ABSTRACT
Physical cultural studies (PCS) is an innovative, interdisciplinary, passionate and potent matrix for new knowledge. It re-orients an array of fields including sport and leisure studies, the sociology of sport and movement studies, creating what David Andrews and Michael Silk (2011: 1) have described as a ‘relationship between physical culture, power, and power relations, and the body’. Too often, new intellectual labels are window dressing for grant applications, but the label in this case is prescient and agitating. It is ‘intellectual migration’ (ibid.). PCS’s emergence as a new trajectory in an area formerly dominated by sport science recognizes and celebrates ‘the physical cultural turn’ and the extent of cultural studies scholars’ interest in a range of new topics and tropes (Bandy, 2016: 726). Such a project requires not only an analysis of local, regional policies, sport and recreation and urban planning, but also an assessment of community developments. Certainly, PCS offers a solution to the disciplinary stalemate created by national research systems for evaluation, such as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Excellence Research Australia (ERA). These systems codified knowledge and created artificial barriers blocking innovation in the quest for accountability and benchmarking. Certainly, PCS confronts and transforms the anti-theoretical and anti-humanities tendency of sports science, kinesiology and even sport and leisure studies. Most importantly, PCS offers a vision for movement and knowledge – and knowledge in movement – that hooks into debates as wide ranging as the obesity ‘crisis’, under-employment, overemployment, post-fordism, masculinity and femininity, the Precariat, health and technology.
