Somatic Podcast 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.