STILL HOPEFUL IN THE ELEVENTH HOUR: A CRITICAL CULTURAL STUDY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLANDâ•ŽS KINESIOLOGY DEPARTMENT

......................................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................iii PREFACE........................................................................................iv TABLE OF CONTENTS....................................................................viii CHAPTER 1......................................................................................

v to express/represent my thesis project. Richardson (1994) asks, "How do we create texts that are vital? That are attended to? That make a difference?" (p. 517). She is speaking in part to what some people consider the 'boring' way social phenomena had been written about. But she mostly wants to call attention to writing as a method of inquiry and it is here that her values about writing overlap with my experience in writing this thesis. Richardson (1994) reveals, "I write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that I didn't know before I wrote it" (p. 517). Me too.
But when I write I also value leaving a bit of ambiguity in the more creative parts of my thesis.
My reasoning behind such an investment in ambiguity, which runs counter to the scientific writer's goal of specifically explaining phenomena of all sorts, is based on my desire to create or leave room for readers to insert themselves into my experience and to dialogue with it. My highest aspiration for the things I write is for the reader to want to enter into a conversation with me about my writings. When academic work tends toward trying to be comprehensive, authoritative, and airtight in its findings and claims about truth with a capital 'T,' it leaves less room for the reader to inhabit and make one's own connection to the ideas. For me, I enjoy the surprising ways a reader takes up ideas in my writing that I didn't intentionally include, that seems to be the very idea of postmodernism in which all knowledge is in doubt, but valued (Richardson, 1994).
Yet my desire to embrace and maintain some ambiguity in my interpretation of aspects of the culture of the URI Department of Kinesiology and my own experience in the department is more complicated-for some reasons that deal with conditions vi experienced within the department and some that derive from my biography and social experiences I carry with me. I will explore these reasons in greater detail within the following chapters. But at this time, let me say that through my experiences within the URI Kinesiology department inhabiting oppositional subject positions, one of a positivistic exercise scientist and one as a Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) critic, I have found an all or nothing dichotomy. The qualitative, social scientific, critical humanist perspective offered by a PCS critic within the URI Kinesiology department simply is not valued or respected as highly as the quantitatively based, positivistic science mode of knowing human movement. This attitude and belief in the superiority of a quantitative-based and positivistic form of scientific knowledge stifles a lot of generative dialogue about alternative ways of knowing or doing kinesiology research.
Since a positivistic exercise-scientific way of knowing human movement is the norm, disregarding a PCS view of human movement almost seems natural to many of those invested in this way of studying human movement. This is hard to accept and not to take personally for a Kinesiologist who identifies as a PCS scholar. But, more than that, trying to inhabit both spaces proved to be impossible within URI's Kinesiology department.
Human movement can be witnessed in more than just physical realities of biology and landscapes, it is always necessarily bound (enabled and limited) by particular fields of vision seen through ever changing expression of ideas borne out of the specific cultural, economic, social, and political forces and conditions of any given historical moment. Learning to hold these two views together was hard, but not being able to talk about their existence in most public spaces within URI's Kinesiology department was vii often uncomfortable as a PCS student. So, for these more complicated reasons, I purposefully choose this alternative mode of academic writing-autoethnography and personal stories-in order to embrace a calculated ambiguity in how I represent my experience in the URI Kinesiology department and my interpretation of its culture in the hopes of opening up a conversation about these issues for those involved in the department.
In the first chapter, I introduce the Tao Te Ching's Uses of Not, which is a conceptualization of the usefulness of space. Positivistic scientific writing does not create space to include the researcher's subjectivities and relies on rhetorical devices such as not using personal pronouns and writing in the third person to assert that the information they create through their research constitutes objective, empirical 'facts' about the human body or physical activity. By contrast, I want my writing to reflect the constructivist notion that knowledge is provisionally built on distinct assumptions and belief systems about the world and objects of study, as well as oriented by value judgments embedded in the social process of theorizing and constructing knowledge (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). Recognizing that all knowledge construction is theoretical and paradigmatic would disrupt the ease with which quantitative, positivistic research can be regarded as producing 'facts' and 'Truths' that are beyond philosophical debate.
