ABSTRACT

For many sports studies scholars high-performance sport is a dirty word. Oppressive. Neoliberal. Exploitative. Disciplinary. But that does not necessarily have to be the case. At least that is how we read physical cultural studies and its promise to reject absolutes, fixed meaning and binaries: good–bad, agency–structure, theory–practice. Such divisions do not make sense within what Bush, Silk, Andrews and Lauder (2013) termed the physical pedagogic bricoleur’s (PPB) epistemological framework; such divisions are simply not in the bricoleur’s tool-kit. What does make sense within a PPB framework is a scholarship that problematizes in the name of change – lasting and ethical social change. In other words, an expansive and flexible methodological scholarship that produces work that ‘make[s] a difference’ (Bush et al., 2013: 134, italics original). And so it is that high-performance sport, if we want it to be, can be studied and understood differently.