KPE200 Final Exam Notes PDF

Course Key Concepts Physical Culture ​ Active embodiment, relational, pluralistic, and complex ​ Organized, embodied, disciplined, represented, and experienced in relation to social power ​ Includes socio-structural, discursive, contextualized, institutional, collective and effective...

Course Key Concepts Physical Culture ​ Active embodiment, relational, pluralistic, and complex ​ Organized, embodied, disciplined, represented, and experienced in relation to social power ​ Includes socio-structural, discursive, contextualized, institutional, collective and effective ○​ Influence what is considered true or possible in physical culture. ○​ Shape the ways beings and identities are constructed. Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) ​ how socio-cultural structures, policies, and institutions influence physical culture ​ Challenges dominant discourses in kinesiology/sport/PA ○​ Draws from various disciplines to understand physical culture. ○​ Uses diverse theories and methods. ○​ Grounded in real-world practices ​ Power and Knowledge: ○​ Analyzes how power operates in and through physical culture, producing “truths” and shaping identities. Power ​ Power-over: Institutionalized domination ○​ E.g - St. Jeromes (Indian Horse): the Indian Act, and the power that the government displayed over Indigenous communities by making it a law that all Canadian Indigenous children must attend a French-English Christian school. ​ Power-to: Capacity for agency. ​ Power shapes socio-historic conditions, social processes, and identities. Physical Culture Sites ​ Spaces where power dynamics play out, such as sport centers/recreational spaces ​ sites are not neutral and reflect broader cultural and political forces Foucault Insight ​ Encourages thinking differently about norms and practices to enable critical reflection and change The Somatic turn ​ A shift in focus to the body and embodiment in society. ​ how the body is central to culture, consumerism, and daily life. ​ Modern Perspective: ○​ It focuses on what the body can do rather than what it is. ○​ Explores interactions between the body, technology, agency, and sociohistorical contexts. Reflexivity: ​ Researchers must examine their positionality and influence on their studies. Theoretical frameworks shape research questions, methods, and interpretations. Helstein: Neoliberalism and Scholarship → emphasizes the need to value complexity and difference within scholarship in the field. ​ Neoliberalism in Academia: Universities employ strategies to put people in competition with each other ​ Scholars face pressure to align with neoliberal values such as entrepreneurialism and measurable outputs King: The Political Grammar of PCS → cautions about the unintended effects of assuming new positions of critical authority. ​ PCS frames itself as a necessary evolution, which can marginalize existing scholarly traditions ​ PCS narratives risk simplifying complex feminist and cultural traditions Adams: Political Engagement in Academia → argues that feminism reminds us of the importance of engaging politically where we are located ​ Teaching as a Political Act: “engaged political intervention” ○​ Classrooms should be spaces for fostering political awareness and reflection among students ○​ The University itself is a site of activism or space of “politicization” that must challenge neoliberal constraints ○​ facilitate the conditions in which students are able to reflect and come to new understandings of themselves as political actors is a form of active engagement in the world Rail: Liminality and Nomadic Scholarship → advocates for Deleuzian types of ‘nomadic’ encounters between art, scholarship, and activism around issues related to the body, embodiment, affect, and desire. ​ Advocates for humility and adaptability in research ​ Emphasizes “becoming” and dismantling exclusionary power dynamics ​ Liminality - a post-disciplinary, fluid, and moving liminal space from which to celebrate feminist anti-racist accomplishments and embark on new dialogue, knowledge production, and activist efforts ​ Nomadic Scholarship - Stands for a subjectivity that has renounced the desire for determinacy and rigidity, and that has embraced a constant state of “in-process” or “becoming” Jamieson: Productive Conflicts → Focus is on utilizing divergent analytic frames toward anticolonial, noncanonical intellectual projects where “difference” produces new knowledge and lays siege to old and emergent hierarchies ​ Encourage divergent frames ○​ Productive conflict means the fission of divergent intellectual frames toward the creation of new understandings, new sensibilities, and new approaches, NOT new, singular disciplines ​ Chicana/o Cultural Studies ○​ recover forgotten and excluded legacies of the past and provide alternative understandings of current social conditions ○​ model of anti-canonical, multipositional, and oppositional approaches Territorializing:  ​ PCS’s tendency to define boundaries risks marginalizing other methodologies and intellectual traditions. Liminality: ​ A fluid, in-process state that resists rigid academic norms and fosters innovation in identity and knowledge production. Nomadic Scholarship: ​ Advocates for humility and a constant state of “becoming”, challenging fixed academic and social identities. INTERSECTIONALITY: ​ Framework that examines overlapping identities (gender, race, class) and interlocking systems of power. → demonstrates that identities are not static but fragmented, shifting, and multiple. ​ Intersectionality insists that various categories of identity cannot be addressed in isolation or treated as singular