Physical Cultural Studies [Redux

Abstract

Congratulations to the editors and the contributing authors to this special edition of the Sociology of Sport Journal for deftly underscoring the promises and prospects of physical cultural studies (PCS). As a self-identified PCS enthusiast, I applaud their probing, thought-provoking and penetrative analyses of the emerging field. While PCS is a nascent field of inquiry, it is never too premature for boundaries, parameters, mandates and definitions to be proposed and contested. Each of the respective articles blends a range of theoretical traditions—from cultural studies to poststructural to spatial to critical pedagogic—into the simmering PCS stew. The separate articles in this edition of the SSJ illustrate active bodies as they are articulated in/through space, place, discourses and the research process in an intriguing manner. The articles challenge readers and potential skeptics of the PCS oeuvre to reflect seriously on the pressing need for sociocultural researchers of sport, physical activity, health and exercise to demarcate new paradigmatic boundaries in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, these are important definitional times within the academy. Both the context and culture of academic research has changed, rather immensely I think, over the past decade. Given the rise of audit cultures within universities and colleges; the crumbling of traditional university business models and upsurge of neoliberal practices of “fund raising”; a groundswell in conservative ideologies across many Western landscapes; the ongoing redesign of sport, exercise and health faculties/ departments along kinesiological and neo-positivist lines; and a proliferating skepticism about the public utility of social research in Canada, the United States and United Kingdom (as evidenced, for example, by the sweeping funding cuts to social scientific teaching and research in British universities in 2010); a broadening of the sociocultural study of sport, exercise, health, movement, dance and play is not only timely, it is long overdue. The pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge has most likely gone the way of the dinosaur, and social scientific units around the world are forced to justify their existence, daily operation, staffing, funding and future along lines of outcomes, deliverables, products or other empirical means-toan-end rationales. The survival of the “sociology of sport” subdiscipline, therefore, may very well depend upon a new sense of praxis and communitas among us; one including a reconceptualized understanding of what the hell it is we do every day (and for whom).