Physical Cultural Studies and possibilities for dialogue with the sociocultural and pedagogical subareas of Brazilian physical education in a local reality

ABSTRACT

This essay explores Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) and shows how this field of studies raises challenges and possibilities for dialogue with the sociocultural and pedagogical subfields of the Brazilian physical education in a local reality. To this end, the text presents PCS based on theoretical productions by researchers who recognize themselves in this field of study, focuses on one of the basic concepts of PCS – physical culture – and how this concept is developed in Brazilian physical education, and bring autoethnographic narratives from experiences with PCS in a local reality. With this, I aim to inform how PCS is designed as a field of study that has impacted the way we produce knowledge and how it is fruitful to develop research in intersection with the sociocultural and pedagogical subfields of Brazilian physical education.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical culture
• body
• PCS
• physical education
• subfields

Aknowledgments

Thanks to Professor Emma Rich for all her support for the development of this research, initiated during the postdoctoral senior internship at University of Bath.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the biodynamic subfield, there are studies related to physical activity and health, the analysis of movement mechanics, exercise physiology, motor behavior, and other related topics, while the sociocultural and pedagogical subfields aggregate research with different subjects in the field of physical culture from links with the human and social sciences. Physical Education is also the name that designates this area in the graduate system and also institutions which finance research in Brazil.

2 It is worth noting that, when thinking of PCS as a contribution to the sociocultural and pedagogical subfields, I do not neglect to consider their links with the biodynamic subfield. It is just a matter of investigative framework. Ingham (1997) himself pointed to the need for this dialogue in the sense of an expanded kinesiology, which was not made up by hierarchies and which could end ‘tribal warfare’.

3 The analysis of the theoretical production of PCS/Bath was published in the journal Movimento, in Brazil. Cf. Lara and Rich (2017).

4 Chapter: Toward a Department of Physical Cultural Studies and an end to tribal warfare. In J.-M. Fernandez-Balboa (Ed.), Critical Postmodernism in Human Movement, Physical Education, and Sport.

5 This edition has the contributions from the following researchers: David Andrews (USA), Michael Friedman (USA), and Cathy Inhem (Canada), Michael Silk and Emma Rich (UK), Michael Atinson (Canada), Giardina (USA), and Newman (New Zealand).

6 Feminism and the Physical Cultural Studies assemblage: revisiting debates and imagining new directions.

7 The call for this publication is available at: https://idrottsforum.org/call-for-chapter-proposals-the-sociology-of-sport-and-physical-culture-in-global-pandemic-critical-diffractions/. Accessed: 20 Nov. 2021.

8 It is worth noting that although the concept of physical culture has been worked on in Brazilian physical education, just as Cultural Studies have been expressive in the areas of Social Communication and Education in the country, PCS was not found in the Brazilian literature on physical education until the first publications from 2017, when researchers from the Body, Culture, and Playfulness Research Group and collaborators started to publish on the subject (Lara & Rich, 2017; Lara et al., 2019; Marques et al., 2020; Sá et al., 2021).

9 In 2011, David Andrews came to Brazil and gave the lecture ‘Rolling-with-it?: the perils of neoliberal kinesiology’ (available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27g3Ji0rZsU), at the University of São Paulo (USP), as a program for the international seminars of the Ephysis project. David's speech focused on the fragmentation of the field of Kinesiology[9] in the United States and its commodification, notably at the University of Maryland, which was similar to the discussions he held in a 2008 article (Andrews, 2008). PCS is only mentioned in this lecture, but it is not central to the issues addressed by the researcher. Thus, I understand that Andrews’ speech (despite being disseminated in digital media) had resonance at the local level without impacting the emergence, in Brazil, of a knowledge production that would develop relations between PCS and physical education or between PCS and the sociology of sport. I also did not identify, when structuring the research project for the senior internship in the United Kingdom, in 2015, knowledge productions that addressed PCS in Brazil.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel – Brazil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.