ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades or so, there has been a noticeable shift towards the identification of, and engagement with, physical culture as an empirical field of study (cf. Adair, 1998; Atkinson, 2010; Brabazon et al., 2015; Hargreaves and Vertinsky, 2007; Hughson, 2008; Kirk, 1999; McDonald, 1999; Phoenix and Smith, 2011; Pronger, 1998). While some may have utilized the more inclusive term ‘physical culture’ as little more than a descriptive antidote to the empirically limiting term ‘sport’, others clearly have broader aspirations in seeking to advance an intellectual project centred on the transdisciplinary study of physical culture: what has, at various points (Andrews, 2008; Atkinson, 2011; Brabazon et al., 2015; Ingham, 1997; Pavlidis and Olive, 2014; Silk and Andrews, 2011; Thorpe, 2011a; Vertinsky, 2015), been termed physical cultural studies (PCS). The emergent intellectual formation that is PCS engages neither the physical culture of the Soviet spartakiad, nor that of the late-nineteenth-century/early-twentieth-century physical culture movement. Rather, it incorporates a relational and pluralistic approach to, and understanding of, physical culture, whose various expressions of active embodiment (including, but certainly not restricted to, exercise, fitness, health, movement, leisure, recreation, dance, and sport practices) are approached as constituent elements of the broader conjunctural formation out of which they were constituted. Furthermore, this understanding is based on the assumption that the very nature of physical culture renders it a complex empirical site incorporating numerous interrelated levels that can be experienced, and thereby examined, from a variety of levels, including the socio-structural, discursive, processual, institutional, collective, communal, corporeal, affective, and subjective.
