Physical Cultural Studies Research Papers (original) (raw)

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- Materials Science, Physical Cultural Studies, Ion Implantation, Ion

The concept of broken symmetry is used to study stability of equilibrium and time doubly-periodic bifurcating solutions of the complex nonresonant Lorenz model as a function of the fre-quency detuning on the basis of modiied Hopf theory. By contrast to the well-known real Lorenz equations, the system in question is invariant under the action of Lie group transformations (ro-tations in complex planes) and an invariant set of stationary points is found to bifurcate into an invariant torus, which is stable under the detuning exceeding its critical value. If the detuning then goes downward numerical analysis reveals that after a cascade of period-doublings the strange Lorenz attractor is formed in the vicinity of zero detuning.

- by Alexei D Kiselev
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- Numerical Analysis, Physical Cultural Studies, Lie Group
- by Georgios Lykesas
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- Creativity, Physical Activity, Teaching Methods, Physical Cultural Studies

Within this paper, I conceptualise practices of the body that are learnt and deployed as part of feminised body work within the cultural context of girls’ leisure. These are practices of the body that are engaged by young women in ways that allow them to (re)construct their subjectivities as well as ‘negotiate a physical sense of themselves’. Therefore, this paper begins by mapping the theoretical foundations upon which the analysis of femininity is couched. Predi- cated upon debates that distinguish between the girl as a passive, duped recipient of culture’s pedagogical signs and the girl as an active, autonomous ‘freely choosing’, ‘freely consuming’ citizen, I draw out the ways in which young girls’ body practices can shed light on the complex relationship between ‘choice’, agency, consumption and subjectivity. Drawing on data collected from workshops and focus groups, I locate consumption, body management and beautification as constituents and simultaneously constitutors of leisure time. I thus offer insight into the ways in which a group of twenty 13-year-old girls who attended a private (fee paying) school in the West of England account for, maintain, develop, and in places resist, localised appearance cultures. Structured around certain leisure activities – reading magazines, shopping for clothes, eating, engaging in physical activity, applying beauty products, make-up and hair styling – this paper concludes by highlighting the ways in which wider cultural discourses are having embodied effects and are being consumed, not without consequence, as commonplace everyday preoccupations.

- by Jessica Francombe-Webb
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- Cultural Studies, Gender, Feminism, Body Image

This collection explores how feminist knowledges work as interventions in physical cultures and recognises the considerable contribution of feminist theories and methodologies to understanding the power relations implicated in embodied movement. Our introductory piece weaves together questions about the gendered formation of physical cultures (across leisure, sport, the arts, tourism, well-being and various embodied practices) with key issues raised by contributing authors from a range of disciplinary perspectives and theory-method approaches. Exploring questions of digital and physical cultures, more-than-human relations, post and decolonial ways of knowing and contemporary onto-epistemologies, this feminist collection aims to contribute to the movement of ideas within and across Physical Cultural Studies. Bringing together diverse perspectives around our common focus we entangle physical cultures with a range of gendered problematisations and interventions that produce different ways of knowing, imagining and doing feminisms.

- by Simone Fullagar and +1
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- Sociology of Sport, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Posthumanism

This chapter explores the gendered dimensions of aesthetic body work practices. Currently, the aesthetic body is a site of intense focus and concern. The aesthetic body is both the target of a range of growing commercial industries, as well as a key focus of academic and theoretical study. Drawing on data from a qualitative study of young people’s body work practices, this chapter explores the aesthetic body work practices of muscle-building and cosmetic surgery. The chapter mobilises concepts of affect, assemblage and becoming to understand the aesthetically-motivated practices of muscle-building and cosmetic surgery. This approach contributes to developing the use of post-human concepts in empirical research. The chapter concludes with a discussion of possible implications for the use of such concepts for physical cultural studies.

