 300 years, this course will focus on the topics that best reveal how science and the public relate in a series of case studies chronologically arranged. Using those case studies, the course investigates the principal question: how did scientists and their theories interact with the public? From this, sub-questions emerge, such as “what is the public?” “what is the basis of scientific authority?” and “how has public support changed science?” Students will grapple with these questions by examining the history of science and technology.

Throughout this course, students will examine the social and cultural aspects of sport through an exploration of the unique ways that race and identity influence sport participation, access and engagement. This course will engage topics such as: Sport and Identity; Identity, "Success" and resilience; Media Imagery, Identity and Power; and, Race in American Sport.

In a 1971 interview, Bruce Lee said "Martial arts has a very very deep meaning as far as my life is concerned because as an actor, as a martial artist, as a human being - all these I have learned from martial arts." By merging multiple aspects of human identity, artistic expression, and cultural activity, martial arts have a unique ability to access the human imagination. From Hong Kong cinemas, to Black Belt magazines and black light posters, to disco songs and shopping mall kiosks for ninja equipment, martial arts are intertwined with popular culture. After more than a half century of association with aesthetic violence, mystical secrets, and Orientalist mystique, the cultural phenomenon of martial arts lends itself to anthropological analysis and critique. This course synthesizes the global dissemination of martial arts with the anthropology of media and symbolic violence. By tracking the proliferation of the martial arts in popular culture, from muay thai action films to karate tournament supply catalogues and dojo iconography, students can simultaneously explore these arts' cultural origins. We will examine these origins in a range of styles from kung fu in China, to jujitsu in Japan, kali/escrima in the Philippines, pencak silat in Indonesia, and savate in France. In this way, the course crafts informative linkages between the cultural variations of martial arts, and their global influence in popular consciousness.

This course will examine the interactions of culture and biology within sports. The anthropology of sports can help us gain valuable insights into broader social and cultural phenomena, the role of ritual in society, and illuminate how sports have been used to bring people together, but also to exclude people. We will begin with studying the evolutionary origins and non-human examples of play. We will then move into the prehistoric and historic foundations for sport. We will also discuss how people change their bodies, in good ways and dangerous ways, for a greater chance at success, and how those bodies are often more harshly judged by society. Finally, we will explore the ways in which contemporary sporting and fan practices are culturally ordered and/or challenge social norms. Drawing on case studies from around the world, we will pay special attention to questions of gender, race, genetics, nationality, health, equality, and human variation. In addition, students will be encouraged to think critically about their own sporting experiences, both as active participants and as fans, and how sports impact their lives.

This course is on the economics of sports, and aims to use economic principles, theories, and tools to analyze the organization of the sports industry and sports markets, the activities of professional and amateur athletes, the effects of sports on the broader economy, and strategic behavior in sports settings. Topics include the industrial organization of professional sports leagues, the labor economics and labor markets in both professional and amateur sports, the public economics and politics of the funding of sports, the economic impact of the sports industry, as well as the application of microeconomic theory to strategic decision-making in sports.

Almost 40% of the world's population is overweight or has obesity. Obesity has become a central focus in biological research as well as policy. Billions of dollars have been spent on public health interventions, biological interventions, diets, and exercise regimens. However, the obesity rate among adults and children has been steadily increasing globally. Why is this happening? How do we even define obesity? Does that definition truly reflect health? Why do we even have fat to begin with...actually what even is fat?!? Why are humans prone to obesity? These are just some of the questions we will address in this class. Using non-traditional methods and assignments, we will discuss adipose tissue and digestive physiology, the role evolution has played in the human propensity to hold onto fat, diet and exercise, food insecurity, therapeutic interventions, as well as the physical and mental health consequences of having obesity. We will use this as a basis to investigate the biological and cultural factors including stigma, race, and gender that shape our perceptions of body image and health in the midst of the obesity epidemic. Finally, this course will include occasional laboratory exercises to familiarize you with the methods used to assess body mass, body composition, metabolic rate, and point of care measures of biomarkers like glucose and cholesterol.

