UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a study of agency and liberatory practices for Black women’s basketball players within a holistically surveilled, predominantly White institution (PWI). Central to this study is the exploration of the dynamics surrounding Black labor in sport, particularly how the regulation and confinement of the body, mind, and spirit of Black student athletes allows for their continued exploitation by the institution of sport in U.S. higher education. I use Afrocentric feminist epistemology to design and execute a participatory study that flips the proverbial script on student athlete research: empowering Black student athletes to critically evaluate their own lived experiences while simultaneously exploring ways of disrupting the tools of regulation currently confining their agency and autonomy. In doing so, this dissertation highlights both how the regulation and control of Black female student athletes is inextricably linked to power, race and gender, and identifies where we can collectively build towards increased freedoms.

I built the participatory action research (PAR) methodology utilized in this study upon the conceptual intersections of Black feminisms and surveillance studies. As such, I also leveraged the site of data collection was also leveraged as a space for participants to identify opportunities to secure and exercise agency and bodily autonomy in real time—a process fellow PAR scholars refer to as the design serving as the intervention. I argue that by empowering Black women to authentically tell their own narratives we can disrupt an institution’s ability to uphold exploitative labor and domestication practices. This work serves as a call to action; in identifying opportunities for student athlete agency and bodily autonomy within a surveilled system. This call likewise challenges institutional actors to increase support for current student athletes in their quest to defiantly look back. While this dissertation primarily centers experiences of surveillance at the site of the institution of sport within U.S. higher education, findings also interrogate the holistic regulation and control of the Black woman’s body in society at large. The study includes a focus on timely issues surrounding biometric technologies and their implications on data privacy and consent policy, understanding the role and influence of sports media in confining Black womanhood, tracking the sustained emotional and cultural labor experienced by Black women in predominantly White spaces, and exploring emerging digital media tools that enable Black women to reimagine the possibilities of storytelling and resistance.