UMD PCS Shines at NASSS 2018 Vancouver

UMD PCS researchers were well represented at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, held in Vancouver, BC, October 31st to November 3rd.

Katie Esmonde became the second UMD PCSer (after Mike Friedman in 2008)  to win the Barbara Brown Outstanding Student Paper Award (Doctoral level) for her paper “There’s only so much data you can handle in your life’: Accommodating and resisting self-surveillance in women’s running and fitness tracking practices.” 

 

 

 

Tori Thompson won Gary Sailes Graduate Diversity Scholarship (Masters level).

 

 

 

 

UMD PCS graduate Josh Newman (PhD, 2005) completed his term as NASSS President and delivered his keynote Presidential Address titled “Sport Sociology, In Question.”

UMD PCS graduate Ryan King-White (PhD, 2008) was named a NASSS Research Fellow

UMD PCS graduate Julie Brice (BA, 2015; MA, 20017) earned an honorable mention for the Barbara Brown Outstanding Student Paper Award (Doctoral level).

In addition, research presentations were made by the following current UMD PCSers: Eric Stone; Katie Esmonde; Tori Thompson; Mike Friedman; Yang (Sunny) Zhang; Shaun Edmonds; Anna Posbergh; Brandon Wallace; and, Shannon Jette.

What a great turnout, congratulations one and all!

 

 

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“Confronting the Crisis”: The 11th Annual Physical Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference

Friday April 27th in the Friedgen Family Student Lounge (SPH 2236)

See HERE for full conference schedule.

The Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) Graduate Student Association – located within the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland, College Park – will host their 11th Annual Graduate Student Conference on Friday, April 27th, 2018 at the School of Public Health Building. This one-day conference will consist of a series of student presentations as well as a panel to discuss the murder of Lt. Richard Collins III on the University of Maryland Campus and the controversy surrounding the University’s response. This year the conference is fortunate to have an alumni keynote presentation by Dr. Jacob Bustad, PCS alumnus and assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology in the College of Health Professions at Towson University.

This year, the conference will be organized around the theme, “Confronting the Crisis: Harnessing Praxis and Combatting Complacency.” In this eleventh year of the conference, it is clear that scholars in many disciplines are recognizing the need to expand their research beyond the confines of Higher Education. The Physical Cultural Studies project at the University of Maryland acknowledges the need to develop and strategically disseminate potentially empowering forms of knowledge, and seeks to illuminate, and hopefully intervene into, sites of injustice and inequity. As members of a School of Public Health, translation in this context is an important tool that enables scholars to present their work to a public audience, yet the divide between the academy and the public seemingly grows every day.

Esmonde Scoops a Wylie!

PCSer Katie Esmonde has been awarded a prestigious Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship for a semester during the 2018-2019 academic year.  The Wylie Fellowship is designed to support students in the latter stages of writing their dissertations, and carries a $15,000 stipend, a candidacy tuition award, and  credit for mandatory fees for one semester.

Katie’s successful application was based on here dissertation research, and was titled ““Critically Contextualizing the Quantified Self.”

Heartiest congratulations to Katie!

Roberts’ Research Hits the Television News

PCS professor, Jennifer Roberts, recently featured on WDVM news in a segment focused on her research examining the effects of the Purple Line on residents health and physical activity.

 

See here for access to the news segment.

Esmonde takes on the Penguins (and Trump)

PCSer (and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellow) Katie Esmonde provides an insightful critique of the NHL Pittsburgh Penguins decision–justified in the name of political neutrality–to accept Donald Trump’s invitation to visit the White House to mark their Stanley Cup victory.  Here piece, written for Pension Plan Puppets on SB Nation, can be accessed here: The Penguins Stand With Trump.

The Classed Embodiment of the English Garden City: Clevenger in History Workshop

PCSer Sam Clevenger’s work recently appeared on History Workshop Online (HWO), which is the online magazine of the History Workshop Journal.

Sam’s contribution, titled “Working Class Bodies in English Garden Cities” develops from a chapter of his dissertation, and can be accessed here: Working class bodies in English garden cities.

 

Clevenger makes his mark in Rethinking History

PCSer Sam Clevenger recently had an article, titled “Sport history, modernity and the logic of coloniality: a case for decoloniality”, published in the journal Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice.

The abstract to the article is as follows:

This essay argues that the predominant narratives within sport history have remained problematically wedded to assumptions and concepts of Western capitalist modernity. As a result, such sport historiography reinforces modernity’s epistemology as the universal system of knowledge in modern world sporting history by relying on modern sport as a primary category of analysis. By relying on categories and assumptions of Western [sporting] modernity within their historical narratives, such sport histories stymie the possibility of giving historical and poetic representation to non-Western and pre-modern modes of knowledge. While sport historiography has benefitted from deconstructionist histories and postcolonial theories, there remains a need to further problematize sport as the field’s predominant means of representing physical cultural pasts. In order to aid the deconstruction of the universalizing epistemology of Western sporting modernity, the essay introduces and discusses some of the prominent works in decoloniality, particularly those by Anibal Quijano, Maria Lugones and Walter Mignolo. A sport history field informed by decolonial thinking offers the potential consideration of alternative decolonized avenues of historical representation, helping sport historians explore the possibilities in writing deconstructionist and epistemologically-decolonized histories of physical culture.

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Click HERE for direct access to the article.

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