Why do weight lifters wear lifting belts? How does athletic training and diet differ between endurance athletes and strength athletes? What are the sex-based differences in athletic performance? What impact do supplements and performance enhancing drugs have on athletic performance? Through the use of peer reviewed research, popular media articles, podcasts, and film we will answer these and many other questions within the field of exercise physiology. The course will be split into two broad units: 1) Powerlifters and 2) Marathoners. Topics covered will include cellular metabolism, muscle physiology, training programs, response to training, basic nutrition, body composition, some methodological exercise testing, supplements and performance enhancing drugs, recovery, fatigue, and activity in extreme environments. Through this use of mixed media, we will also discuss how the media misrepresents and misreports exercise physiology studies, making us all more discerning consumers of information.

The human drive to struggle for victory against opponents, whether in military battles or athletic contests, runs throughout human history. Theologians and philosophers from ancient times until today have considered the implications of this struggle for the human quest for excellence and for meaning which, at its limit, involves the search for God. More recently, scholars have considered the behavior and discourse of sports fans as something close to a religion. This course will examine each of these topics, beginning with early philosophical and theological views of struggle, embodiment, and the quest for excellence before engaging more recent writings about the relation of sports to virtue, theological accounts of athletics in its relationship to community identity and flourishing, and the ethical analysis of modern college and professional sports. Course requirements include a series of short reflection papers and a final group project undertaking a theological and ethical analysis of one particular example of modern athletics in a specific social context.

Sports have played an integral role in the television industry since the medium's early days. This course will highlight the history of sports on television and focus on the nuts and bolts of how television sports programming works today. The course will also examine the impact of televised sports on our culture as well as the ethical issues raised by the media's coverage of sports. Taught in the Fall only.

How do the contemporary film and television industries work? How can an analysis of the "business of entertainment" enable a greater understanding of contemporary media aesthetics and culture? This course will explore these questions by focusing on the structure, practices and products of America's film and television industries, and students will engage with academic readings, screenings, trade publications, current events, guest lectures, and written and oral assignments in order to understand the activities of the film and television industries. By the end of the course, students should be able to understand prominent practices employed by media conglomerates and independent companies today, recognize the ways in which industrial structures and practices can shape media products, and examine how television shows and movies are influenced by business strategies. The course should be especially beneficial for students intending to pursue scholarly or professional careers related to film and television through its comprehensive overview of how these industries work, why they work as they do, and the broader practical and theoretical implications of media industry operations.

The Game, as we experience it on screens big and small, is an ever evolving story. A human competition turned into a visual narrative by producers, directors, and broadcasters. How is that three hour ebb and flow of emotions turned into an engaging narrative for fans? How has that story evolved over decades? How has the evolution of technology changed that story? And has the televised broadcast changed the meaning of the game itself? From the Super Bowl to March Madness, ESPN Sportscenter to WWE Smackdown, we'll dissect the process, storytelling techniques and technology that form the American sports story on television, as well as experience the actual game production operation from inside the control rooms of Notre Dame Studios. Assignments include on-camera and off-camera production exercises, as well as written assignments deconstructing historical and current broadcasts. No prior television production experience required.

It has long-been a part of Notre Dame’s Saturday football tradition. As uniformed players leave the locker room and descend a tight stairwell to the field below, they reach up and touch the iconic “Play Like a Champion Today” sign. Countless players, students, and fans have touched the sign over the years, hoping to imbibe some illusive and ineffable Fighting Irish magic. But what does it mean to “play like a champion today” … or any day, really? More simply, what does it mean to play? Play is an inescapable and essential part of the human condition. And, yet, the experience’s core liminality defies easy definition and explanation. This course provides an introduction to the study of human play primarily through the lens of analog and digital games. Given the variety of play practices across human history and cultures, this class strives to equip students with a critical vocabulary and interpretive framework to help them make sense of play in its many forms. This class will pay particular attention to how rules, goals, game mechanics, and narratives offer reliable and compelling structures for gameplay, and what ludic activities reveal about human culture and social power.

