(Re)Occupying a cultural commons: reclaiming the labour process in critical sports studies

Scholars have been slow to recognize the impact of the developing ‘information society’ on the political economy of intellectual work. This paper draws on recent work exploring critical models of higher education practice in art education as well as in political economy and philosophy exploring copying, accumulation by dispossession and the threats of commodification of the commons of culture, external and internal nature to explore the current circumstances of scholarship in sport. It draws on theories of the commons to argue that sport social scientists must grapple with the antagonisms between scholarship and copyright and between membership of a ‘secular vocation’ and the relations of intellectual production and labour processes of the contemporary corporate university. Finally, drawing on the principles of critical social science, this paper considers a range of desirable, viable and achievable objectives of the teaching, writing and publishing to propose ways that scholars can respond to these emerging relations of intellectual labour and production.