About PCS@bath
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pcs@bath is devoted to the contextually based understanding of the corporeal practices, discourses, and subjectivities through which active bodies become organised, represented, and experienced in relation to the operations of social power. Committed to interdisciplinarity and a social justice approach towards scholarship, policy and research practice, our work centres on physical activity, health, sport, well-being, culture, technology, the body, pedagogies, poverty, power relations and identities across the lifespan.
Further, given physical culture is both manifest and experienced in different forms, we adopt a multi-method approach toward engaging the sporting empirical (including ethnography and autoethnography, participant observation, discourse, policy and media analysis, and contextual analysis) and advance an equally fluid theoretical vocabulary, utilising concepts and theories from a variety of disciplines (including cultural studies, psychology, policy analysis, education, pedagogy, economics, history, media studies, philosophy, sociology, and urban studies) in engaging and interpreting the particular aspect of physical culture under scrutiny.
History
— The Intellectual Derivations of PCS
Physical culture remains one of the most significant forms of popular culture and an important object of study for the social sciences. Physical culture is a site of cultural struggle, political contestation, and, economic significance. It can operate as a spectacle, like few other forms, able to draw thousands and sometimes millions together across national boundaries both enhancing and challenging nationalisms. Physical culture also involves mundane, everyday practices that operate outside the glare of the mass media, enabling moments of joy and pain, illness, health, creativity and human expression. In short, the various instances of physical culture are complex cultural phenomenon of profound importance in terms of understanding human life, interpersonal relations and social formations.
Yet, despite the important work of a small number of writers, the various elements of physical culture do not have the same level of visibility within academe as other cultural practices such as film, music and television. Even when social scientists make an argument for the importance of culture and everyday life as central aspects of society, sport, and other forms of physical activity, are often disavowed. Thus, while the growth and impact of various forms of physical culture has continued unabated, the critical and theoretical study of sport has somewhat lagged behind. Indeed, the academic study of physical culture has often been ahistorcial, acontextual and atheoretical, devoid of any indication of physical culture as a site of social struggle around its production and maintenance, and, seemingly designed to function as a careful diplomat and bureaucrat in the service of particular agendas.
PCS was initially developed at the University of Maryland—and heavily influenced by yje work of scholars such as Alan Ingham, John Loy and Patricia Vertinsky—through the writings and work of Professor David L. Andrews and Dr. Michael Silk. The development of PCS can be viewed as a response to a number of trends within the intellectual community (see below). First, it was prompted by the perceived inadequacies of the field of the sociology of sport. The integrative nature of the work being carried out at Maryland, however, meant that the use of the term sociology of sport would reproduce the type of intellectual boundaries and exclusivities we were attempting to transcend. In other words, it would reinforce the type of disenabling sub-disciplinary boundaries that inter-disciplinary approaches have sought to overcome. Thus, we turned to the term physical cultural studies as a means of encompassing the breadth and depth of our necessarily integrated and inter-disciplinary project.
Furthermore, is a plausible argument to be made that the sociology of sport, as practiced and exhibited within its numerous journals and at its various conferences, is neither exclusively sociological nor is it exclusively focused on sport. In terms of the former, and as with the field of sociology at large, there has been a pronounced and prolonged engagement with a variety of cultural theories and culturally oriented research methodologies. In addition, and perhaps enabled by the turn to cultural theory and method, the range of sociology of sport research has expanded to incorporate the empirical domains of fitness, dance, exercise, movement, wellness, and health. Rather than an “expressive totality” coalescing around sport, the sociology of sport is, in actuality, presently characterised by a “unity-in-difference” (Clarke, 1991, p. 17)—the unifying element being a commitment toward understanding various expressions or iterations of the physical.
At the University of Bath, and housed within the Department of Education, we have established a growing group of scholars whose work centers on this approach to the contextually based understanding of the corporeal practices, discourses, and subjectivities through which active bodies become organised, represented, and experienced in relation to the operations of social power.