While I want the more theoretical and qualitative knowledge I produce in this thesis to be taken seriously by my fellow Kinesiology colleagues, I also want to engage with and respect their ways of knowing the world so that a new day in Kinesiology might arise where new, more cross-paradigmatic modes of research-research projects that cross "We have these discussions in class [KIN 278] and he has a response for everything we say, which isn't so bad. But, then he goes into his lecture and as he goes along the PowerPoint slides follow pretty much the conversation we just had," I vented.
What upset and fascinated me about these exchanges in KIN 278 with Dr.
Kusz, a man who called himself a 'cultural critic,' was the way in which his teaching style revealed to me that my sense of having an autonomous mind was largely a myth. Hollowed out, Clay makes a pot. Where the pot's not Is where it's useful.

Cut doors and windows
To make a room. Where the room isn't, There's room for you In this case, the framework erected by Dr. Kusz through the discussion and subsequent lectures created space for/within me to take notice, reflect, feel watched, and ultimately to change myself and the direction of my life. He never came out and stated that this framework was intentional or that we should listen for the predictability of our responses. But, the silence on the matter while offering me a private space to come to the realization that the nature of things is never fixed, also worked to do other tricky things.
That space for critical awareness and examination created by Dr. Kusz's class, whose seeds were beginning to grow in my mind, Yet, at the time, I was merely reactionary with my dealings with Dr. Kusz, responding to his reasoning and arguments in a visceral way. I was not trying to understand the academic concepts underpinning his lectures. I was just trying to protect particular aspects of my identity, such as my race and gender that I had taken for granted. If I were a little more self-reflexive I would also have noted that I used silence when dealing with certain people as a way to wall off my insecurities.
While I was adept and comfortable at dealing with physical displays of power, this more cerebral way of exerting power was something altogether different and new for me. Especially in terms of being on the receiving end of it. It was the establishment of a relation of intellectual supremacy, what I viewed as a behind the scenes puppeteer, because he engaged us in a discussion already knowing the moves many of us would make. Yet, he made no mention of the cultural and historical roots of our thinking that were transparent for him even if still opaque to us. He just left it up to me to make the realization of the ways in which we learn to think are the product of our history and culture.
When I did learn this lesson I felt like I was diminished a bit. I no longer could convince myself that I was a truly unique individual and thinker even if this form of individualism and individuality is what our American culture loves to promise us. For someone whose identity has been built upon such notions of self, this lesson wasn't easy to accept. To be fair to Dr. Kusz, all of this happened not because of who he was, or who I was for that matter, but who we became through the alchemy, pattern, and circumstance of our interaction in the classroom the summer of 2008.
Yet, that same masculine ego that was challenged by KIN 278 also helped me want to understand those ideas about the invisible roles of culture and social power in producing human movement-really, human action-because I had a felt sense of wanting to be right and I wanted to avoid the humiliation I felt in a past educational experience when 'sticking to my guns' led me to publicly state to my high school geometry teacher, "I know what I know!" immediately after giving a wrong answer.
But, most importantly, in reflecting back on this formative moment in my education as a Kinesiologist, I started to take my first steps toward cultural studies because now that I recognized a hierarchy and father figure in my midst, I needed his approval. This external validation of worth seemed to naturally follow from the lessons I had been taught throughout my life, from childhood through my family, to coaches, the military, and the Almighty, each demanding a particular and at times overlapping or opposing set of behaviors. So, I was invested in a distinct notion of what it is to be a man that I think also had to do with my working class whiteness. I wanted to be comfortable inhabiting this new space of higher education, of Kinesiology, and while KIN 278 disrupted my common sense view of the world and my place in it, I needed to (re)assert a notion of self that was still what I could consider essentially me (Bufton, 2003). I could position myself, if not as Dr. Kusz's equal, at least as his right hand 'man.' At the time, my reasoning for starting to take seriously the PCS ideas I was learning about from Dr. Kusz seemed pure enough. I would sacrifice certain aspects of my identity, beliefs, and values to be the one who 'gets it'. It is a circular masculine logic that offers itself in the form of an internal monologue, stating that being a man means sacrifice, the bigger man cuts himself most, and denying masculinity is most masculine. A logic that at first glance seems resistive to the logics of hegemonic masculinity, but that I now see really just reinscribes them in slightly different form.
