Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) is a broad-ranging and innovative project developed within the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland, College Park. We, at Maryland, have decided to embrace and activate the term physical culture as a means of announcing and directing our particular object of study. According to this understanding, the term physical culture represents a diverse cultural sphere (including, but not restricted to: sport, health, movement, exercise, dance, and daily living related activities), through which the active body is located within, and thereby experiences, the operations of social power. PCS is thus interested in the critical, and theoretically informed, analysis of those “cultural practices in which the physical (active) body—the way it moves, is represented, has meanings assigned to it, and is imbued with power—is central” (Vertinsky, 2004, italics added).

The PCS project is inherently contextual since it seeks to locate and analyze particular aspects physical culture, within the broader social, political, economic, and technological contexts in which they situated. PCS thus seeks to identify the role played by physical culture in constructing, reproducing, and sometimes challenging, particular class, ethnic, gender, ability, generational, national,racial, and/or sexual norms and differences.

Whether it is the prevalence of highly commercialized and mediated sport spectacles and celebrities; the spiralling rates of physical inactivity and ill-health; the gendered and gendering economy of popular physical practices; the phenomena of overtraining and steroid abuse; the differential opportunity for physical activity between different racial, class, and generational groupings; or, the physical exploitation evident in the workplace, PCS seeks to develop a more nuanced socio- behavioral understanding of the physical health and well-being (or otherwise) of the nation.

Through the development and strategic dissemination of potentially empowering forms of knowledge and understanding to academic, policy-maker, and public constituencies, PCS seeks to illuminate, and intervene into, sites of physical cultural injustice and inequity in meaningful ways. Moreover, it is our contention that the aforementioned physical cultural injustices and inequities–with which PCS is committed to engaging–are clearly implicated in the health experiences and outcomes of the general populace, hence, PCS’ relevance to the mission of the School of Public Health, within which the Department of Kinesiology is located.

The development of PCS at Maryland represents a much-needed counter to the general trend within Departments of Kinesiology (and other related fields) toward an almost exclusive focus on the bioscientific aspects and understanding of physical activity. It is our firmly held contention that particular ways of knowing the active body (particularly those anchored within the natural sciences) are presently privileged within kinesiology, thereby precluding it from realizing its potential as an epistemologically and empirically comprehensive field of inquiry. In countering this trend, our aim within PCS is to interrupt the naturalist assumptions pertaining to the body, that have allowed the human sciences to claim the body as their own. As Hargreaves noted:

“Scientific discourse and common sense combine to naturalize the ‘truth’ about the body so that its historicity and its significance in the constitution of social relations is obscured” (1987, p. 139)

Furthering this point, the body may appear natural (an authentic expression of some biological essence), yet this masks its socio-cultural constitution, which is, at the very least, equally as important as its biological constitution. If this is true of the body in general, then it is perhaps even more applicable to the manner in which the active body is socially and culturally regulated, constructed, and experienced. As Ingham crucially noted:

“all of us share genetically endowed bodies, but to talk about physical culture requires that we try to understand how the genetically endowed is socially constituted or socially constructed, as well as socially constituting and constructing” (1997, p. 176)

PCS shares a commitment to a comprehensive approach to kinesiology, whose empirical core is the complex field of physical activity/human movement, and which demands the examination of the empirical from various (inter)disciplinary vantage points. Only then is it possible to get a truly holistic understanding of the derivation, constitution, and experience of physical activity/human movement.

Maryland’s own rendition of the kinesiology project is understandably both enabled and constrained by not inconsiderable institutional history and pressures. So, in its Maryland form, the research cultures within the Department of Kinesiology have formed into three distinct inter-disciplinary clusters (see below), each of which displays internal commonalities in terms of empirical focus, epistemological assumptions, and methodological adherence, yet each of which also recognizes the need for more imaginative approaches to cross-cluster collaboration.

Within this structure of inter-disciplinary clusters, and since since physical culture is both manifest and experienced in different forms, PCS adopts a multi-method approach toward engaging the empirical (including ethnography and auto-ethnography, participant observation, discourse and media analysis, and contextual analysis). PCS also advances an equally fluid theoretical vocabulary, utilizing concepts and theories from a variety of disciplines (including cultural studies, economics, history, media studies, philosophy, performance studies, sociology, and urban studies) in engaging and interpreting the particular aspect of physical culture under scrutiny.

The development of PCS at Maryland 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 sociology of sport to the aims and objectives of both a Department of Kinesiology, and, indeed, a School of Public Health. 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 are 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 characterized by a “unity-in-difference” (Clarke, 1991, p. 17)—the unifying element being a commitment toward understanding various expressions or iterations of the physical.

It is also important not to discount the cultural turn within sociology from the 1980s onward, which made a sociology of the body/embodied sociology an evermore important (if, in some quarters, divisive) component of the sociology project. Thus, a proliferation of conferences and research publications focused on the critical cultural analysis of the corporeal placed the body at the forefront of the intellectual agenda. In Frank’s (1990) terms, the body had been “brought back in”. Whereas we often berate ourselves for not being at the forefront of such. The sociology of sport community proved to be unusually proactive in this regard, being at the forefront of the search for the absent body (Loy,1991). This can be attributed to a palpable dissatisfaction with the largely disembodied nature of sociology of sport research in the preceding two decades (sociological studies of the active body were carried out; however, they were the exception rather than the rule, and the field as a whole seemed to avoid issues pertaining to the body and embodiment. From the mid/late 1980s, sociology of sport researchers conclusively (re)discovered the body (and thereby issues of physicality) as the empirical core of the field of study onward. Thus ensued a collective awakening to the fact that the body “constitutes the most striking symbol, as well as constituting the material core of sporting activity” (Hargreaves, 1987, p. 141). Once the sociology of sport acknowledged its unavoidably embodied focus, the field gradually broke from its preoccupation with sporting and broadened its empirical scope to include a wider range of physical cultural forms.

It should also be noted that the, now-globalized, British tradition of cultural studies–from which PCS draws much of its epistemological and ontological understanding, and political impetus–has shown a marked neglect of the physical cultural realm. This is despite both the renewed interest of critical cultural theorists in the body, and cultural studies generally accepted aim to critically contextualize the most prescient aspects of contemporary popular culture and existence (one of which physical culture, in all its myriad forms, has to be considered).

Thus, PCS can be considered as an innovative response to a number of intellectual trends, as required by the demands of providing a innovative and insightful approach to the socio-behavioral understanding of the active body. As such, while the aim of PCS is to further the missions of both the Department of Kinesiology and the School of Public Health, it is fully expected that the research generated by the PCS group will also inform fields such as cultural studies, the sociology of the body, race and ethic studies, gender studies, women’s studies, queer and sexuality studies, and urban studies.