What is New About New Materialism for Sport Sociology? Reflections on Body, Movement, and Culture

Abstract

The new material turn in social sciences and humanities has drawn attention to how the material interacts with the social in the world where both human and non-human actors produce power relations. To include the material objects and their environments within the social analysis, new materialists argue for a new onto-epistemology that departs from the humanist social constructionism. To explore what this might mean for sport sociologists, I discuss three themes characterizing the new materialism: the focus on processes of materiality, post-humanist tools needed to engage with the material processes, and postqualitative research methodologies and ways of representation that include the material world. I advocate studying the body in motion as a unique focus for socio-cultural scholars of physical activity who can connect the material with the social into research that matters in the contemporary world.

The Nature of the Body in Sport and Physical Culture: From Bodies and Environments to Ecological Embodiment

“…The result has been an outpouring of work concerned with the materiality of human and nonhuman life, including Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter (2010), Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway ( 2007), Elizabeth Wilson's Gut Feminism (2015), and an array of studies reckoning with objects, animals, plants, and more-than-human phenomena. In keeping with these developments, "new" materialist philosophy and post-qualitative inquiry have recently been advocated by sociologists of sport and physical culture (Newman, Thorpe, & Andrews, 2020), who have placed varying emphasis on "posthuman becomings" (Markula, 2019), methodological implications (Giardina, 2017), and epistemological openness (Fullager, 2017), in their engagements with the material turn.…”

Spectres of Nature in the Trail Building Assemblage

“…Yet much of the literature still fosters elements of what Naes (1972) calls a 'shallow ecology movement', which set about fighting pollution and resource depletion inorder to improve, or further sustain, the health and wellbeing of people in developed countries, and focusses almost exlusively on the human components of these initiatives. Furthermore, notwithstanding recent commentaries by the likes of Markula (2018) and Fullagar (2017), the sociology of leisure appears to mirror the sluggish development of an environmental sociology more generally. In its rush to denounce the anthropocentric bias of orthodox accounts, commentators have neglected to deal with fundamental questions regarding agency, ethics and identity in these new nature-cultures, and the way in which such issues might be manifest in the activities and motivations of their participants.…”

‘The bike breaks down. What are they going to do?’ Actor-networks and the Bicycles for Development movement

“…As the literature on SDP has flourished, research on sport has, at the same time, helped advance a ‘new materialist’ turn in the social sciences. In contrast to the preceding discursive turn and its strong social constructionism, new materialism presses beyond human experience through ‘ontological questions about how “matter” is thought and constituted through entanglements of human and non-human bodies, affects, objects and cultural practices’ (Fullagar, 2017: 248; also see Markula, 2019; Millington, 2009). Actor-network theory (ANT) is among the most prominent new materialist theoretical perspectives.…”