JESS - Anticolonial Autoethnography - Contributor Hub

A black-and-white photograph of an empty soccer field under a wide, cloudless sky. In the foreground stands a metal goal frame with no netting, its long shadow stretching across the short grass. A lone soccer ball rests just beyond the goal line, as if recently struck or waiting to be claimed. In the distance, a second, smaller goal appears on the open field, with leafless trees, rolling hills, power lines, and a few scattered buildings marking the horizon. Centered above the landscape, the title “Journal of Emerging Sport Studies” is overlaid in serif lettering, giving the scene the feel of a quiet, expansive cover image that hints at possibility, experimentation, and open play.

Please note: This image is from the JESS website, copyright belongs to them.

It's Here!

The editorial team of JESS's Special Issue on Anti-Colonial Autoethnography is pleased to announce the publication of our collaborative work. The issue is available here, and here.

We would like to thank the Editorial Board at the Journal of Emerging Sport Studies, notably Taylor McKee, for their support of our vision to engage in the production of this volume, and labour in bringing this special issue to form.

Thanks, also, to our community of contributors: Janelle Joseph, Rohini Balram, Roc Rochon, Nik Dickerson, Shabana Ali, Jorge E. Moraga, Nathan Viktor Fawaz, Tricia McGuire-Adams, and Jason Laurendeau, whose labours of scholarship, collaboration, and community building have made this special issue what it is. We are so glad to see this work in the world, and so honoured to have played a part in bringing it about.

The screenshot shows the top-left corner of a Padlet board for the JESS Special Issue – Anticolonial Autoethnography in Sport. The layout is a grid of rectangular tiles, each representing a post. The first, largest visible tile (upper left) is titled “Collaborative Introduction” and contains several paragraphs of text. It welcomes contributors, explains that this Padlet is a duplicate of one created by the editorial team in their first meeting, and invites participants to co-write the introduction to the special issue. Around it are several smaller tiles with short thematic prompts but no bodies: “(He)artwork,” “transparency – about process,” “Relational accountability” (quoting Daniel Heath Justice: “We can hold each other to account as we hold each other up”), and “Consent/check-in – make sure that we engage with each other’s work in ways that are generative and meaningful.” The visual impression is of a brainstorming wall that mixes a central orienting post with surrounding fragments of prompts and questions.

The screenshot displays the next section of the Padlet, again in tiled format. Tiles here combine references and reflective prompts. One square is titled “Emergence/process” with no added body text. Two nearby tiles are bibliographic references: “Tuck & Yang (2014)” with a full citation to Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research (Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 811–818, DOI link), and “Dashper (2015)” with a citation to Revise, resubmit and reveal? (Current Sociology, 63(4), 511–527, DOI link). Below them, another tile poses a reflective question: “Writing Question: How much vulnerable information should I share?” Adjacent is a post titled “Engagement in decolonial futurity.” The arrangement suggests a mix of academic anchoring references and open-ended editorial questions, visually equalized by the sticky-note tile format.

This screenshot captures additional tiles in the same Padlet, again in a grid. One reads “‘Honouring the agency of the story itself’” with only the subject line visible. Another, longer-titled tile states: “Maybe it would be good for us as editors to record a Zoom call about our values and hopes.” The screenshot shows these among other nearby tiles, many of which are single-sentence prompts without bodies. The visual arrangement continues the mosaic-like, collaborative texture of the board: each tile a fragment, some declarative, some questioning, together building a collective orientation toward writing the special issue introduction.

The final screenshot shows the rightmost or lower section of the Padlet, where later-numbered posts appear. The grid includes reflective tiles such as “Bringing ourselves to the work” (no body text), “the process” with a note inside acknowledging comfort with being named and appreciating intent, and two tiles beginning with “I wonder…”: one about shared methods, and another about inviting contributors to reflect on process. A final tile reads “Re: Nathan’s invite to share parts we were longing for others to see” with a brief body about engaging one another’s work. These posts are shorter and more dialogic, and in the screenshot they visually echo earlier prompts while turning toward personal reflection and collective self-situating. The overall impression is of a collaborative patchwork—each tile a voice or citation—woven into a shared editorial space.

Process Notes

A great deal of thought went into our editorial process-related decisions, especially in to how we might inhabit the academic tradition of journal editing in ways that were aligned with our shared axiological fidelity toward anti-colonial learning, being, and expression.

We will leave the Contributor Hub available for those interested in the proverbial nuts-and-bolts of our process, and encourage you to read our introduction, "...where, in fact, will we go?" Heartful methods, physical culture, anti-colonial autoethnography in order to learn more about how that process played out and why we made the sorts of editorial decisions we did.

