The Quest for Social Justice in Sport

Helen Jefferson Lenskyj is one of the world’s foremost critical scholars of sports. For decades, her writings have been both destinations and starting points for many of us. The Quest for Social Justice in Sport is both a distillation of her work and a new and innovative intervention: a distillation in that it follows on from her established concerns; new and innovative because it takes on sports’ most pressing contemporary issues with equally powerful research, theorization, and commitment

-- Toby Miller, Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey

Helen Jefferson Lenskyj is pre-eminent among critical sport scholars – academics who have written and taught about sport as a prism through which to explain the social and political world in all its often ugly manifestations. Most of these ugly manifestations – colonialism, the use of banned drugs, commercialism, violence, corrosive individualism, racism, sexism, transphobia – are considered in this excellent book, along with examples and suggestions of how sport can be reimagined as what the philosopher Ivan Illich called a tool for conviviality. More and more people, as the book recognises, value physical activity for its intrinsic pleasures and not for fame, fortune or the establishment of world records. This, as Lenskyj shows, means not only considering strategies of ‘desportification’ but also acknowledging the nurturant properties of long-suppressed Indigenous cultures. Way to go.

-- Stephen Wagg, Honorary Fellow, International Centre for Sports History and Culture, De Montfort University, Leicester UK

I used to ask my students to imagine a world without elite competitive sport—and they couldn’t. It’s everywhere: in schools, on screens, billboards, and in our feeds. No wonder it’s hard to see past it.

In this accessible and thought-provoking book, Helen Lenskyj not only challenges us to imagine alternatives—she shows us what they look like. Through a sharp critique of how colonial norms, binary thinking, and the Olympic industry have shaped the last half-century of sport, she outlines the deep inequalities built into the system. But this isn’t just critique—it’s a reimagining.

By centering the voices of activists and scholars, and spotlighting vibrant, community-based forms of movement, Lenskyj offers a vision rooted in joy, justice, and belonging. And maybe—just maybe—it’ll help the next generation see beyond the narrow confines of elite sport and toward something more inclusive, more humane, and more hopeful.

-- Janice Forsyth, Professor, Indigenous Land-Based Physical Culture and Wellness Kinesiology, University of British Columbia

The Quest for Social Justice in Sport is the provocative book that athletic participants need and that most sports organizations will do their best to dutifully ignore, lest they find themselves questioning the premise of their existence. In an era when sport is being put to work to advance oppressive conservative agendas, at the cost of community, the joys of inclusion and belonging, and the livelihoods and even lives of some of the most marginalized participants, Helen Lenskyj cuts through the noise, delivering an exacting diagnosis of the root problems of the failings of contemporary sport and what can be done about them. In this strident, fearless critique of the social exclusions and hierarchies that have been normalized through sporting practices, and of the corporate and political players that have transformed sport into a win-at-all-costs industry, Lenskyj embodies the best of feminist scholarship, attending to the diverse ways that power and domination compromise sport’s promise to celebrate the breadth of human diversity and be a vehicle of social equality. The solution Lenksyj proposes asks of sports lovers to face the notion that the time has come for sport itself––that is, the very word, and the violent practices this word has come to stand for––to be revised, replaced with a liberatory language and practice that allows us to collectively access the joy of movement.

-- Dr Madeleine Pape, Olympian, Sociolo