- by Julia Coffey
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- Sociology, Feminist Theory, Gender, Sociology of the Body

The aim of this article is to put in order essential issues that deal with the application of autoethnography in physical culture research. After outlining the main tenets and variations of autoethnography. I present how this ethnographic... more

- by Dominika Czarnecka
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- Research Methodology, Autoethnography, Fitness, Physical Cultural Studies

In this paper, I conduct a feminist multi-modal critical discourse analysis (FMCDA) of the Lorna Jane (LJ) retail website (www.lornajane.com.au), an Australian fitness fashion company, to examine the discursive strategies used by the company to authorise a particular notion of “active living” for women. Specifically, I shall examine how the semiotic choices on the LJ website signify key discourses and themes related to health and fitness and how they are used to place the responsibility for fitness and health onto individual women. In particular, I focus on the discourses inscribed through the technologies, styles, fabrics, colours, cuts, and sizing of LJ clothing items. I am also interested in the underlying choices, assumptions, and biases of these constructions and the power relationships underpinning them. I conclude that “empowerment” for women on the LJ website is imagined in a limited, individualistic way.

- by Meredith Nash
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- Discourse Analysis, Sociology, Gender Studies, Fashion design

Started in the 1860s in Prague, in order to provide physical education to the Czech people, Sokol gymnastics subsequently became a larger political movement and characteristic part of Pan-Slavism. Around 1910, the Russians
introduced Sokol gymnastics, replacing German gymnastics as the official system of physical education in the army and at school. The First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution interrupted this development: the Sokol instructors, together with and rank-and-file members, either went to the army and died in action or were persecuted in the early 1920s when the
Soviet authorities disbanded pre-revolutionary gymnastics. Nearly seventy years later, in 1991, a mixture of historical events, in which some element of chance played a part, brought the Sokol back to Russia. The movement, though very small in scale and limited mainly to Moscow and the Moscow
Region, continued into the twenty-first century.

- by Irina Sirotkina
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- Dance Studies, Slavic Studies, Physical Cultural Studies
- by Michael Giardina
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- Sociology of Sport, Physical Cultural Studies

This research is concerned with the 2003 UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage, which allows the inscription of activities such as performing arts, skills and traditions into the UNESCO world cultural heritage lists. One practice potentially worthy of consideration for such recognition is raqs sharqi (‘oriental dance’ in Arabic; a style of bellydance), originating in Egypt in the 1920s and now practised worldwide.
Egyptian raqs sharqi, in this thesis, is examined in a way that centralises the question of how such forms of heritage are embodied and transmitted by people (within and across cultures) via their practices, experiences and traditions. The aim is to identify the cultural heritage characteristics of Egyptian raqs sharqi and evaluate if it can be considered heritage and how it locates itself within the field of ICH. In pursuing this aim, this thesis explores the challenges involved in safeguarding Egyptian raqs sharqi as transcultural, living and embodied heritage, whilst critically examining the suitability of separating cultural heritage into tangible and intangible forms.
A multidisciplinary, dialogical and holistic framework for dance/heritage is constructed, connecting dance theory, philosophically influenced sociology (particularly the nondualistic theories of Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu and Giddens) and cultural heritage studies. An ethnochoreological approach and a qualitative methodology are adopted, analysing formal aspects of dance (including movements and artefacts) and its socio-cultural context, using: analysis of online videos of dance and textual sources; online ethnography and one-to-one interviews.
The result is a reconstruction of Egyptian raqs sharqi history and the current discourse around it. What emerges is a holistic, ever-evolving phenomenon that develops through the interaction of transculturality, tangible and intangible elements and dialectic between individual agency and social structures, change and tradition. These elements influence the authenticity discourse, heritage transmission, threats and opportunities for its safeguarding.
Subsequently, a dynamic approach, with four interdependent stages (heritage identification, curation, sharing and promotion) is suggested for its safeguarding. As people are central to this type of heritage, the involvement of members of the public is strongly encouraged, at every stage, through public engagement initiatives.

