ABSTRACT
The work of Basarab Nicolescu (2015), a theoretical physicist and founder of the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research and Studies, has perhaps gone the furthest in developing a working definition of transdisciplinarity that has influenced much research and provided a way into thinking about reconciling the often oppositional frameworks proceeding from the sciences and the humanities. In this chapter I argue that such a framework is necessary to a physical cultural studies (PCS), as indeed was called for in the foundational PCS agenda articulated by sport studies scholar David Andrews: PCS advocates ‘a multi-method approach … from a variety of disciplines (including cultural studies, economics, history, media studies, philosophy, sociology, and urban studies) in engaging and interpreting the particular aspect of physical culture under scrutiny’ (Andrews, 2008: 55). Similarly, Nicolescu is a scientist whose work challenges the dualistic, split nature of the modern scientific paradigm – a paradigm that PCS challenges at its foundations. But science – done in a particular way – remains a crucial part of his integrationist perspective. This is a move that is important for PCS to follow, because in its privileging of cultural constructivism over perspectives from the sciences, PCS has inadvertently violated its foundational intentions to operate within an inclusive, and necessarily interdisciplinary perspective. In fact, the stated aims of PCS actually make the field more transdisciplinary than interdisciplinary. But in its neglect of hard sciences such as neurobiology that, along with many levels of culture, work together inextricably to inform human movement, PCS has remained more interdisciplinary than transdisciplinary. Recent work within the field, such as that of Holly Thorpe on transdisciplinarity and embodiment, Jette, Vertinsky, and Ng’s work on biomedical models of pregnancy and movement, John Evans’s work on transdiciplinary models of sport and health, and my own work on the importance of affective neuroscience has heralded and embraced this direction (Thorpe, 2014, 2016; Jette et al., 2014; Evans, 2014; Heywood 2011, 2015; Heywood, Garcia and Wilson, 2010). For the field of PCS to fully achieve its stated aims, transdisciplinarity is an even more effective frame than the more interdisciplinarity model that privileges the constructivism of the cultural studies paradigm to the exclusion of the hard sciences.