but must be seen in relationship to other axes of identity. ​ The categories of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, ability, and nationality often overlap with and impinge on one another and define how one is valued. NEOLIBERALISM ​ Institutional focus on measurable productivity, privatization, and individual responsibility. ​ Critiqued for alienating marginalized groups and prioritizing marketable outputs over critical thought. ​ Self-help is morally preferable to entitlements ​ Private initiative is preferable to public subsidization ​ Restraint and Individual responsibility emphasized ○​ “Preoccupation with our bodies, health & lifestyle is being used as a solution to the discal crisis of welfare state” -Ingham, 1995 ○​ Personal troubles, NOT public issues (Ingham, 1995) Neoliberal Demand: ​ Encourages people to conform to specific standards of “responsible” behaviour, like maintaining fitness or health through structured movement (gym, workouts, fitness routines) ​ Alienation: these standards often lead to alienated embodiment, meaning some people feel disconnected from their bodies because: ○​ May not fit societal norms (ie. size, ability, fitness level) ○​ Movement becomes a chore or obligation instead of a source of pleasure Embodiment – socially and culturally significant (the body matters); we live in a somatic society ​ attributing meanings & identification to the body ​ body in physical culture can be free, autonomous, enriching; can also be constraining and contested The body - both personal and social; biological and cultural (naturalized and nurtured) Heidegger: Science & Technology ​ Science presents conceptual picture of the world ​ Science delivers “being” to technology ​ Technology is aggressive and domineering ​ “beings “ are resources to be marshalled Foucault: Science ​ Way of seeing ​ Gives the power to see ​ Scientific language shapes perceptions of what we see Foucault - Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault, 1979, pg. 25-26) ​ The body is directly involved in a political field ○​ Power relations have immediate hold upon the body ​ Invest, mark, train, torture, force it to carry out tasks ○​ The body becomes a useful force only if it is both productive & subjected ​ This knowledge and this mastery constitute is called the political technology of the body Pronger: Gross anatomy ​ Explicitly teaches anatomical map of the body ​ Implicitly teaches technological habitus Technological habitus and cultural capital means “seeing”: ​ The body as an object ​ The body as a machine ​ The body as accessible to scientific gaze and technology ​ The body in dualist terms ​ The body in depoliticized terms ​ The body is highly: ○​ Medicalized ○​ Technoloigcalized ○​ Fragmented Methodology - overall approach to accumulation of knowledge based on theoretical and philosophical principles Method - techniques of knowledge acquisition; sub-component of overall methodology Qualitative Methodology - interconnection between goals of inductively developing theoretical understandings of world; belief in constructivism/subjectivism; application of interpretivist methods of inquiry ​ Induction - process of collecting data to build theoretical understanding of the world ​ Constructivism/Subjectivism - philosophical position understanding the social experiences as a matter of subjective interpretation; no fixed laws governing life/social process, realities of life constructed by people on an ongoing & everyday basis ​ Interpretivist methods of inquiry - methods designed to allow researchers to understand how people construct and understand realities of their lived experiences Critical Discourse  ​ Discourses create reality (produced through language) ​ Not transparent or innocent - aim to interpret texts, analyze construction, how they serve dominant interests, in relation to cultural & political contexts ​ examines range of people discursive repertoires or sense-making practices, can then propose alternatives to dominant discourses Ethnographic methods ​ Cultural descriptions ​ Participate in lives of people ​ Requires access, immersion, documentation, constant analysis & interpretation, processes & procedures for ethical interactions, sense-making & “exiting” field ​ Usually about unsettling taken-for-granted truths about marginalized (and/or privileged) cultures ➔​ PCS methodologies & methods analyze how subjects are constituted by discourses, structures, contexts and practices ➔​ PCS research methods challenge power structures, seek transformative change ➔​ Sustained research work, paying attention to methods & methodologies are engaged to realized a vision of the world of what is right, just and possible ➔​ Decolonizing research means centering concerns and world views on non-western individuals, knowing and understanding theory and research from previously “other(ed)” perspectives NORMATIVITY: Disciplining bodies → technologies of normalization -​ Normalization is “one of the greatest instruments of power” (Foucault, 1978) Normalcy: ​ Concept that is based on the absence of gross pathology ​ Premises, upon which notions of the body have been derived, are normative ​ Exclusionary and steeped in knowledge largely derived from dominant cultural assumptions about what is a ‘normal’ human Norm ​ Often referred to as “constituting, conforming to, not deviating or differing from, the common type or standard.” ​ Pushes normal variation of the body through a strict template guiding what the body “should be” ​ Is a disciplinary technology that helps produce “truths” about bodies Disciplinary technologies - (re)producing subjection → technologies of normalization 