- by Valeria Lo Iacono
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- Dance Studies, Ethnography, Anthropology Of Dance, Internet research methods
- by Liviu Bordas
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- Romanian History, Yoga, Yoga Philosophy, Romanian Studies

This is an open access monograph published by Cardiff University Press

- by Paul Bowman
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- Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Poststructuralism, Cultural Theory

To grasp the connectedness of our thoughts, feelings and senses as they are implicated in embodied movement we need more nuanced ways of thinking sport and physical culture as phenomena that materialize through complex biopsychosocial relations (as distinct from biopsy models of illness and treatment). In this chapter I take up the question of how embodied movement matters in mental health with respect to the materiality of all knowledge practices (science and social science, qualitative and quantitative research). I argue through a diffractive analysis that embodied movement practices can be thought of as phenomena that are co-implicated in the performance of recovery from depression. I draw together several trajectories of thought that emerge from Karen Barad’s (2007, 2003) diffractive analysis as well as Deleuze and Guattari and feminist readings concerned with affective relations and assemblages (Fox & Alldred, 2016; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Coleman and Ringrose, 2013). Through post-qualitative inquiry I explore how embodied movement is co-implicated in the affective, entangled relations that shape women’s recovery from depression in an Australian study.

- by Simone Fullagar
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- Sociology of Sport, Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory

Foreward & Table of Contents

- by Simone Fullagar
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- Sociology of Sport, Recreation & Leisure Studies, Feminism, Gender and Sport

This article explores the contemporary co-production of bicycle practices in Copenhagen and the heterogeneous work involved in making a city pro-cycling. Attention is given as much to the sayings and doings of everyday commuters, as to planners, physical designs and campaigns. I ask: why, and how, are cycling practices continually (re)produced in Copenhagen and how can they attract so many practitioners? The first section discusses and employs practice theory, as it is well suited for examining practices of cycling. The second section explores how Copenhagen Municipality designed and scripted a cycle-friendly space by installing bike infrastructure, promoting cultural meanings and nourishing user competences. I argue that this is done through a heterogeneous process of normalizing and mainstreaming cycling and making alliances with other commuters. The third section shows how cyclists co-produce cycling practices by performing cycling and by enlisting and passing on knowledge to new practitioners. The concluding highlights the potentials of practice theory to fully understand cycling, and it unravels some of the problems of Copenhagenizing low-cycling cities.

- by Jonas Larsen
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- Sociology, Cultural Studies, Geography, Practice theory

In this article I examine the 'turn to' post-‐qualitative inquiry, new materialism and post-‐ humanist theories to consider the challenges of, and implications for, doing research in sport, health and physical culture. The term 'post-‐qualitative inquiry' (PQI) indicates a decisive departure from the ethico-‐onto-‐epistemological assumptions that have informed the humanist interpretive tradition of qualitative research (St Pierre 2011). Moving beyond a theory/method divide, PQI draws its methodological inspiration from critical post-‐humanist debates concerned with how 'matter' is thought and constituted through entanglements of human and non-‐human bodies, affects, objects and practices. Such a shift reorients thinking around relational questions about the material-‐discursive forces coimplicated in what bodies can 'do' and how matter 'acts', rather than a concern with what 'is' a body or the agentic meaning of experience. I discuss how these new styles of thought reorient our onto-‐ epistemological assumptions and theory-‐method approaches through engagement with PQI within (and beyond) sport, health and physical culture scholarship.

- by Jonas Larsen and +1
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- Sociology, Sociology of Sport, Geography, Cultural Geography
- by Tara Brabazon
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- Cultural Studies, Human Movement Science, Mhealth, eHealth

Најзначајније промене у српском спорту – попут укидања старих спортских друштава и савеза, који су били организовани приватном иницијативом и који су представљали важан део грађанског идентитета, формирања нових, на идеологизованим и етатизованим основама, и успостављања кровних огранизација спорта и физичке културе, које су биле директно повезане са државним и партијским форумима – десиле су се непосредно по ослобођењу земље, током 1944. и 1945. године. Овај рад има за циљ да дâ општи предглед тих промена, укаже на неке опште трендове у процесу реорганизације српског спорта и да опише процес почетка изградње социјалистичког система спорта и физичке културе. У писању рада коришћена је релевантна литература и штампа, као и објављени документи и документи из архивских фондова.

