Somatic Podcast

For this episode, we recorded the sounds of U.S. Interstate 77, which runs rights next to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. These are the sounds one hears in the parking lot next to the museum and facility. The ambient soundscape, brooding, repetitive, and industrial, offer an immersive soundscape for critically reflecting on football and its function within broader society. We approached the episode as a form of "sound art," in which the goal is the artistic, creative expression of an idea. Through episodes like this one, we hope to explore podcasting as sound art and the act of listening as an experience that is active, affective, and embodied.

Check out any of the recent media coverage on 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, and you're bound to hear sporting metaphors used to describe the election "race". Candidates are "competing" and "running" for office. The candidates, seeking an election "win", declare that they won't "leave anything on the field." Why do we use sporting metaphors to talk about American politics? Why do we say that politicians "run" for office? What are the origins of this sporting discourse in American politics? In this special "pre-election" episode, we explore the history of this kind of "sportified" political discourse so that we can have a better understanding of why this discourse persists today. We hear from Dr. Kenneth Cohen, Associate Professor of History and Director of Museum Studies and Public History at the University of Delaware. Dr. Cohen discusses the history of sporting political discourse, a history he covers in his 2017 book 2017 book They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Early American Republic(Cornell University Press).

In this second part of our mini-series on the history and politics of yoga, we play our recent interview with Shanice Jones Cameron about her research on Black women and their engagement yoga through social media. Shanice is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Communication, and her research areas of interest include media studies, critical health communication, and Black feminism. As Shanice explains, today modern postural yoga remains "a form of exercise that remains exclusive to a privileged subset of the population." Meanwhile, the typical yoga practitioner, as it appears in advertisements and popular culture, tend to be White, female, and middle-class. This leads to important questions concerning the politics of representation in contemporary yoga culture. In this episode, Shanice discusses her research the intersections of race and representation in contemporary yoga culture, and explains the increasing importance of social media pages like the popular Instagram page Black Girl Yoga as digital spaces for building a yogini community for Black women and increasing the visibility of their engagement with yoga.

In this new episode - our first production since January of 2020, which also means our first episode since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread protests against police brutality and the notable impact of the Black Lives Matter movement - we begin a two part mini-series on the history and politics of yoga culture. In this part one, we play an interview with Dr. Andrea Jain, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, and editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. This episode coincides with the release of Dr. Jain's new book Peace, Love, Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality (Oxford University Press). In our discussion, Dr. Jain touches on the complex history of yoga, its emergence as a mass consumer product in the twentieth century, and the politics of yoga as a "spiritual commodity" shaped by neoliberal capitalism. Dr. Jain's interview gives listeners a more critical perspective on a cultural and spiritual practice that, in this current moment of pandemics, social distancing, and protesting against racial injustice, is more complicated than they may have previously assumed.

In this first episode of 2020, we acknowledge the significant scholarly and theoretical development currently taking shape in the sociology of sport specifically and the humanities and social sciences in general. An increasing number of critical sport scholars are embracing theoretical discourses we can collectively associate with “New Materialism”, scholarship seeking to destabilize Anthropocentric notions of human subjectivity and relate humans with nonhuman and environmental actants in the contemporary context of rapid technological change and global late capitalism. New Materialism complicates the influential foundations laid by decades of historical and cultural materialist inquiry, as well as the twentieth-century “linguistic turn”, in which feminist, critical race, postcolonial and poststructural scholars emphasized the social constructed-ness of categories like gender and race and the role of discourse in contexts of identity formation. Equipped with this insight from the linguistic turn, sociologists, cultural theorists, historians, geographers, and other critical scholars are returning their focus to “matter” and are trying to better understand human life in relation to technology, animals, and other environmental and non-human “actants” in a way that does not privilege the human subject. Thus, we dedicate the first episode of 2020 to the question of New Materialism and how New Materialist theories can productively extend the critical study of sport, physical culture and the active body in new and excited ways. We speak with Drs. Joshua Newman, Holly Thorpe, and David Andrews, three prominent and influential figures in the sociology of sport field who recently edited a volume of New Materialist scholarship, culminating the new book Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body: Materialisms, Technologies, Ecologies. The editors discuss New Materialist inquiry and how the theoretical development can lead to more nuanced takes on the role of sport and the moving body in our present era of climate change and late capitalism. We then speak with Dr. Marianne Clark, a chapter author in the book, to gain a better understand of what exactly is New Materialist sport scholarship and what kind of research may be generated by the New Materialist turn.

