ABSTRACT
Albeit with differing degrees and intensities within various higher education systems, ‘sport’ as an academic discipline – in a similar fashion to other disciplinary enterprises – has become enmeshed within the dictates of neoliberalism; namely the ‘logics’ of the market, and the privileging of centrally controlled, efficiency oriented, rationally predictable, empirically calculable modes of knowledge generation and, ultimately, epistemologically restricted ways of knowing (cf. Ritzer, 2004; Giroux, 2010a, 2010b). Such processes have further wed the ‘science of sport’, the university and implicated subjects (students/professors) to the logics of the capital. Almost out of necessity there has been a tendency to downplay pedagogic practices and scholarly foci that empathize with, for example, human needs, civic and moral responsibilities, public values, fluid ways of knowing and becoming and critique (Giroux, 2010a). Perhaps more worryingly, such dictates question the very worth and perceived value of the ‘social’, and it follows, the social sciences of sport and physical activity. This is, of course, an alarming state given nonrational and incalculable pedagogical outcomes are crucial foundations for democracy, political freedom and equality (Brown, 2006), yet they appear devalued in the ‘sciences of sport’ as in other formations of (higher) education.