- by Dejan Zec
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- Cold War and Culture, Sports History, Cold War, Serbian

The following paper aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary field of enquiry addressing the ways in which lifestyle and informal sports can inform policy debate and development at various levels. It will do so by considering the ambivalent position that parkour is taking within policies of urban and community re-branding enacted in Turin, Italy. Parkour in Turin is an increasingly structured discipline often endorsed by events celebrating the city’s vibrancy, and by local projects that target youth, and promote social participation. However, this discipline implies also a spontaneous and irreverent engagement with urban spaces that often creates frictions and conflicts between traceurs (parkour practitioners) and other actors in relation to what constitutes the public, how it should be used and by whom. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research with a group of 20 traceurs predominantly of migrant origins, this study focuses on the participants’ ambivalent engagement with one project promoting social participation through sports in Turin’s urban spaces. Building on the ethnographic material, this paper addresses the emerging relationship between social projects, informal urban practices and emerging forms of creative urbanism. The discussion focuses on the ambiguities and fault lines of urban agendas incorporating lifestyle and informal sports in their (neoliberal) vocabulary of community and place regeneration. However, this paper calls also for the necessity to engage with spontaneous, informal physical practices as a way to acknowledge, and support existing, contested negotiations of citizenship and belonging in urban spaces.

- by Kyle Kusz
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- Film Studies, Masculinity Studies, Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies

Located within a cultural space situated firmly in the political, technological, and historical context of the contemporary moment and predicated on the contention that all texts are dialogic, the author reads physical cultural technologies as constituents of the powerful techniques of self-regulation and self-surveillance of the young female body.“We Cheer” acts as a discursive technology, a noncentralized capillary-like force that works to “conduct the conduct” of subjects. Emanating from these media are digital discourses through which young girls are learning not only how to move their bodies appropriately but also how the have to be to fit the mould and “join the squad.” As a powerful and pervasive public pedagogy,“We Cheer” (re)establishes the position of the neoliberal girl norm, that is, a girl whose body is representative of her being (heterosexy) middle class, white, and a young consumer–citizen.

- by Jessica Francombe-Webb
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- Cultural Studies, Digital Media, Digital Technology, Gender

Roller derby is a growing, popular sport, where teams compete on roller skates, and where rules allow ‘blocking’ and full body contact. Roller derby is primarily played by women, with men restricted to support roles during its revival stage in the early 2000s. However, men and gender diverse skaters are increasingly playing the sport, in mixed/co-ed leagues and Men’s teams. This has created deep divisions within the derby community regarding the role of men in a women’s space and the playing of a full-contact sport with men against women on the track. The tensions within derby highlight the wider gendered problems in sport regarding perceptions of athletic ability, strength and capability. Drawing on an ethnographic methodology, we present a range of perspectives from derby players and counter-point their lived experiences with the structural constraints on gender enforced by the governing bodies with the sport Women’s Flat Track Derby Association and Men’s Roller Derby Association. We explicitly engage from a radically inclusive position inspired by Hargreaves’ call for sport to challenge gendered notions of capability.

- by adele pavlidis
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- Sociology of Sport, Gender Studies, Masculinities, Sports and Gender

There are numerous ways to theorise about elements of civilisations and societies known as ‘body’, ‘movement’, or ‘physical’ cultures. Inspired by the late Henning Eichberg’s notions of multiple and continually shifting body cultures, this article explores his constant comparative (trialectic)
approach via the Mexican martial art, exercise, and human development philosophy—Xilam. Situating Xilam within its historical and political context and within a triad of Mesoamerican, native, and modern martial arts, combat sports, and other physical cultures, I map this complexity through Eichberg’s triadic model of achievement, fitness, and experience sports. I then focus my analysis on the aspects of movement in space as seen in my ethnographic fieldwork in one branch of the Xilam school. Using a bare studio as the setting and my body as principle instrument, I provide an impressionist portrait of what it is like to train in Xilam within a communal dance hall (space) and typical class session of two hours (time) and to form and express warrior identity from it. This article displays the techniques; gestures and bodily symbols that encapsulate the essence of the Xilam body culture, calling for a way to theorise from not just from and on the body but also across body cultures.
Keywords: body cultures; comparative analysis; Eichberg; ethnography; games; martial arts; Mexico; physical culture; space; theory