Citing from that introduction, we leave you with this:

Looking back, we are pleased to share. Looking forward, we are excited to see this work emerge into the world. We hope it meets you in a place of good connection, at once grounding and vitalizing. We hope you feel the love and care our contributors have so generously and courageously shared. Love, in fact, has been central to this entire project, as Hermann reminds us: “Autoethnographies as cultural critiques are acts of love that hopefully will emancipate a better future for all of us” (2022, p. 75). We hope, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the choices we made as editors, that you find something here that is alive for you. We hope, in the dream of forms, rituals, and voicings of scholarship to come, you are willing to be nourished by this garden we collectively grew. Eat now and come back when you are hungry for more. We hope, through the collected and collective spirit of our intentions, this Special Issue of JESS on Anticolonial Autoethnography invites you in and toward deeper relationships with all that you care about. Whoever you are, however you came to this place, you are welcome here. You have been welcome all along.

With love,

Nathan, Tricia, and Jay

Journal of Emerging Sport Studies - CFP

Sport scholars have increasingly drawn on autoethnography in their interrogations of physical cultural practices and spaces of various kinds, shedding important light on the embodied experiences of these undertakings as well as the workings of power.

The aim of this special issue is to delve into the (as yet under-realized) potential of autoethnographies of physical culture to contribute to an anti-colonial movement, taking up the challenge that “understanding sport as a ‘colonizing tool’ is not widely accepted in the discourse of sport sociology” (Whitinui, 2021, p. 3).

I invite/encourage contributors to “draw connections between violences ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’… and radically imagine how our praxis can actively refuse the colonial trajectory designed by the settler state” (Chen, 2021, p. 745). It is here, I argue, that autoethnographic work has much to offer, both in terms of substantive and theoretical considerations of sport and physical culture and in terms of reflexive considerations of our own physical cultural practices as well as our research about them. All of this, I suggest, is part of the process of thinking through what Kanien'kehá:ka scholar Daniel Henhawk calls a “decolonizing praxis” (2013, p. 511).

In terms of editorial/review process, I invite contributors to engage with each other and each other’s work as part of a broader project of responding to Carly Adams’ recent point in an editorial for Sport History Review : “Authors, editors, publishers, and journal policies and practices transform the academic journal into a space and constitute how the space is experienced and produced. It is not simply a place where academics submit and publish research, a vessel for publication and professional practice” (Adams, 2022, p. 3). Journals and journal editorial policies and practice, in other words, are also key sites of praxis as we work to unsettle the whiteness, able-bodied/mindedness, and other vectors of power structuring and structured by dominant disciplinary and academic conventions. Contributors and I will collaboratively curate a review process that reimagines these principles and politics.

Submission Portal

At all parts of the process, contributors are invited to submit all issue related work using the submissions portal: https://forms.gle/6huS3JCshb6KZ3AX7.

SUBMISSION PROCESS

First, we'll offer authors/creators the opportunity to meet with the editorial team to discuss their contributions, feedback/suggestions for revisions. etc.
Next, we'll connect contributors with other contibutors we believe well suited to support each other's work as peer reviewers. From there, a peer review/revision process will take shape.
Finally, we'll move more squarely into the publication process with the fine-tuning that comes with that.

Again, we sincerely look forward to engaging with your work with our hearts and minds, in a spirit of love, relational accountability, and hope that better worlds are possible.

Collaborative Work Sessions - Zoom Link & Meeting Times

COLLABORATIVE WORK SESSIONS

Jan 26 - 10:00-11:30 MST / 12:00-1:30 EST

Feb 23 - 10:00-11:30 MST / 12:00-1:30 EST

Mar 22 - 10:00-11:30 MST / 12:00-1:30 EST

Apr 26 - 10:00-11:30 MST / 12:00-1:30 EST

May 24 - 10:00-11:30 MST / 12:00-1:30 EST

Jun 21 - 10:00-11:30 MST / 12:00-1:30 EST

ZOOM LINK FOR ALL WORK SESSIONS

Join Zoom Meeting

https://ualberta-ca.zoom.us/j/96295045985?pwd=Qk5MS0tnaGhXRFdXUkNneDlVSUJHdz09

Meeting ID: 962 9504 5985

Passcode: 725299

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Special Issue Editorial Team

For Editorial Team - Links to Collaborative Docs

Submission Portal

- To Submit Work
- To Read Responses

Pathway to Publication:

- Process
- Tracking

Padlet

- Axiological investments
- Resources for contributors

Shared Docs

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