The way in which we understand pain, as a species, is a process of learning. As Arthur Frank writes about illness, so too is pain “about learning to live with lost control” (1995, p. 30). We shudder at the thought of lost control; we abhor it. To lose control is to lose one’s ability to function in society. If we cannot exercise control over ourselves, we are unwelcome.

A couple of months ago, I received terrible news: one of my mentors from my graduate studies at the University of Wyoming had passed away. Ronald Schultz was an accomplished historian, a scholar whose imparted knowledge I am only beginning to fully realize and understand.

Like everyone else currently living in the U.S., the graduate students and professors here at the University of Maryland’s Physical Cultural Studies research group have been both personally and collectively impacted by the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States.  Below is a collection of short pieces by various members of the UMD PCS community highlight their reaction to the election.  Our hope is that these pieces not only show the various ways we here at PCS are thinking about the election of Donald Trump, but expose the potential implications it will have on the critical study and significance of physical culture.

A question posed by one of my high school teachers accurately summarizes the effect of PCS: How do I know what I think I know? Well, how does anyone learn anything? School? Textbooks? Parents? Friends? Government? TV? History? Sports? As I’ve spent more time exploring the PCS discourse, the question has morphed into: How influential are sports in shaping knowledge? This core question has served as the underlying catalyst for my thesis.

On July 13th, Dr. Bryan Clift from the University of Bath’s Physical Cultural Studies Research Group and Dr. Thiago Allis from the Universidade de São Paulo organized an international colloquium titled “(Re)Making Cities: Urban Transformation and Sport Mega-Events in Brazil.” The colloquium showcased much recent work concerning the critical study of physical culture. Considering its timely topic with the upcoming 2016 Rio Olympics, Drs. Clift and Allis have been kind enough to write a short assessment of their colloquium and its significance to the critical study of urban transformation and sport mega-events.

In doing historical research, it’s hard enough trying to decipher the significance of a document staring you in the face as it lies comfortably on a weird large pillow archives use to protect primary sources. It’s a whole other Costco-size can of worms figuring out whether, within that document, there is evidence of the existence of forms of human agency, of how ordinary people, not just those near the controls of power, were actually experiencing and making history

The hundreds of hours that I have spent running on sidewalks, trails, roads, and fields are perhaps the times when I have been most aware of my body. In contrast to Leder’s (1990) concept of the “disappearing body”, where the body “is largely absent from conscious thought in everyday life” (Allen-Collinson & Owton, 2014, p. 3), running can be characterized by “intense embodiment” or a “[period] of heightened awareness of corporeal existence” (ibid.).

The tragedy of a young life lost, the absurdity of an empty baseball stadium, and the rage of rioters in the streets of Baltimore… What does PCS at Maryland have to say in this moment?

In their article, “Toward a Physical Cultural Studies,” Michael Silk and David Andrews (2011) explicated the need for a “complementary field of study” (p. 6) alongside the sociology of sport, presenting Physical Cultural Studies as a project with the potential to “empower and compel ourselves, and others within the academy, to develop and apply critically-informed physical culture-oriented research in a manner that impacts, and is meaningful to, the range of communities who we have the potential to touch” (p. 5).