- by George Jennings
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- Social Theory, Ethnography, Martial Arts, Mexico (Anthropology)

The following is the Delphine Hanna Lecture presented at the National Association for Kinesiology in Higher Education annual conference in Orlando, Florida, January 5th, 2017 at 6pm. This will be published in the journal Quest in the... more

- by Brian Culp
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- Religion, Multiculturalism, Diversity, Immigration

The space taken in the last years by the development of " performance texts " (see Finley 2005) redirected attention to the process of doing research, rather than looking for truth, answers, and expert knowledge. This focus on the process of knowledge construction, rather than the generalizability of " evidence-based " knowledge, has made the process of methodological design and representation a fundamental element in contemporary qualitative research. Through methodology, the researcher articulates the ontological, epistemological and axiological perspectives informing a study, therefore not shying from stating one's personal and political stance on the knowledge construction process. By drawing on a long-term research engagement with young men of migrant origins negotiating self, place and belonging through the practice of capoeira and parkour in Turin, Italy, I address the relationship between the above mentioned perspectives and the embodied research act. In doing this, I intend to explore the complexity, reflexivity and empirical vulnerability of doing embodied research on physical cultures and inequality, by considering the methodological bricolage (Kincheloe, 2001, 2005; Lincoln, 2001; Kincheloe and McLaren, 2002) that enabled me and the participants to co-create knowledge during the research process. In reflecting on the set of qualitative methods used in the research (from ethnographic participation to collaborative forms of writing and video composition with participants, to textual analysis) I do not claim for a particular methodological novelty. Instead, I am wary of claims regarding innovative approaches enabling to do " better " research, but possibly implying the constitution of emerging hierarchies of knowledge. Rather, I intend to elaborate on what kind of knowledge was enabled by the tentative blurring of the boundaries between researcher and researched, and the co-emergence of meaning and experience in the bodily, spatially, and temporally connoted dimensions of the ethnographic encounter (see also Pink, 2011; Francombe et al., 2014; Fullagar, 2017). The findings of this ongoing reflection will inform a discussion on the possibilities and challenges of embodied critical research in illuminating and addressing sites of inequality at the intersection of body, space, self and power.

- by Nicola De Martini Ugolotti
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- Ethnography, Bricolage, Qualitative Research, Visual Research Methods
- by Simone Fullagar
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- Sociology of Sport, Gender Studies, Youth Studies, Recreation & Leisure Studies
- by Andrij Rovenchak
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- Physical Cultural Studies

Based on research with middle-upper class 12–13-year-old school girls, we discuss how femininities were embodied and discursively reconstructed in class-based ways. The data suggests the girls understood class antagonisms within the boundaries of neoliberal discourses of responsibilization, self-discipline, self-worth, and ‘proper’ conduct and choices. With social class stripped of any structural or structuring properties, instead imparted to the fleshy sinews of the (excessive) body, the data reveals how social class was made visible and manifest in various mechanisms of, and meanings about, inclusion, exclusion, pathology and normalization. Thus, in explicating the ways in which the school girls embodied middle-upper class femininity (as the epitome of localized and everyday neoliberalism) we highlight how, in turn, ‘others’ (‘chavs’) were pathologized and deemed in need of regulation, management and governance.

- by Jessica Francombe-Webb
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- Cultural Studies, Gender, Feminism, Sociology of the Body

Creativity as an approach and teaching method of traditional Greek dance in secondary schools ... STUDIES IN PHYSICAL CULTURE AND TOURISM Vol. 16, No. 2, 2009 ... GEORGIOS LYKESAS1, MARIA KOUTSOUBA 2, VASILIKI TYROVOLA 2 1 Department of... more

