Ep 14 - New Materialism and the Active Body

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.