1)​ Hierarchical observation 2)​ Normalizing judgements 3)​ Examination & confessional Panopticon - mechanism that arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately… assure the efficient and automatic function of power (Foucault in Denison & Mills, 2018, p. 112) Investigating race & diversity in kinesiology: ​ Outcome ○​ Dominant (white, scientific) hierarchies are supported ○​ The normalization of racial hierarchies. ○​ Lack of preparation to work in diverse communities ○​ Racialized Minorities & Aboriginal students have little representation in curriculum ​ Costs (for whom?) ○​ RM & A students may experience isolation, alienation, micro-aggressions etc. ○​ A narrow curriculum and limited knowledge base which creates boundaries between insiders and outsiders ○​ Damage, harm in relationships among faculty as well as in the classroom dynamic among students ○​ Racialized faculty are overloaded on ‘diversity work’ ​ Benefits (for whom?) ○​ Certain identities experience affirmation, familiarity and belonging ○​ Western, European histories & ways of knowing are normalized ○​ The denial of the relevance of race protects and sustains racism in its myriad forms. Racialized bodies - Trimbur ○​ sportocracy creates a zero-sum sporting competition, only winners and losers ○​ In sportocracy, we are interprellated/hailed into certain subjectivities ○​ Representing ‘race’ as fixed, natural shores up ideas of ‘race’ in sportocracies thus failing to see multiplicity within identity categories ○​ Organizing spaces for a capitalist colonial, racist and imperialistic world reproduce sport as a world of work and evacuate histories ○​ Ongoing legacies of western colonialism render Black bodies as ‘space invaders’. ○​ Sport create myths – about biology, control, discipline,‘singular’ identity categories, individualism ○​ The ideals of white, Western norms are the unquestioned, Black bodies are policed and are often associated with the ghetto, depicted as anti-citizens or are depicted in problematic ways that reinforce racist ideologies Kapernick’s protest ​ Sport has always been political, connected to alliances, affinities, & solidarities ​ Engaged in an act of witness & symbolic action creating a counterpublic to initiate a discussion on Anti-Black racism and police brutality & premature death of Black & Brown people ​ Ostracized by NFL & hegemonic groups because Black counterculture threatens the order & foundations of white supremacy ​ Kapernick & supporters subject to racial abuse, death threats, hateful messages, people burned his jersey, criticized by Trump & other politicians ​ Supported from many athletes & coaches for his Constitutional right to protest & many ‘took a knee’ ​ Focus was on refusal, listening and education – prompted people to take responsibility for anti-Black racism, social justice & deliberative democracy Gendered & Sexed Bodies - General theories  ​ Sport (re)produces dualist gender norms which: ○​ Establish - gendered categories, “naturalizes’’ & normalizes the difference between men’s and women’s bodies ○​ Make - possible & validate “normative” gendered experiences ○​ Reproduce - gendered difference & comparisons ○​ Render - gender and sexed bodies as pairs of opposites Reproductions of Femininity ​ sport has been an important space for the reproduction of gender differences ​ Male dominated professions (e.g., medicine, sports organizations) reproduced discourses of female passivity, weakness, overstrain etc. ​ Historically, institutionalized sexism rendered women as sports spectators not competitors ​ Women (upper/middle-class white women) were seen as responsible for the cultivation of strong and healthy (boy) leaders of empire, but these women were not seen to be suitable for sport ​ Entry into sport by women (e.g., Olympics) was managed to maintain gender and heteronormative stereotypes ​ Persistent and residual ideologies about women’s abilities have sustained misogyny and exclusion at all levels of sport across class, (dis)ability, ‘race’ and gender (e.g., non-binary athletes and gender verification) Sport & hegemonic Masculinity ​ Boys & men taught to construct identities and sculpt bodies to align with hegemonic perspectives ​ An imperial ‘cult of manliness’ historically aligned with patriarchal, Victorian society values and was exported to British empire ​ Sport historically has come to symbolize ‘a civilizing mission’ for all non-European cultures and for shaping gendered identities ​ Sport for men was associated with class status, militarism, nationalism and whiteness and was used for training the ‘custodians of empire’ ​ Sport became an important site for ‘making men’ and sports schools and organizations (e.g., IOC) solidify the celebration of male athleticism Disrupting Unthinkability (Travers) ​ Transgressing global, socio-cultural systems of gendered intelligibility allows for a re-thinking of the limits of what is possible with respect to gender/s & sexualities in global societies. ​ There is occupational injustice in the gendered bifurcation of baseball – it is unthinkable to imagine otherwise within a binary-normative gender order ​ Examining sporting contexts as cultural texts renders visible inequities, power relations & the valorization of the ‘inevitability’ of male superiority in sport ​ Traditionally baseball is equated with American nationalism, imperialism & white hegemonic masculinity thus excluding girls & women appears ‘natural’ ​ Unintended consequence has been the creation of a counterculture & transgressive sport space for non-normative/binary & trans girls & women ​ Possibility lies in abolishing male-only baseball but maintaining trans-inclusive