- by Georgios Lykesas
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- Creativity, Physical Activity, Teaching Methods, Physical Cultural Studies
- by Simone Fullagar and +1
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- Sociology of Sport, Feminist Theory, Recreation & Leisure Studies, Gender and Sport
- by Maxence Leconte
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- French Literature, French Studies, Masculinity Studies, War Studies
- by adele pavlidis and +1
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- Cultural Studies, Sociology of Sport, Gender Studies, Cultural Sociology

Despite the proliferation of doctoral training courses within universities, little attention is paid to the complexity of supervision as a process of becoming for both students and supervisors. As post-qualitative researchers we explore how collaborative writing can be mobi-lised as a rhizomatic practice to open up engagements with supervision that counter hierarchical master/apprentice models of knowledge transmission. Researching-writing through our own knowledge practices and affective investments we engage with supervision as an assemblage that produces multiplicity. We created a democratic learning alliance through an electronic writing forum. These collaborative e-writing practices generated insights into, and movements through, critical moments that disrupted the doctoral experience of progress (writers block, self-doubt, misunderstanding). We theorise collaborative writing as a rhizomatic practice that refuses ontological assumptions of linearity, causality and rationali-ty, instead following the embodied lines of thought, affective intensities and problematics that haunt the supervision relationship. We recast supervision as an improvisation through which academic dilemmas/possibilities are negotiated and performed anew. Collaborative writing as rhizomatic practice: Critical moments of (un)doing doctoral supervision

- by Simone Fullagar and +1
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- Improvisation, Sociology of Education, Digital Humanities, Higher Education

Research question and purpose: Les Mills is a New Zealand-based fitness distributor with a community consisting of approximately 140.000 instructors worldwide who teach standardized work- out routines. This paper aims to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic and related measurements, such as social distancing affect the everyday lives and professions of Les Mills International (LMI) group fitness instructors. The aim was met with the following research questions: RQ1: How are social distancing and social connectedness understood, and how do they condition LMI instructors’ understanding of their profession? RQ2: What do LMI instructors think about the #LesMillsUnited campaign to maintain a strong trainer community in the midst of the pandemic? RQ3: How do LMI instructors think that group fitness will change long term due to social distancing? Research methods: Using qualitative measures and a case-study-based approach, data were gathered through interviews with LMI-certified group fitness instructors. Seven semi-structured focused group dis- cussions with fifteen group fitness instructors from different countries were conducted and audio recorded. The first round of virtual discussions took place in April 2020, and the follow-up talks in September 2020. A thematic analysis was employed to analyze the material. Results and findings: According to the participants, online classes as a means of upholding group fitness in times of social distancing is an insufficient substitute to face-to-face instructing, lacking social connectedness that is normally maintained through successful rituals or social scripts. Navigating “instructorhood” during the pandemic includes emotional labor where not only relationships to clients are challenged, but instructors also experience societal pressure to reinvent themselves as instructors. Implications: With no way of telling how long social distancing needs to be practiced, the group fitness industry is facing unprecedented challenges. Making sense of the group fitness profession currently preoccupies instructors who may now have to redefine to themselves how they can teach, and who for.

- by Karin Jemima Andersson
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- Body Image, Sociology of Professions, Fitness, Health and Fitness

