Faculty Pub Night: Rudy Mondragón on "Dignity and Dissent: Life in the Brutal economy of Boxing"

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The first Faculty Pub Night of the 2026-27 season features Rudy Mondragón, assistant professor of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies (Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts). He will discuss his recent publication, "Rings of Dissent: Boxing and Performances of Rebellion."

About Faculty Pub Night

Students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of the public are all invited to the 2026-27 series of Faculty Pub Night at the William H. Hannon Library. Eight LMU professors are selected annually to discuss their latest publication or project in a comfortable setting and format that welcomes diverse perspectives for an inclusive conversation aimed to educate the entire community. All Faculty Pub Nights are free and open to the public.

About the Author's Work

What can a boxing ring entrance teach us about dignity, dissent, and the politics of labor? In "Rings of Dissent: Boxing and Performances of Rebellion" (University of Illinois Press, 2025), winner of the North American Society for Sports History 2025 Anthology Award, professor Rudy Mondragón and co-editors Gaye Theresa Johnson and David J. Leonard reframe boxing as a site of cultural production where fighters challenge dominant ideologies through music, fashion, and expressive culture.

There’s an urgent need for this perspective in today’s sporting and political landscape. Professional boxing operates without a national governing body, leaving fighters to navigate what insiders call the “Wild West” of fragmented state regulations, exploitative contracts, and winner-take-all economics. Of the 25,000 professional boxers registered worldwide, only a handful earn living wages for high-risk work. In conditions like these, fighters claim agency through what Mondragón calls “sporting entitlements”—the curated ways athletes deploy expressive culture to disrupt subordination and assert belonging.

Drawing on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork and over 40 interviews with world champions and industry stakeholders, Mondragón’s work extends his broader scholarship, including articles in "Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies," "Journal of Sport History," and "Kalfou," alongside his public-facing commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle, ESPN, Zócalo Public Square, and L.A. Taco. A 2024 SoCal Journalism Award finalist, Mondragón is also at work on "On the Ropes" (under contract with University of Illinois Press), and his policy work with the California State Athletic Commission positions his scholarship to reach students, athletes, and anyone invested in how working-class communities of color transform sites of exploitation into spaces of dignity.

About the Author

Rudy Mondragón is an assistant professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at LMU. He works mainly at the intersection of ethnic studies and the sociology of sport, with a focus on how professional boxers assert dignity and resistance within an exploitative industry. His scholarship advances two original concepts—the “brutal economy of boxing” and “sporting entitlements”—that examine how fighters navigate underregulated labor conditions and deploy expressive culture as a form of dissent. He is co-editor of "Rings of Dissent: Boxing and Performances of Rebellion" (University of Illinois Press, 2025), winner of the North American Society for Sports History 2025 Anthology Award, and is at work on his monograph "On the Ropes: Performances of Dignity and Resistance within the Brutal Economy of Boxing," under contract with the University of Illinois Press. From 2022 to 2024, he was a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, where he co-authored a policy brief on labor struggles for professional boxers in California. His work has been recognized with a 2024 SoCal Journalism Award nomination and grants from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute and the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. He lives in Long Beach with his family.

About the William H. Hannon Library

The William H. Hannon Library fosters excellence in academic achievement through an array of distinctive services that enable learners to feed their curiosity, experience new worlds, develop their ideas, inform their decision-making, and inspire others. More information can be found at http://library.lmu.edu

For more information about this event, contact the Outreach and Engagement team at the William H. Hannon library via email at library.outreach@lmu.edu or call 310-338-5234.