Policy, Power & Practice
Embracing work that reflects this shifting focus from “sport” to physical culture, dialogically informs not only our understanding of physicality, but also the “pedagogic” and how one learns about physical practices, expressions and corporeality. Our research explores knowledge in context, exploring how processes of learning and education takes place in many sites and environments beyond the school, including those which we might broadly define as physical culture. Research at Bath under this remit engages a plurality of approaches and has expertise in a number of areas:
Policy-as-process
Despite the increased governmental deployment of sport as part of an array of neoliberal policy initiatives related to crime, immigration, policing, welfare reform, urban order, surveillance, tourism, urban regeneration, economic reform, and, international development there has been very little academic work concerned with sport policy. Our interests here lie, for example, in the retrenchment of sport into neoliberal policy initiatives; the governance of the populous; the role of sport in the alignment of social and economic goals; the apparent contradictions between the promotion of elite sport and sport as a tool of social inclusion; the ‘mechanisms’ through which sport is said to intervene into social problems; the place of sport in the European Union; sport & economic, political, cultural, and militarised globalisation; sport and health policy (e.g. the medical geography and cultural technologies of obesity); the role of sport in international development and peace initiatives, the use of sport interventions for marginalized youth; praxis oriented research with disadvantaged communities; the development of partnerships with public/private organizations to conduct research that can ‘make a difference’; health pedagogies; the role of sporting experiences, institutions and spectacles in identity formations, urban regeneration and narratives of nation (such as through London 2012); and, in the articulations between sport and multiculturalism. Work in this area aims to inform industry practice and policy-makers.
Knowledge in context
This area focuses on the study of physical education, health education, sport development and coaching ‘in context’. Research on Coaching/Physical education/Sport knowledge as context specific forms of coaching, development or teaching include: high-quality performance based research with a number of national international ‘sport providers’; interdisciplinary understandings of various issues related to human motivation, cognition, youth culture, identity, health and physical experiences; the role of attachment schema and central relationship patterns in enhancing our understanding of social, cognitive and motivational functioning in young people; exploring and implicating the concept of transference in the area of coach-athlete relationships; developing social-cognitive models of youth sport motivation (exploring the central motivational factors linked to positive sporting experiences for children and adolescents); and the ways in which sport for peace / development initiatives are used to ‘teach’ citizens about health, AIDS, sexual health and so forth.