I was interpellated into this physical cultural studies mode of understanding human movement because I connected, on a very personal level, with the ideas of hegemonic masculinity covered in KIN 278. Hegemonic masculinity is a concept used to describe a particular narrow way in which men are taught in American culture to perform their masculinity in order to exercise social power--be tough, be strong, don't back down, don't show emotion, etc. For the first time, I was given a formal language in which to speak about and understand many of my childhood and military experiences and the associated internal tensions those experiences invoked. In many ways, the study of culture is the study of knowing what we know and how we come to know it, particularly when 'knowing what we know' feels so natural that the history and social connection of those ideas seems completely disconnected or nonexistent.
What is really culturally produced can easily seem like something we often think of as a natural, innate, and immutable fact about ourselves and/or the world. In Chapter 7 of my thesis, I talk about the metaphor of 'holding thoughts lightly' espoused by the comedian, Emily Levine. This metaphor allows an understanding of knowledge as provisional, especially when confronting my presuppositions and assumptions I have about the world because it implies portability, subtle influence, and resists wringing out the awareness of social and historical contexts from one's thinking. For me, thinking about knowledge as contingent and provisional is preferred because it helps to guard against returning to more ethnocentric, naturalizing, and universalizing ways of knowing and being in the world.
The silver lining, for a guy that loves ideas, thinking, connecting, and creating, is the development of the understanding that everything we do, know, and say now has many more dimensions and influences than one casually (and causally) imagines.
Indeed, knowledge itself is best understood as a fallible, partial, and limited social construction rather than something pre-cultural that is 'discovered' objectively and transparently by humans (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). This was a way of knowing I had never contemplated prior to KIN 278. ***** … To my surprise, at the end of that summer semester, Dr. Kusz called me in to talk about the term paper I wrote for his class. He said he was impressed with my paper and that "I had a future in sociology, if I wanted one." Looking back, I take new meaning from what Marx's famous quote that each person is a product of 'social conditions not of our own choosing.' But, as I examine the pieces of my recent experiences in order to construct some mythical origin of this project out of a past littered with other potential formative experiences upon which origin stories could be built, I think these experiences were like the spokes on the wheel or the walls of the room crafting me a space to work and live.

Statement of the Analytic Focus of This Project
The Kinesiology department at the University of Rhode Island (URI) has a unique mix of fields from which human movement gets studied. The department's fields are oriented by broader disciplines themselves differentially organized by scientific, social scientific, critical, and humanistic foundations for knowledge. In the rendition of Kinesiology at URI, various areas of specialization within the department are oriented by differing and even oppositional epistemologies and methodologies relative to the study of human movement.
Using a British Cultural Studies (BCS) perspective in this thesis, I critically examine how the Kinesiology department at URI operates as a contested terrain where struggles over how certain types of knowledge are valued over others take place. As a member of this departmental culture, I will critically examine my own experiences and observations to make visible how various ways of knowing human movement are valued differently within the department. This differential valuation creates a hierarchy of Kinesiological knowledge that gets produced both through formal structures of the department like curricula and through informal everyday discourses and social relations. Although I attempt to illuminate both of these formal and informal aspects, I spend particular time showing some of the less visible, 'informal' ways in which a department that is represented and often imagined by some of its members as equally valuing all of the subfields can, in practice, subtly create a hierarchy of value that leaves particular ways of knowing human movement and of being a Kinesiologist more or less valued than others.
The goal of this thesis is to shed light on the social process of how particular types of Kinesiological knowledge get represented as important, valid, legitimate and universal through the everyday practices of various members of the URI Kinesiology community (faculty, staff, undergraduate students, and graduate students), while others get marginalized and regarded as suspect and less important.
For example, I am interested in illuminating how the formal and informal practices of the department promote a particular way of valuing a higher education, or a Kinesiological degree, mostly as a means of technical, professional development where getting a well-paid job is the goal or ideal. This way of imagining the value of a degree in Kinesiology diverges from a more critical humanistic value of higher education where the goal is to develop a deep and comprehensive understanding of how and why humans move the ways that they do in a particular culture and historical moment. Further still, the specific type of knowledge that I argue is produced, normalized, and promoted within the Kinesiology department often deftly insists that members form or mold their identities into certain subject positions that accept and promote exercise science knowledge without question. This way of valuing Kinesiological knowledge subtly brackets what can be thought and said about human movement in formal and informal discussions both inside the classroom and in the spaces that make up the culture of the department.