programs for girls & women which will work to: ○​ destabilize assumptions of essential differences between men & women  ○​ open opportunities for those with overlapping ability ○​ foster more fluid understandings of sex and gender identities ○​ assist in thinking intersectionally about the role of racialization in the binary-normative gender order ​ Is a gender free sport (Un)thinkable? Institutions: ​ Rules and laws affecting incentives and shaping behaviour, not just physical buildings ​ purpose is to help society function by organizing and regulating actions (government , family, religion) ​ Produce institutionalized and governed bodies, shaping physical, social, and cultural interactions. ​ act as observing and recording machines, fields of knowledge for the registration of human differences Governmentality - the art of governing, concerned with the correct manner of managing individuals through a network of institutions and tactics. Space - constructed from social relations and imbued with power, it operates on multiple scales (macro/micro) [e.g locker rooms, parks, stadiums] Place - a meaningful location tied to human emotion and identity (ie. sense of place) ​ material settings for social relations and reflect societal hierarchies and attachments. Healthification: ​ Process that sustain hygiene and health through discorses of public health, risk, and cleanliness. ​ Healthified spaces are highly regulated to reflect safety and respectability (ie. locker rooms) Geometrification: ​ Modernist architectural design reflects western colonial and capitalist ideals of purity and order, often excluding marginalized groups. Racialized Space: ​ Space is shaped by racial categories and institutionalized norms, perpetuating exclusions and hierarchies (ie. whiteness in locker rooms) Power Geometries: ​ Space is inherently political, with power dynamics determining inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization. Spatial Practices in PCS: ​ Spaces of sport and P.A. often: ○​ Modernization, rationalization, sportification ○​ Territorialized, delimited, compartmentalization spaces ○​ Achievement orientated, specialized spaces ○​ Commodified spaces for capitalism and neoliberlism ○​ Reflect historical, social, and cultural hierarchies ○​ Reproduce systems of exclusion basedon race, gender, class, ability, and nationhood. ○​ EXAMPLE: Locker rooms are designed to embody ideals of cleanliness and respectability while marginalizing others. Geographical Imagination: → Critical approach to understanding how: ​ Spaces are socially constructed, regulated, governed and produced ○​ considering relationships between the body, identity, physical culture, and health, as well as the spaces through which those relationships are produced and expressed ​ Space and social relations are interconnected, shaping identity, health, and culture. ○​ Space determines who belongs to the nation state and who does not and results in marginalization on the basis of difference. ​ Spatiality → refers to how space and social relations are made through each other. ​ If spaces were made to be experienced equitably, they can bring joy, happiness and community for all. Case Studies: 1.​ Locker Rooms: a.​ Analyzed as spaces where social and physical norms (ie. whiteness, respectability) are reinforced. b.​ Design and hygiene standards often marginalize non-normative bodies. c.​ Intersection of respectability and degeneration highlights boundaries of inclusion. 2.​ Parks, Pandemics, and Encampments: a.​ During COVID-19, park spaces became contested sites for unhoused communities. b.​ Authorities used public health discourses to justify disposession, reflecting colonial power gynamics. Resistance and Social Justice: ​ Spatial practices can support or resist dominant narratives. ​ Equitable spaces can promote joy, healing, and inclusion. ​ Critical examinations of space are essential to acheiving equity and addressing social injustice. -​ Spaces are reproduced and experienced differently based on identities (race, gender, class, ability) -​ Vigilance is required to challenge exclusionary practices and reimagine spaces as sites of inclusion and community. “More-Than-Human”: ​ Recognizes the agency and rights of non-human actors (animals, plants, ecosystems) in social and cultural contexts. ​ Advocates decentering human interests to include broader ecological concerns. Anthropocentrism: -​ privileging of human interests (ie. destruction of geomorphology/ecosystems/animals for human benefit)  -​ Decentering the human: -​ considering the relationshihp between active human bodies and active non-human bodies. Environmental Managerialism: ​ Minimal policies implemented by governements and organization to deflect criticism without significantly disrupting economic growth: ​ Often critisized for being insufficient in addressing ecological crises. Egocentrism: ​ An approach to environmental issues → prioritizing harmony with nature and integrating non-human actors into decision-making processes. ​ Opposes anthropocentric practices that prioritize human benefit at the expense of the environment. Speciesism: ​ Unjustified privileging of human interests over animals, leading to their exploitation in sports, entertainment, food, and other industries. ○​ Animal exploitation and harm (comfortably) rationalized ○​ No animal can provide consent ​ Examples include using animal parts for sporting equipment or hyper-consumption at sports events (hot dogs, chicken wings) Greenwashing: ​ Organizations often make superficial environmental commitments without meaningful action (promoting sustainability while maintaining unsustainable practices)