It sure seems to me like more and more writers and thinkers these days are praising the value and virtues of idleness. In our current era defined by such problems as the hollowing of social welfare programs and digital technology's seeming uncompromising power over people's everyday activities and work habits, more writers and thinkers are calling for a renewed, nuanced discussion of idleness as a healthy, humanist, virtuous endeavor. Though idleness probably seems like a strange topic choice for a podcast dedicated to sport, physical activities and the "active body". Yet, it is time to re-think our assumptions of inactivity as they undergird our assumptions activity, work, and productivity. We should consider the possibility that idleness may constitute not only an important element of a future ecologically sustainable society, but an important, neglected form of human freedom. This episode is about idleness and its relation to sport and play. We interviewed Dr. Brian O'Connor, Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, and discuss his recent book Idleness: A Philosophical Essay, in which he examines notions of idleness as they were articulated in the texts of famous Western philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. The episode centers on our interview with Prof. O'Connor, and highlights his understanding of idleness and its potentially relation to physical activities like play and sport.

Today, counties across the U.S. organize county fairs during the summer months.  For millions of Americas, fairs have come to signify family-friendly community entertainment, complete with an assortment of fried and comfort foods, carnival rides, tractor pulls, 4-H and agricultural demonstrations, and other symbols (real and mythical) of rural life.  Sport and the active body is often a key component of fair entertainment, arriving in the form of rodeos, racing competitions involving farming equipment and lawnmowers, guns, even the presence of military booths testing participants on their physical strength. County fairs in the United States, however, are also entertainment spaces rife with political meaning and shaped by the racial divisions of the nation.  Scholar Benjamin Tausig considers county fairs a “fantasy of whiteness”: not only are they spaces typically predominated by white Americans, they are spaces of “political imagination” with “severe racial overtones” powered through symbols (like the Confederate Flag) and a accompanying and surrounding silence that emboldens their meaning. This episode, posted on the eve of county fair season for this summer of 2019, takes a critical look at county fairs through the lens of race, Whiteness, sound, and sport/leisure.  We interview Dr. Benjamin Tausig about his ethnographic research on county fairs, and his arguments that county fairs constitute a “fantasy of Whiteness” powered by symbols and silence.

In July of 2012, the Trump Organization opened a course, Trump International Golf Links, just north of Aberdeen on the northeast coast of Scotland. To this day, Trump continues to declare it “perhaps the greatest golf course anywhere in the world.” The development of Trump International Golf Links, Scotland, however, was contested and politicized from the beginning. In this episode of Somatic, we talked with two noted scholars of golf, sport and environmentalism - Dr. Brad Millington from the University of Bath (UK) and Dr. Brian Wilson from the University of British Columbia - and asked them to reflect on the case of Trump International Golf Links, Scotland, as well as the question of Anthropocentrism in the study of sport and politics. Our hope is that the episode appeals to the sport scholar and lay podcast listener alike, as we explore a fascinating context of political, social, and environmental contestation, while considering how scholars can better understand the role of the non-human in such contexts. You can find our full blog post accompanying this episode, as well as links to the scholars' works and media coverage of the Trump International Golf Links, Scotland case, on our website at http://www.somaticpodcast.com.

In this episode of Somatic, we talked with Dr. Newman about his article, and his view on the state of critical research in the sport management field as a whole. Original music has been recorded to provide an audial “landscape” to Dr. Newman’s thoughts and reflections. The musical pieces have been weaved together to create a seamless soundscape. The result is an episode that can hopefully contribute to current discussions of critical research within sport management, as well as showcase the potential in linking digital audio expression and platforms with critical academic discourse. Dr. Joshua Newman is Professor of Sport Management at Florida State University. He is the author of Embodying Dixie: Studies in the Body Pedagogics of Southern Whiteness and Sport, Spectacle, and NASCAR Nation: Consumption and the Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism (with Michael D. Giardina). Dr. Newman previously served as President of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

