Somatic Podcast

This episode is a discussion with Helen McBride, a young feminist activist living in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her graduate historical research explored the role of Northern Irish women community organizers within the peace process during the Troubles. While in Laramie she became involved in the community’s Take Back the Night and SlutWalk events. When she returned to Belfast following her graduate work, she became heavily involved in the feminist activist community, co-founding the city’s Hollaback chapter, joining the Belfast Feminist Network, and becoming a member of the Belfast Go Girl collective of young, creative women, as well as the city’s local roller derby community.

This episode deviates slightly from previous Somatic episodes in that it is a more personal journey of contemplation. In this episode, I talk about my PhD research on the history of the international garden city movement, specifically two prominent planned communities that emerged as a result of the movement: Letchworth Garden City in the United Kingdom, and Greenbelt, Maryland in the United States. Playing recorded soundscapes from my visit to these communities, I reflect on my experience visiting and staying in these communities, talk about the history, and ponder the significance of such planned communities in terms of how they help us rethink the meaning of our bodies in relation to our built environments. As a result, the episode involves a mixture of approaches in that I both talk about the history of garden city ideals, and ponder my own somatic experience in the communities. It’s kind of like a personal journey and soundscape that I’m hoping is in some way informative and interesting to you, the listener.

In this episode we took a break from our usual format and tried out something new. We are going to try to stay as close as possible to a monthly schedule with our main episode releases, but there are times when we want to be able to go outside of that routine and put out a show that may need to be more timely or that does not quite fit a normal format. These episodes will be referred to as 'Somatic in Brief' and will be listed as half numbers (2.5 in this case). There is not a specific time limit we are going to keep to, but the idea is to stick to a shortened discussion, often put together to respond quickly to a particularly relevant and sometimes time sensitive topic. In this 'brief' we took a look back at the work being presented at the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport conference, this year held in Tampa.

Bike share programs, sometimes also referred to as cycle-hire schemes, are becoming an increasingly common place part of transportation infrastructure and programming in cities around the world. In this episode we had a chance to sit down and talk with Transport for London’s (TFL) Duncan Robertson to understand what this specifically looks like with in London. Specifically we were interested in connecting the function of the scheme with the political intent of former mayor Boris Johnson, and what this might mean for the future of the program.

The Olympics is one of the biggest sporting events in the world that connects to a wide array of global and local political, economic, social, cultural, and technological processes. As such it has received a lot of attention, both in the popular media and through academic analysis. In order to cut through this multiplicity of voices and opinions we turned to Dr. Bryan Clift to explore how he views to games in Rio and what it means for the future of the Olympics.

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