Dave Zirin is the sports editor of The Nation Magazine. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports including the forthcoming The Kaepernick Effect: Taking A Knee, Changing The World. He is also the host of the Edge of Sports Podcast.

Royce White is an humanitarian, author, creator, entrepreneur and professional athlete. He is currently the founder and CEO of Vitruvian, Inc., a science, technology and engineering company. White says Vitruvian’s initial focus is healthcare, food and water. Current projects include Anxious Minds, Inc. and Vardas Solutions, Inc. The goal of these two companies is advancing mental health care access and efficiency. White is also the founder of WING, Inc., a media and electronics company. It’s subsidiaries include The Last Renaissance & Just Another Talk Show.

White led protests for the 10K Foundation following the tragic death of George Floyd in 2020. The 10K Foundation started with a group of community members in Minnesota that came together and orchestrated events of protest, peace and healing after George Floyd was brutally suffocated to death by Minneapolis police officer (Derek Chauvin) on May 25, 2020.

Mary G. McDonald is the Homer C. Rice Chair in Sports and Society in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A past president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, her research focuses on American culture and sport including issues of inequality as related to gender, race, class, and sexuality. Professor McDonald has published more than 50 refereed articles and book chapters and co-edited Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation, a foundational work in the field which earned a Choice award as a top academic title. Dr. McDonald recently co-edited two additional anthologies, Sports, Society, and Technology: Bodies, Practices, and Knowledge Production with Jennifer Sterling (Palgrave, 2020) and Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussions with Matt Ventresca (Routledge, 2020). She is currently working on a book, tentatively titled, “We Got Next:” The Affective Politics of the WNBA. As Homer C. Rice Chair, she directs the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts initiative in Sports, Society, and Technology.

Doug Hartmann is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath (Chicago, 2003), and co-author of Migration, Incorporation, and Change in an Interconnected World (Routledge/Taylor Francis 2015, with Syed Ali) and of Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Pine Forge Press, 2007 with Stephen Cornell). With Chris Uggen, he publishes The Society Pages, an open access social science hub. He is past president of the Midwest Sociological Society and co-Principal Investigator of the American Mosaic Project and the Kids’ Involvement and Diversity Study (KIDS).