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Tracie Canada

Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology
Box 90091, Durham, NC 27708
1316 Campus Drive, Box 90677, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the founder and director of the HEARTS (Health, Ethnography, and Race through Sports) Lab and and is affiliated with the Duke Sports & Race Project. As a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer, she researches and teaches about race, sport, kinship, and the performing body. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. She is also a NSF CAREER Award grantee.  

For more information, please visit her website: www.traciecanada.com.

Her book, Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football (University of California Press, 2025), is an ethnography about the lived experiences of Black college football players. This work moves off the gridiron into the daily lives of the young Black athletes that sustain this American sport. Informed by more than a year of ethnographic research at universities in the southeastern United States, this book tells how institutional systems and everyday spaces order, discipline, and enact violence against Black players. Through an analysis of college athletes, Blackness, and two types of care, she argues that Black college football players successfully move through their everyday lives by reimagining certain kinship relationships and relying on various geographies of care.

An overall goal of her ethnographic research is to recenter and decanonize not only what we consider to be anthropological knowledge, but also who we consider to be academic and public knowledge producers. She is committed to bringing current social, political, and popular culture events into the intellectual conversation, and to highlighting how valuable lived and embodied knowledge can be. In her current and future projects, she aims to acknowledge what football, and the lived experiences of its Black players, can tell us about racial, historical, political, and power dynamics in the contemporary United States. She is particularly interested in the performing body to reveal how social hierarchies and inequalities manifest in embodied practice and how processes of violence and care are both impactful.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology · 2024 - Present Cultural Anthropology, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology · 2022 - Present Cultural Anthropology, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Assistant Professor in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies · 2024 - Present Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published March 25, 2025
What Nourishes Black College Football Players? Moms and Teammates.
Published March 27, 2023
Trinity Anthropology Course Explores Our Obsession Over Sports
Published March 17, 2023
Seven New Projects Build Intellectual Communities Among Duke Faculty

View All News

Recent Publications


Turning the Spyglass of Anthropology to Tackle Football

Journal Article Kinesiology Review · May 1, 2025 Drawing on almost a decade of immersive research with Black college football players, I argue that an anthropological and ethnographic approach to tackle football can complement studies in kinesiology by acknowledging the humanity, personhood, and lived ex ... Full text Cite
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Recent Grants


CAREER: The Science of Risk Assessment

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2025 - 2030

Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant: Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Wenner-Gren Foundation · 2025 - 2025

Black in Blue: An Oral History

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation · 2023 - 2025

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Education, Training & Certifications


University of Virginia · 2020 Ph.D.
Duke University · 2012 A.B.

External Links


www.traciecanada.com