College Sport and its Activists:  Women Athletes’ Awareness and Activism


The “athlete-activist” is the context for our research. We will present the second stage of our research on awareness and activism among women college athletes. We explore to what extent women college athletes think of themselves as athlete-activists, and act with political agency, within the larger wave of political and sports activism, and feminism and women’s rights. Much of the research and non-scholarly writing on the athlete-activist focuses on professional men. We are interested in women athletes in general and college age in particular.  One guiding question is do women who play college level sports use their sports as a platform to promote awareness of social issues and activism around the same issues? A second question is to what extent an “Athletic Identity” may promote or prohibit awareness of social issues and activism. We will begin addressing these questions this fall after we distribute a survey via to RI women college athletes.

**We presented the first stage at NASSS 2017