This hierarchical means of valuing particular forms of Kinesiological knowledge is not solely produced by and within the relations of the faculty, staff and students that make up the URI Kinesiology community in 2010-2011, but is also produced by broader socio-historical forces informing the Kinesiology department at URI in 2010. More specifically, I argue that an implicit value system organizes social actions and relations within the department so that knowledges produced from a positivist scientific standpoint and oriented around the biological or physiological are often made to appear as the dominant, legitimate, and default mode of knowing human movement, or common sensical basis for expressing Kinesiological expertise.
So then, the objective of this thesis project is to make visible how this hierarchical valuation of Kinesiological knowledge materializes through daily actions and interactions of the faculty, students, and staff within the departmental spaces that produce the idea that positivistic scientific constructed knowledge directed toward the interiority of the body is the commonsense way to understand human movement.
Additionally, I show how other ways of knowing human movement, particularly, but not only, a critical socio-cultural orientation toward human movement, are often marginalized in a variety of ways that are not always done deliberately or maliciously, but that have material effects on the everyday experiences, relations, and identities of members of the URI Kinesiology community that affect one's sense of comfort and community within the department.

Justification for and Significance of the Study
My interest in the ways in which Kinesiological knowledge is produced and valued developed from my experiences as a non-traditional student progressing towards a Bachelor of Science degree in Kinesiology with a specialization in Exercise Science. After ten years of active submarine service in the United States Navy, I exchanged my loyalty to the dolphins 1 for a new one with the Rhody Ram. I expected to find out how and why the human body works the way it does. The influence of submarine culture with its insistence on the twin values of interdisciplinarity (the need to know, at a moment's notice, how to work any system that existed on the boat for the health and safety of everyone) and forceful backup (a core principle for submarines that encourages a questioning attitude of all members of the crew regardless of rank, specialization or time onboard) contributed significantly to the way I approached my academic career. When I chose my undergraduate degree program I did so for personal reasons, most notably to stay active, athletic and healthy. At that time, I conceptualized the body as a machine, much like a submarine with integrated vital systems. Assuming this view of the body from a biological and physiological 'systems approach' meant valuing knowledge that cut across various positivistic scientific fields such as the chemical, physiological, and biological and were deemed 'foundational' to understanding human movement. At the time, seeking scientific answers to questions about how to live a healthy lifestyle by looking inside a body at its systems to how and why the body moves and works as it does seemed commonsensical to me.
As alluded to in the 1 st Hour story that began this chapter, when I took KIN 278 Physical Activity, Cultural Diversity and Society, in the summer of 2008, I found myself challenged and angered as my thinking about how and why human bodies move proved to be limited in ways I had never imagined previously. I had never fully contemplated the invisible roles of culture, social structure, and social power in producing how and why humans choose-or don't choose for that matter-to move their bodies as they do. For the first time I was going through the process of the kind of critical humanist education promoted by Cornel West 2 a thinker I have come to admire for his prolonged contemplation of the question of what it means to be human. KIN 278-organized by a British Cultural Studies optic on human movement that revealed how human movement is produced by the cultural, social, economic, and political forces and conditions of particular historical moments-also brought a realization that scientific and cultural studies modes of understanding human movement seemed to be separated by what I would call 'a paradigmatic steel curtain.' Each mode espouses a common interest in trying to explain how various humans move their bodies, but produces explanations that are quite different and often lead to divergent, competing ideas about what constitutes the 'realities' of what crucially 2 Cornel West is a Princeton professor, an activist, philosopher and public intellectual. His ideas of education are centered on the question of what it means to be human. He believes the human condition should be examined in order to shed the superficial and reveal the substantial. This process of getting to the substantial is also a process of a metaphorical death of assumptions and suppositions. produces healthy forms of human movement. These modes were hard for me to reconcile, especially in the departmental culture in which I landed.
Not long after taking KIN 278, I encountered firsthand the tension that can exist in a Kinesiology department when community members envision human movement through differing ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies-one way of understanding based in positivist science and steeped in the biological and physiological and one founded on the sociological, the cultural, the historical, and the political. 3 I was a research assistant for a funded study of a diet and exercise intervention in older overweight adults. During a meeting with one of the co-principal investigators, I asked if I could write a paper exploring how we might deliver this knowledge to the target population of the study. I thought it was the next logical step to consider how to get the information from this study to the community and more I admit that, in the beginning, I was caught up in the desire for big muscles. I wore sleeveless shirts and used mirrors for more than checking my form. My wife asked me once, "How big do you want to get?" "I want to look mildly fierce," I replied.