For many people, running is not just a healthy exercise, but an integral activity in the rhythms of their everyday lives. More than this, running has become a ubiquitous, culturally-meaning practice within modern capitalist societies. The omnipresence of running images, symbols and representations within sporting and social media is a testament to its power and ubiquity within at least North American popular culture. Running, however, is a complex, contentious running practice. Class, race, gender, sexuality, space and nationalism, to name only a few, intimately shape people’s ordinary running experiences. In this episode of Somatic, we talked with Katie Esmonde, PhD candidate in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland, about her experiences with running, specifically within urban spaces. We asked Katie to record herself running as part of her everyday exercise routine. We then interviewed Katie days after her run, and asked her to reflect on the experience, using her research and scholarly insight on exercise as a critical lens. The result is an immersive episode in which you hear the sounds and ambient soundscape of someone running, with discussion and original music interwoven throughout.

Hosting the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi was a part of growing domestic and international Russian political presence that has taken place under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. Alongside military, political, and covert actions, the games served as a public facing form of ‘soft power’ for Russia. Hosting the games was part of asserting to the world and his people the might of a new Russia, Putin's Russia. In this episode we worked with Stanis Elsborg and his research partner Andreas Juul Jeppesen to explore the symbols and messages embedded in the Sochi games. In turn this provides a lens through which we can reflect on the lasting effects of this new direction for Russia. The episode is based on the collaborative work of Stanis and Andreas who co-authored a research project titled: Dreams of Russia - To what extent and in what sense was the Olympic Games in Sochi 2014 used politically with particular emphasis on the opening and closing ceremonies completed while at the University of Copenhagen in the department of nutrition, exercise, and sport. Stanis' ongoing work in sports history can be found at: http://idraetshistorie.dk/

At its essence, this episode is about the experience of traveling west on Amtrak passenger trains in the United States. Since about 2008, I've personally traveled west on many an Amtrak train, so many that I have difficulty counting the exact number. Some trips were to visit friends, some were to visit girlfriends at the time (one who, at that time, was living in Northern Montana), some were because I was living out west for graduate school. But, each trip, the traveling experience seemed so palpably meaningful. And with each subsequent trip, I became more aware and reflective of each experience: how it relates to the experiences of my fellow travelers, the workers on the trains, but also how the experience was in important ways a deeply affective, emotive, embodied experience. So, with a recent traveling experience, I recorded a portion of my journey, as the train traveled through the American Midwest at night. I then created original music (written, played, and recorded by myself) to help convey, complicate, and expand the expression of the soundscape and its meaning. In this episode, I present this weaving of soundscape and music, and narrate my experience of train travel. It's a digital audio story of my train experiences.

A new music track for a future Somatic Podcast episode on the physical culture/bodily experiences of train travel. Photo is of the Western Nebraska landscape at night. Photo was taken by me while traveling east by train.

In this episode of Somatic, we talk with Professor Brett Hutchins of Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. As an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, Prof. Hutchins has been developing research on The Mobile Media Sport Moment: Markets, Technologies, Power. As an integral part of his research program, Prof. Hutchins developed his MediaSport Podcast Series, in which he interviews leading international researchers and scholars on the prescient sociocultural, political, and economic issues related to sport and media technology. Now with twenty-seven episodes, MediaSport has become one of the multiple successful sport studies podcasts available to listeners all over the world via online audio platforms such as iTunes and Soundcloud. In the episode, we talk at length with Prof. Hutchins about his experience with MediaSport and podcasting in general, as well as ask him for his insight on the significance of the current “digital media sport” (Hutchins & Rowe, 2013) moment and the importance of digital audio forms for researchers and scholars of sport.

In this episode we explore the history and spaces of suburbia, focusing on the role of physical activity in the shaping of suburban life. The story and development of American suburbs is a long, complicated, and often overlooked social history, but what many people forget is their persistent role as spaces where people exercise, play sport, and seek leisure. In developing the episode we spoke with several contributors to examine questions not only of what the suburbs have been in the past, but what they could be in the future as places where people are physically active. It is becoming clearer with each day that cities continue to spill out into their surrounding districts, and there are intense commercial pressures to privatize and enclose the public/open lands of the these communities. Here we examine how these pressures have been dealt with in suburban communities and what these communities can do to preserve land in accessible and equitable ways.