In “South Bend Stories” students will produce reported narratives across a variety of nonfiction genres, including prose writing and documentary filmmaking. This course draws its inspiration and subject matter from the city of South Bend and the greater Michiana region, as you will work with classmates and community partners to tell stories of local interest and significance. Topics may include close-up looks at a wide range of ideas—family, sport, education, history, etc.—but the ultimate goal is to describe real-world truth at the “felt-life level,” revealing something of what it means to be alive in this particular time and place. We wish to highlight the daily lives, cultural events, natural and built spaces, and social issues of South Bend. Projects are collaborative, with students working in teams. With guidance, you will look for stories, request access and permission to tell those stories, and gather material en route to crafting meaningful narratives. Each group will produce several different stories, though subjects and forms will often converse with one another. For instance, storytelling teams may create short moving-image documentaries, works of prose journalism, photo essays, audio narratives, creative nonfiction essays, or more avant-garde documentary projects, etc. The class will interrogate the boundaries between subgenres of these factual artforms. Students will decide which types of stories they will produce. Telling others’ stories is a profoundly ethical act. It is also a creative process that allows us to grow as individuals and as a community. This challenging process demands your respect and your time as a media-maker. The class will regularly engage in discussions about media ethics and accountability, in the traditions of journalism and documentary filmmaking courses. Students must be prepared to use resources to travel beyond campus and engage with people who are not students and may not be affiliated with the university. Additionally, you must act ethically as a storyteller and collaborator. Further, you must solve a range of challenges—conceptual, logistical, and narratological—while being prepared to spend time with your subjects outside of class time and often according to others’ schedules.

Community-Based Design is an advanced Visual Communication Design course that focuses on the design of socially-driven interventions that impact communities at large and small-scale. Students will learn how design might work for, with, and through communities in a way that is empowering and sustainable for existing community advocates and organizations. Students will consider the impacts of extractive, top-down, externally driven interventions that fail to identify or activate local expertise. This course is structured as a hands-on, interdisciplinary studio that might be taken as the capstone for the Collaborative Innovation minor. Complimentary majors such as anthropology, sociology, peace studies or others are invited to join the class. Students will divide their time between lecture, critique, stakeholder research, presentations, and in-class work.

Through its transition from sport to pseudo-sport to sports entertainment, professional wrestling has long held the popularity to fill arenas and stadiums. This course takes a look at that popularity's effect on the medium of television. From its inception in the 1940s to the golden age of the 50s to the modern boom of the 80s and 90s to the streaming area of the present day, students will observe, analyze and critique the unique storytelling and production elements of professional wrestling that have made it such a television juggernaut and mainstay.

What does it mean when some of the sharpest insights about health justice come packaged in punchlines? Through satire, the hit-series The Boondocks elevates overlooked aspects of health and material security, transforming systemic failures into resonate comedic sequences. Through engagement with The Boondocks, this course explores the use of humor and other forms of cultural expression to challenge and reimagine our current healthcare practices. Additionally, this course examines how film, video, photography, drawing, and interactive media function as an archive of community health knowledge — ethnographic resources that illuminate the complexities of our social world. Students will explore pressing health issues as well as engage core readings in cultural studies and visual anthropology to develop analytic approaches that extend beyond summaries and plot descriptions. By emphasizing these interpretive skills, students will learn to extract health discourses from different cultural forms, recognizing how seemingly disparate texts — from academic articles to animated satire — collectively participate in broader conversations about well-being, justice, and community care.

This applied research methods course will allow students to examine research as a driver of change in poverty studies. Throughout this course students will learn a variety of research methods that will equip them with the skills to engage research that in some way seeks to disrupt, reduce, or abolish poverty. Students will learn the foundations of applied research through qualitative and quantitative methods including sampling basics, grounded ethnographic approaches, survey design and the utilization of secondary sources. Students will also engage with experiential learning that is focused on problem-based goals and relevant applications in the area of poverty. This course will create an opportunity for students to learn practical approaches to data identification, collection, analysis and dissemination. It will include a lecture and seminar-based format where students are introduced to key concepts in research methods as well as hands-on opportunities to practice what they've learned in collaboration with community partnerships. At the end of this course, students will have the strategies, tools and confidence to handle complex data, to develop practical solutions to current challenges, and develop a clearer understanding of the varying ways knowledge can be created and accessed. The course will culminate in a group research project proposal.

This course invites students to explore the ways writing can develop our moral imagination about what poverty is and what our world could be without poverty. We will read and write intensively in a wide variety of genres and modes--memoir, podcasts, letters, poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and more. Class will include active participation from students through rhetorical analysis of published texts and workshopping of peer writing to create a portfolio of diverse expressions, insights, and arguments about poverty and injustice. Students will have the opportunity to meet experienced writers and advocates who write for social change. We will seek inspiration and insight through community-engaged and campus speakers and events that will prompt us to complicate and elevate our understanding of why poverty exists and what we can do now and throughout our lives to make change. Introduction to Poverty Studies or an equivalent course is desired but not required.

