Embracing Discomfort and Manifesting Hope as an Activist Practice

Since first travelling to Japan in 2008, I have been fascinated by the culture of Japanese gift giving, a process of exchange that involves giving, receiving, and repaying.In Japan, the traditional cloths used to wrap and carry things are called Furoshiki and the practice of wrapping is an art.The culture of gifting in Japan, I find both fascinating but also discomforting.I am often befuddled by the expectations around receiving and the weight of the obligation to partake in this exchange process in particular ways.Joy Hendry, in her book Wrapping Culture, discusses the intercultural communication and the meanings and expectations associated with the practice of gift giving and how wrapping and unwrapping are intentional acts. 1 When we offer a gift, we are simultaneously offering something but also creating a 'debt' of a sort.It is relational work that calls us to lean into discomfort and to make meaning from it.Much of my work with the Sport History Review over the past seventeen years (as book review editor, editorial board member, associate editor and editor) has been relational work of giving and receiving.There is much I reflect on from conversations and discussions with authors, colleagues, mentors, and students who have pushed me in sometimes uncomfortable but also productive and necessary ways as they challenge me to look closely at my presuppositions, my responsibilities, and my praxes.As anthropologists Susanna Harris and Laurence Douny write: "to unwrap is not simply to reverse wrapping; the act of unwrapping is significant in itself and has its own outcomes." 2And yet, as Hendry writes "we are perhaps overly concerned with the 'unwrapping' with revealing the perceived essence of things, when we might do well to examine a little further the nature of the concealment used." 3 I often think about the "wrappings" we use in our lives, our research practices and our teachingto think about what they mean and what is revealed when we unwrap the structures, logics, and taken-for-granted ways of engaging in and with academia, sport history, and our own research practices.How do we make visible and refuse the status quo, read the silences, embrace counternarratives, sit in the surprise and awe of uncomfortable disclosures, and unravel our research practices and conventions as we look to the future?