November 12th 5:00 P.M. Central– Tracie Canada: Dr. Tracie Canada is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at University of Notre Dame. Her research has been supported by various agencies, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.

 “Relating on a College Football Team” 

Arguably the national sport, American football is a standardized space that, ideally, disciplines and trains bodies, serves as a vehicle in the transmission of cultural values, and mirrors a modernist preoccupation with order. One of the most recognizable ways this is done is through the idea of the team, a narrative that is touted by football administrators and popularized in the media to demonstrate how players are able to come together as a ‘football family’ for the greater good of the overall unit. However, this paper borrows from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s notion of a racial grammar that shapes everyday life to complicate this trope. I argue that the notion of the team projects onto college players’ lives normative, Euro-American standards of whiteness because of its dependence on rationality, order, specialization, and surprisingly, cellular individuality. Because of this, it is important to consider how Black players navigate this administration-driven family ordering. By focusing on the lived experiences of Black college football players at predominantly white institutions in the southeastern U.S., I consider how these athletes confront this circumstance with their own forms of relatedness that, at times, contradict and undermine the idea of the team.