This advanced topics course in visual communication design explores identity through the lens of design, community, history, and sport. The class will build on historical research conducted by students in the Baseball In America course in the fall of '22. The class will collaborate with the Centers for Social Concerns, Foundry Field (foundryfield.org), and community partners to examine the history of appropriation, representation, and access in sports and design. Students will implement participatory and co-creative design methods to understand how community involvement in the design process might stimulate dialogue, create a greater sense of community ownership, and empower local advocates in their work toward inclusion, representation, and access.

This course engages students in an ongoing project to build an equitable and developmentally oriented youth sports system in South Bend, Chicago, and high poverty urban communities throughout the United States. The first part of the course will draw on the latest research in the sports sciences, developmental psychology, and education to identify the basic principles of youth sports coaching and mentoring. The students will receive preparation in identifying and responding to the chronic stress and trauma that affects a sizable proportion of the children they will be working with. The second part of the course will help students to continue to develop their coaching and mentoring competencies while studying generational child poverty in the Unites States.

In this course, we will challenge the single story/ies U.S. schools and curricula have told about books, characters, contemporary issues, and cultural groups by focusing on literature by and about people from various populations that have been traditionally underrepresented in the United States. We will discuss young adult literature from parallel cultures (including possible works by and about African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino/as, Native Americans, Middle Eastern Americans, and other ethnic groups), as well as literature by and about populations traditionally defined by class, ability, religion, gender and sexuality. Furthermore, this literature often tackles sensitive contemporary topics that are not typically and explicitly discussed in schools, such as racism and privilege, sexual assault, climate change, and the opioid crisis. Course participants will investigate theoretical perspectives, issues, and educational implications for these texts in society and in the educational system. As an extension of the course, we will also examine the young adult literature market and how contemporary media may reinforce or resist the stereotypes and single stories associated with these cultures.

The aim of the introductory course is to introduce some basic questions about the nature and goals of education, its history, and theoretical explanations of influences on learning, teaching, and schooling. We will incorporate both classic and current texts. The core course will incorporate several disciplinary perspectives.

In this course, students will engage with the critical developmental role of play in childhood and examine the inequities that affect access to play opportunities in diverse communities. This course integrates theoretical frameworks with hands-on community engagement, encouraging students to explore how play contributes to cognitive, socioemotional, physical and moral growth in children. Through readings, discussions, and case studies, students will critically examine social, economic, and cultural factors that limit access to play in various communities. Each student will partner with a local elementary school to coach recess activities for two hours each week. This practical experience will allow students to implement play strategies, observe dynamics in play, and directly engage with children in the community. Students will develop a research project analyzing the effects of their coaching experience on children's play and social interactions. Note: Students in this class must be available to coach recess one day per week between the hours of 10:30am and 12:30pm. Access to transportation is helpful but not required.

This course will explore how popular culture, constructed through as well as against folk and high cultures, operates at the intersection of gender with race, class, sexuality, and nationality in the United States. Approaching gender and popular culture from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, we will consider how culture in its commodified form has helped construct gendered identities, communities, and power structures in the United States. For example, we will examine how popular media texts may influence ideas about gender and how fans may transform and use mass culture texts for different purposes. Along the way, we will consider popular culture's ideological potential in relation to gender justice. Do negative representations harm the cause of women's and/or minority rights? What do the rise of the Internet and social media activism mean for the intersections of popular culture and social justice? Assignments include mini essays, a multimedia essay, and a final creative project accompanied by an analytical paper.

O futebol, fútbol, football: The beautiful game, the people’s game, the world’s game. Soccer is the most popular sport on the globe, a massive, international corporate enterprise whose outlays—from player salaries to stadiums—make it by far the biggest business in sport. Soccer is also popular in the other sense, del pueblo, a game played around the world on the smallest pitches imaginable, with improvised nets, bare feet, and any reasonably kickable object standing in as a ball. If sport tells us something about who we are and offers a window into our historical reality, then the massive scope of soccer, perhaps, can tell us something about the world. On the eve of FIFA World Cup 26ä, when the world’s game will be centered in a country that has turned its back on globalization and where the United States, Mexico and Canada will be asked to work together in the name of internationalism, we will take up the modern history of soccer (fútbol, futebol) by focusing on its aesthetics, politics, economics, and interactions with society. Soccer is big enough to comprise the world’s dreams and its nightmares and we will consider its controversies head on: race, gender, class, labor, inequality and social violence will be in play. We’ll also take plenty of time to contemplate the sport as an aesthetic object, and its relations to art, poetry and music. Objects of study include literary and journalistic texts, academic research, and video (films, shows, clips, and so on). This course satisfies electives in both the Spanish major and the Sports, Media and Culture (SMAC) minor. The language of instruction is English. Spanish majors, or students of French or Portuguese, may conduct their assignments in the respective language. Interdisciplinary and comparative work is encouraged.