Le pagine che seguono si soffermano sulla relazione e costituzione reciproca di corpi e spazi come punti di osservazione privilegiati da cui rendere visibili la riproduzione e negoziazione di soggettività, rapporti sociali e politiche dell'appartenenza in contesti urbani contemporanei.
Questo punto di osservazione si è sviluppato a partire da circa due anni di lavoro etnografico con una trentina di giovani uomini tra i 16 e 21 anni, quasi tutti figli della migrazione e praticanti capoeira e parkour in diversi spazi pubblici (e non) di Torino.
A partire da questa base empirica e nel proporre una discussione che non ambisce a definire che cosa sia il corpo (Shilling, 1993, p. 3), ma piuttosto che cosa (non) possa fare un corpo negli spazi urbani, questo contributo opera a partire da due premesse. Primo, l'analisi qui proposta considera corpi e spazi (in questo caso urbani) come siti che si costituiscono reciprocamente, ed in cui relazioni di potere e diseguaglianze sono al tempo stesso incorporate, localizzate, riprodotte e negoziate (Foucault, 1976; 2007; Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1996). Guardare alla reciproca costituzione di corpi e spazi può rappresentare quindi un punto di partenza per avanzare prospettive che ambiscono ad essere socialmente e politicamente rilevanti; questo, a partire da ambiti, come le pratiche corporee, il cui impatto sulla nostra contemporaneità viene spesso considerato nelle scienze sociali limitato, per via di una visione cartesiana che sancisce il dominio della mente sul corpo, o circoscritto a visioni prettamente funzionaliste, medicalizzate e medicalizzanti legate all'attività fisica e allo sport.
Sviluppando questa premessa, la discussione di queste pagine riconosce la necessità di cogliere la molteplicità delle prospettive che vengono evocate quando si parla di “corpi”, in quanto entità allo stesso tempo socio-culturali, bio-mediche e (bio)politiche. Da qui la necessità di approcci che abbattano steccati disciplinari e si propongano di dialogare con molteplici vocabolari teorici e metodologici, quella che Avtar Brah ha chiamato “creolizzazione teorica” (1996, p. 210), per proporre elementi di comprensione e intervento su noi stessi e sul presente, a partire anche dalle pratiche e culture fisiche che fanno parte della nostra quotidianità.
A partire da queste premesse, le prossime pagine articolano la praxis1 degli Studi Culturali del Corpo con le questioni che animano questo volume, proponendosi quindi di sviluppare uno sguardo che, nel focalizzarsi sulla pratica di capoeira e parkour negli spazi urbani di Torino, si soffermi su che cosa queste pratiche corporee abbiano fatto. Ovvero, in che modo l'attuazione di queste discipline da parte dei giovani uomini nella ricerca abbia, allo stesso tempo, riprodotto, negoziato e ridefinito confini invisibili, gerarchie dell'appartenenza, rapporti di potere e forme di soggettività che si inscrivono nei corpi e negli spazi fisici e sociali del quotidiano. L'elaborazione di questa prospettiva nelle prossime pagine offrirà l'occasione per sviluppare alcune riflessioni sulla dialettica corporea e spaziale tra potere e resistenza in contesti di “rinascita” e marginalità urbane.

- by Nicola De Martini Ugolotti
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- Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Parkour, CAPOEIRA

This article aligns theories of city imaging and physical cultural studies to probe the city of Newport. This ‘new’ city shares many cultural and economic characteristics with the rest of Wales, but also reveals some significant differences. We focus on and probe the movement
policies and cultures in the city, understanding the relationship between bodies and economics, cities and health. Through this discussion, we weave analyses of resilience through the paper, recognising that regeneration focuses on constructing and renovating buildings. We investigate how regeneration and resilience disconnect, with particular
consequences for health. Part of this challenge emerges because of the inability to align sport and event tourism with the promotion of walking programmes for residents. Regeneration and resilience disconnect once more. Creating movement cultures is difficult. The ambivalent success of Newport's policies and initiatives offers both insights and warnings to
other small cities.

- by Tara Brabazon
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- Urban Planning, Urban And Regional Planning, Health and Wellness Tourism, Cities

Drawing explicitly upon the bodily techniques of military basic training and the corporeal competencies of ex-military personnel, military-themed fitness classes and physical challenges have become an increasingly popular civilian leisure pursuit in the UK over the last two decades. This paper explores the embodied regimes, experiences and interactions between civilians and ex-military personnel that occur in these emergent hybrid leisure spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that commercial military fitness involves a repurposing and rearticulation of collective military discipline within a late modern physical culture that emphasizes the individual body as a site of self-discovery and personal responsibility. Military fitness is thus a site of a particular biopolitics, of feeling alive in a very specific way. The intensities and feelings of physical achievement and togetherness that are generated emerge filtered through a particular military lens, circulating around and clinging to the totem of the repurposed ex-martial body. In the commercial logic of the fitness market, being 'military' and the ex-soldier's body have thus become particularly trusted and affectively resonant brands.

