Bryan Clift

Suspect of smiles: Struggle, compassion, and running to reclaim the body in urban Baltimore

In this article, I perform and discuss two interrelated embodied tensions brought on by my experiences with the people of one urban-based nonprofit organization: my uneasiness with charity and voluntarism, and my conflicted relationship with the practice of running. This is also about the people of Back on My Feet (2010), a nonprofit organization that partners with addiction and homelessness recovery centers to empower those recovering through the practice of running. I detail, in particular, how these tensions problematize the desire to help others, challenge my sense of self, and challenge my own politics, all while trying not to undercut the positive effects of the organization, the people, and its practices. Piecing together stories from my experience, memory, and notes, I write to learn and make known my own hesitancies, hypocrisies, and uncertainties expressed through my body in search of urban social justice and to work toward decolonizing my inquiry.

Living Lula’s passion: The politics of Rio 2016

Rio has a lot to win from the Games … And the Olympic movement has a lot to win from Rio as well.1 According to Tomlinson, ‘the allegedly pure Olympic ideal has always been moulded into the image of the time and place of the particular Olympiad or Games’.2 The contextuality of the Olympic Games, to which Tomlinson referred, is particularly evident in the way that virtually every modern games has been immersed within, and simultaneously an agent of, the domestic and international politics of the moment. Despite masquerading behind a veneer of political neutrality - originally advanced by Coubertin et al. as a cornerstone of the Olympic movement - the politically motivated actions of the national organising committees, and at times the events which enveloped succeeding Olympic Games, have rendered apoliticism little more than an anachronistic part of the Olympics’ brand identity.3 While discussions of the politicisation of the contemporary Olympics routinely default to the monumentally politicised Olympic spectacles - such as Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980, Salt Lake City 2002 and Beijing 2008, to name but a few - it is our contention that analysis of less overtly politicised games is equally instructive. It is this assumption that drew us to the phenomenon of Rio 2016.

Transitioning to an Athletic Subjectivity: First-Semester Experiences at a Corporate (Sporting) University.

This paper explores how eight women experience, and are incorporated into, the regulatory regimes and pedagogical practices of a corporate (sporting) university in their first semester of college. Using Foucaults conceptions of power, discipline and subjectivity, we situate womens participation on the soccer team within the context of a corporatized Division-I University. As sport has become increasingly corporatized, low-profile sports have begun to emulate high-profile sports. The corporate university and corporate sport model indicative of high-profile college programs, such as the one involved in this study, use (sporting) bodies as resources, rendering them detached and alienated from many college experiences. As evidenced in the data from this study, the pedagogies of highly structured schedules and authoritative-, peer- and self-disciplining mechanisms functioned to normalize the experiences of stress, tension, isolation, loneliness and little autonomy. Nevertheless, we also discuss a point of rupture, wherein two women, for different reasons, refused their athletic subjectivities at The University after their first semester by discontinuing their athletic participation. The contextualization of such experiences reveals the complex relations of power emerging from young adults’ immersion into an athletic system imbued with corporatist ideologies housed within a simulated aura of education and development. This paper aims not to provide definitive answers but rather, by exploring power relations, to open for discussion critical questions about college athletics and to advocate for a more humanist research agenda that considers athletic subjectivities.

Toward a “Pedagogy of Reinvention”: Memory Work, Collective Biography, Self-Study, and Family

In this article, we illustrate how we have drawn on the methodology of collective biography as a way to inform our teaching practices. Collective biography offers a strategy for retrieving and reworking memories/experiences that can be used to understand subjectivity. In doing so, we utilize this work on our memories, experiences, and subjectivities as we engage in the self-study of education practice. Seeking to incorporate embodied, familial, emotional, temporal, contextual, and cognitive interpretations of past and present, we aim to make our pasts useable for our futures. We discuss the ways in which memory, experience, and reinterpretations of both as interplays among past, present, and context contribute to our reinvention of teaching practices.