This course provides students with an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of gender studies. It also serves as an introduction to gender itself—gender as identity, as a social/cultural formation, as a mode of self-expression, and as a critical lens through which to better understand the world. We will explore how gender is experienced, produced, and performed at the intersection of culture, politics, and the body, always in conjunction with other factors of power and difference such as race, nation, sexuality, dis/ability, and socioeconomic class. We will ask how institutions like government, work, and family interact with gender in the U.S. and in local contexts around the world. We will think critically about how ideology (systems of ideas and knowledge) and representation (portrayals in media, political discourse, and everyday life) shape our understanding of gender. The study of gender reaches into, across, and beyond academic disciplines. This course will explore how research on gender is done both within the interdisciplinary field of gender/women/sexuality studies and across many other fields, taking up debates and conversations about gender from history, sociology, anthropology, biology, literature, philosophy, political science, geography, and other disciplines that engage gender as a subject of knowledge.

This is the lab component for SMAC 30740, Play Like a Champion lecture. Students must take both the lecture and lab.

This course is the tutorial section to SMAC 30301 Boxing in America course

There is no other cultural practice more global than soccer. From its 19th century origins to the present day, the hold "the global game" has on billions of people is profound. Through everyday involvement in soccer, people define who they are as well as who they think others are. As "The Home of Football," Britain's relationship to the game is fundamental to its relationship with the rest of the world, and a thorough understanding of soccer history will serve students well while studying abroad in London.  The course begins with the codification of its rules by elites in the Victorian Era and comes of age during the Second Industrial Revolution as the game moved down the socio-economic scale, "from the classes to the masses." During the early 20th century, soccer also became a tool of "soft power" as it travelled to nearly every corner of the British Empire, and it factored into the formation of national identities during two world wars. With the game at its post-war peak, it then suffered a dramatic decline, culminating with its violent nadir in Thatcherite England. Finally, the course will look at the coming of the English Premier League, an era that has set the stage for the massively influential cultural export, perhaps "Britain's most durable export."

Sports and recreation are a huge part of American life. What we do for fun reflects who we are and what we aspire to be as individuals, as members of a group or subculture, and as a nation. Amusement parks, city parks, national parks, stadiums, and sports fields shape the built and natural world around us; sports media, outdoor recreation, and tourism represent billion-dollar industries and influence American politics and culture. Because sports and recreation foster community and identity, they also become sites of conflict. As a result, they provide a useful lens for examining major themes and questions integral to the field of American Studies. Just as Introduction to American Studies served as your gateway to the major, this seminar will be the culminating experience. Readings and assignments will explore research and scholarship examining sports and recreation in the context of American Studies as a field, and students will develop research projects on a topic of their own choice. Requirements will include seminar-style discussions of assigned readings, a final research project of 20-25 pages, and an oral presentation of that project in class, as well as some smaller writing assignments.

This is an academic internship. This is a collaboration between the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre and the Department of American Studies that will provide a unique professional experience to the right candidate. Must be an Sports, Media, and Culture minor.

Directed reading taught by individual faculty members. Permission required.

Capstone projects synthesize and reflect upon the student's work within the minor in some public-facing way. They ask students to contribute to public discourses on sports, media, and culture. Each student will plan and develop a project with the help of the director and a faculty or staff mentor. Capstone projects may build from a course, senior thesis, internship, research project, or service program, or they may be a separate project. Capstone projects should reflect the student's academic and professional interests, and may take a variety of forms such as a public poster presentation or talk, online digital humanities project, curated museum or library exhibit, print journalism, podcast, video, or the organization and introduction of public programming such as a panel discussion, film screening, or visiting speaker.