NASSS 2018 Conference - Vancouver

As his numerous former students-turned NASSS members will attest, Dr. Stephen Mosher has long used music to teach undergraduates how history, culture, and politics inform sport and popular culture. At the 1992 NASSS conference Mosher debuted a visual and aural commentary, Bread and Circuses in America, that intermixed Nike commercials and ESPN Sportscenter coverage with powerful songs like The Beatles’ “Instant Karma,” to implicate sport as a complicit force in the revolt and reaction to the 1992 LA uprisings. Mosher hoped the video would compel audiences to confront the ways in which state violence against black bodies and white refusals of this reality are a recurring feature of American social/sporting life. In this present moment of burgeoning progressive movements and Trumpian white backlash, Dr. Mosher will re-screen Bread and Circuses in America and use it to initiate a conversation amongst panelists and attendees about the social continuities and differences between 1993 and today.