- by Kevin McSorley
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- Sociology, Political Sociology, International Relations, Sociology of the Military

Исследование посвящено рассмотрению причин быстрого распространения баскетбола в первое послереволюционное десятилетие. Автор приходит к выводу, что для этого существовал целый ряд причин. Кроме поддержки со стороны новой власти, видевшей в командных играх способ воспитания духа коллективизма, и положительного влияния на здоровье, баскетбол был более доступен благодаря возможности играть как в залах, так и на улице. Кроме этого, баскетбол был одинаково популярен среди и мужчин и женщин, и особенно рекомендовался для распространения среди последних как менее грубый и жесткий. Эти факторы в сочетании с его интересом как для игроков, так и для зрителей, стали залогом его будущего развития на профессиональном и любительском уровне.

- by Ilia Sidorchuk
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- HIstory of Sport, Physical Cultural Studies, Basketball, Soviet Sport

Critiques of public health policies to reduce physical inactivity have led to calls for practice-led research and the need to reduce the individualising effects of health promotion discourse. This paper examines how parkrun – an increasingly popular, regular, community-based 5km running event – comes to be understood as a ‘health practice’ that allows individuals to enact contemporary desires for better health in a collective social context. Taking a reflexive analytical approach, we use interview data from a geographically diverse sample of previously inactive parkrun participants (N=19) to explore two themes. First, we argue that parkrun offers a space for ‘collective bodywork’ whereby participants simultaneously enact personal body projects while also experience a sense of being “all in this together” which works to ameliorate certain individualising effects of health responsibilisation. Second, we examine how parkrun figures as a health practice that makes available the subject position of the ‘parkrunner’. In doing so, parkrun enables newly active participants to negotiate discourses of embodied risk to reconcile the otherwise paradoxical experience of being an ‘unfit-runner’. Findings contribute to sociological understandings of health and illness through new insights into the relation between health practices and emerging physical cultures, such as parkrun. Exploring parkrun as a social context for collective health practices: Running with and against the moral imperatives of health responsibilisation.

- by Irena Martinkova
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- Physical Cultural Studies

Our aim in this article is to throw light on the complexity of the presence of the researcher’s body in the context of conducting research on and within biopolitical governance. To do so, we present author body-narratives derived from two separatestudies, both of which explore biopolitics and draw on an embodied methodology. These narratives point toward the corporeal contradictions of being located within a culture of reading and critiquing bodies while realizing the presence of our own physicality. We argue that methodological reflection on the connections between bodies within the research field ought to rest high among the list of things shaping the future of work related to biopolitics or we risk the effacement of the body. We articulate this in two key ways. First, we examine the emplacement of the fleshy bodies of researchers and the individuals we encounter. We offer reflections on the complexities of the emplacement of our researcher bodies in time, space, and place, and advance a politics of reflexivity that sheds light on how we experience, make claims, and speak about embodiment and physical culture. Second, as scholars who seek to disrupt biopolitical forces and attempt to transcend political and disciplinary boundaries, we consider the presence of the body in a process of border crossing. Rather than simply considering border crossing as an exchange of ideas, knowledge, and practices; we explore the ways in which the presence of our sometimes “normative” bodies can seemingly complicate and contradict our political agenda.

- by Jessica Francombe-Webb
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- Cultural Studies, Poststructuralism, Embodiment, Gender
- by Vasyl Kharchenko
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- Physical Cultural Studies

Where is the moving body in our written bodies of work? How might we articulate truly unspeakable and deeply moving moments of understanding? In what ways can we reflect and honor the knowledge of those who do not use academic words, English words, or any words at all? How might art move us to answer these questions differently—and more importantly, to ask different questions? These lines of inquiry have driven arts-based research movements within many fields including nursing, medicine, and education. In this article, we explore existing and potential uses of arts in adapted physical activity research and practice. We weave theoretical explora- tion, artistic engagement, and our personal experiences as research- ers, practitioners and disabled movers. We do so in order to demonstrate how artistic epistemologies can enrich and expand our inquiry, understanding, and engagement in adapted physical activity.

- by Maxym Dudka
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- Physical Cultural Studies