Sport, Social Movements, and New Media: Digital Sporting Pedagogy in Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp

This study explores how social movements and alternative/activist media initiatives tactically mobilize the phenomenon of sport in their digital messaging to frame social critique, expand to greater digital publics, and solicit resources for counterhegemonic endeavors. In doing so, they exhibit the potentials and challenges of adapting a Gramscian and Freirean model of critical pedagogy to the digital age. Through a textual analysis of two digital documents created by Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp, I call attention to the emergence of a digital sporting pedagogy, referring to a project of strategically using mobilizing sport for political conscientization across digital media. Know Your Rights Camp is thus a case study of a progressive articulation of sport that presents an alternative to the increasingly conservative and corporatized model of (new) sports media. I conclude by calling for a “bottom-up” approach to sport communication that explores how everyday people and communities are assembling and assigning meaning to sport at a grassroots level.