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.

Somatic Podcast

Ep 18 - The Pro Interstate Hall of Fame

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).

Ep 17 - The 'Final Stretch' Of The Presidential 'Race': American Politics and Sporting Metaphors

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.

Ep 16 - Race, Social Media, and Yoga w/ Shanice Jones Cameron

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.

Ep 15 - The History and Politics of Modern Yoga w/ Dr. Andrea Jain

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.

Ep 14 - New Materialism and the Active Body

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.

Ep 13 - Idleness, 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.

Ep 12 - County Fairs: A Fantasy of (Sporting) Whiteness

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.

Ep 11 - Golf, Environmentalism, and Anthropocentrism

http://www.somaticpodcast.com Somatic Podcast explores the everyday, ordinary experiences, spaces, cultures, practices, and communities concerning our bodies in motion. Each episode weaves original music and soundtracking with stories, research, and interviews on the critical study of sport, recreation, leisure, and physical culture.

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Somatic Podcast

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