Meet the New Guy

Ok, well this is a bit weird. I haven’t written about hockey on a blog aside from my own in close to 5 years, but here we are. I suppose now would probably be a good time to introduce myself, since I’m sure most of you have no idea who on earth I am. You were likely very surprised last week when the Oilers Rig twitter feed blew up about a new writer joining the team – and let’s be honest, no one was more surprised to learn I was getting recalled from the ECHL of blogs directly back to the show than I was. And yet…

Hi! I’m Stephen Sheps. You might remember me from such blogs as Lowetide‘s comment section and Copper n Blue. I was briefly their travel correspondent and occasional purveyor of philosophically oriented hockey analysis. I also write a blog of my own, Bringing Back the Glory, which some friends of mine started in 2007 but became my personal page as of 2012. So despite probably not being particularly well-known to most of you and even a few of my new OilersRig colleagues until I mysteriously appeared on Twitter last month, I’ve actually been writing about the Oilers for 8 years.

My Oilers writing started as a distraction from doing actual work while I was writing my masters thesis. It would later become a fantastic procrastination tactic during my PhD. Eventually my little blog became a space where I would test drive some of my academic ideas without needing to go through ethics boards, peer review or any other gatekeepers that might prevent me from posting random stuff on the internet about sports. I also started using the blog as a teaching tool once I finished my PhD and I had a captive audience.

I used to write about hockey and sociological theory, trying to use abstract sociopolitical concepts to help understand why the team we all love so much was so terrible. Much like in my academic career, I discovered that Foucault and Derrida are pretty good at showing us what is structurally wrong with the world but are terrible at showing us a way out. This of course meant that my dream of fusing hockey and post-structural theory together was a dead-end. However as a (once and hopefully soon to be) sociology professor, I can’t quite get away from applying sociological analysis to hockey related things so I’m trying to build a scholarly career around the game I love. I’m currently working on two projects: The first is on racism, nationalism and the failure of multiculturalism in Canadian hockey, a project that will likely become a book in 3 years or so. The second is an article I am writing with a bit of help from G Money that looks at the origins of the advanced stats movement in hockey. You can read more about these projects here and here.

I’m not sure what my focus will be at the OilersRig just yet as I am still finding my way and getting to know the rest of the writers as well as the style and tone of the community. I imagine it will be similar to my regular work, so I will be cross-posting both here and at my home site. Some academic work will appear here as a way to test concepts with actual people before the academics get their hands on it. Of course there will be other stuff more explicitly Oilers related – this is an Oilers site after all! I’m excited to get to know the regular readers a little more and to work with such a talented set of writers. Thanks for reading. This will be fun.