Suchergebnisse

The essay uses the theoretical-methodological strategy of notes and listing (following the practices of Susan Sontag and Umberto Eco, among others) to illuminate particular, unique historical and cultural-anthropological aspects of the Jerry Sandusky-Penn State scandal/tragedy. Special attention is devoted in the essay to critique of depictions of the Catholic Church, ancient Greece, the "unsayable," and social memory in regard to their links to the Penn State tragedy. Tribute is paid to those such as Murray Sperber, Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson, whose scholarly activism foresaw and attempted 0to prevent such a scandal. Influenced by ideas about ritual forwarded by Seligman, Weller, Piett and Simon, ultimately the essay seeks to forward a distinctive understanding of the nature of sport that goes against common scholarly and popular beliefs.

The authors of this article hail from perhaps disparate fields of biology and cultural studies. The authors use ethnography and ethology, which have offered parallel modernist responses to the challenge posed by Otherness, as touchstones for exploring modernist responses to the theories/methods of the research texts that are produced and performed in their respective disciplines; for example, ethnography typically promises a supreme moment of insight, an intellectual epiphany, when the trained ethnographer's patient and painstaking field work finally cracks the code of the alien culture to reveal the philosophical and metaphysical essence that constitutes that culture's previously baffling Otherness. Similarly, field studies of animal behavior promise a royal road to the Umwelten (encompassing worlds, milieux) of natures and cultures far more alien and "Other" than even the most exotic forms of the human condition. The article highlights that scholars in 20th-century ethnography—and, to a lesser extent, ethology—began to question these philosophical and methodological bases and that by the beginning of the 21st century, their criticisms and answers to such dilemmas sparked a range of interrelated responses, which the article briefly overviews: epistemological decentering and recontextualizing of inquiry; illumination of the tensions between, and experimentation with traditional and avant-garde rhetorical, statistical, evidence-based, performance and literary forms necessary for presentation of research; and return to and/or finer articulation of the goals of ethology and ethnography. Within these responses the authors are particularly interested in understanding "plotlessness," a concept that emerges from recent ethnographic and ethological investigations of "Other-ology" but that is rarely dissected in ethnography. The authors further explore and refine the idea of plotlessness, especially in regard to possible commonalities that this idea might reveal in thinking about play, broadly and loosely conceived, and the "openings" that play may afford present, and future work and thought in ethnography and ethology. Reminding readers of thought on the imperatives of play, on the ordinary/extraordinary nature of play, the authors push play as an all-encompassing paradigm for scholarship across the disciplines and much more (play as core of the ontological-epistemological human condition?).

This article is an early 1990s experimental text that takes the form of an e-mail exchange between University of Illinois scholars Nate Kohn and Synthia Sydnor. The authors sought in their composition to pay tribute to the life and thought of Norman K. Denzin and to illuminate Denzin's place in the development of the disciplines of communication studies and kinesiology. The writing echoes Denzin's call at the time for re-imagining social science research, theory, and methodology and their dissemination into academe and culture at large. Purposefully minimalist, the essay plays methodologically with voice and authority, interweaving narrative with ironic and paradoxical statements that critique—in Denzinian style—profound ethnographic issues, both classic and current.

This manifesto reimagines social justice in physical cultural studies by renaming, broadening, and building new characterizations of the body, dis/ability, mental health, exercise, social oppression, and sport. We problematize embedded 'myths' in exercise and sports studies scholarship for purposes of informing praxis-based research, and emancipatory practical agendas. These 'myths' include the embodied tragedy myth, the myth of bodily control, the sport for peace/development myth, the exercise is medicine myth, the healthism and exercise myth, the compulsory ablemindedness and exercise myth, and the exercise is cost-effective myth. Using intersecting and diverging theories, we propose new ways of knowing these taken for granted notions to springboard a new, socially just, emancipatory approach to research and practice.