I don't know if it was just curiosity about what was on the other side of the steel curtain or if Ivan Drago, Rocky Balboa's nemesis from Rocky IV, had more of an influence than I immediately felt, but I have a fascination with Russia that led me to seek out a Russian history course at URI. I was excited to take this course the last semester before my senior internship. Interestingly, the class was fascinating for reasons I could not have predicted. Namely, it allowed me to learn something about the Kinesiology department. I don't know the best way to say it, but what I thought then was, "Here are all the 'normal' people." I realized then that since I had spent almost all my time with students in Kinesiology I had gotten used to seeing the fit and the beautiful surrounding me on a daily basis and had come to imagine them as 'normal.' In Washburn Hall, I saw smokers, Goths, and overweight students. But these students were different in other ways as well, they were more attentive in class, asked a lot of probing questions that overlapped with things they had learned in other classes, and read a lot. This apparent contradiction between the Kinesiology students and History students, as well as the apparent contradiction between their bodies and their classroom behaviors tickled my brain like Mountford did. I remember when I was getting into lifting weights, I felt bombarded with contradictory information. I just wanted to know 'the Facts.' Tell me what to do and I'll do it. In a way, that is how I approached my exercise science classes. While I was known in class to ask a lot of questions, my aim was to get to the truth (with a capital 'T') of how the body works so I could best train it. So, underlying my performance as an exercise science student was a body disciplined through thoughts of internal systems, machine metaphors, desires for masculine control, certitude, and authority and a compartmentalized, regimented mind ready and willing to absorb 'Facts' and learn exercise procedures. Through this experience, I think I can understand better the pervasive silence coming from many Kinesiology students in a typical exercise science class. It seems their mindset, like mine was when I first decided on Kinesiology as a major is: "What's to question? The facts are the facts, fill me up please." For the most part, the values of those students in the Russian History class did not include being hard bodied. It seemed that the focus and aim of their programs of study directed their energies down alternative avenues.

On Paradigms
What I was observing-different majors correlating with different bodies and different ways of learning and coming to know the world-might be called paradigmatic differences. After reading Kuhn (1996) and thinking about his ideas about paradigms and scientific revolutions, I took from him the way in which paradigms provide a particular way of understanding the world based on certain assumptions, beliefs, values and foci. Paradigms signify the virtues and limits of particular ways of knowing the world while simultaneously, implicitly, foregrounding the way in which 'truths' about the world are constructed within them. After reading Kuhn (1996), 'facts' and 'truths' no longer can be capitalized and self-assuredly asserted by those of learned stock. As particular paradigms sediment into certain social fields, like a department, they also marginalize, if not exclude other, alternative ways of understanding the world. In other words, as a paradigm promotes a particular way of knowing something it simultaneously has a tendency to nullify or diminish desires for alternative ways of knowing that same thing. This way in which a particular paradigm is made dominant in a culture at a given time and place is something which I encountered within the University of Rhode Island's Kinesiology department.
One goal of this thesis is to illuminate how a particular way of knowing human movement or doing Kinesiology is made to seem like the single, universal, normal, legitimate way of doing Kinesiology and is concurrently given more value within the department in a number of ways. These social norms and values are produced and reproduced every day in the department culture. They are indicative of the paradigm that is dominant in the URI Kinesiology department culture. Yet, they are usually invisible to those who embody and enact these norms and values. Indeed, for those Kinesiology department community members whose professional credentials and beliefs align with this particular paradigmatic view of Kinesiology (what I call a positivist scientific/exercise science viewpoint), the departmental norm of portraying this particular Kinesiological paradigm of knowledge as the universal and legitimate paradigm of Kinesiology will likely seem commonsensical and natural. But social norms and dominant paradigms never just naturally appear, instead they are constructed by people derived from a political, historical and cultural struggle between competing paradigms within the epistemologically broad field of Kinesiology. By silently establishing one particular paradigm within the broad field of Kinesiology as the universal paradigm of all of Kinesiology-particularly in undergraduate education-our department is privileging certain ways of thinking, questioning, and talking about human movement, while marginalizing other modes of thought, questions and ways of knowing and contemplating the meaning and value of human movement.
In my educational experience as a Kinesiology undergraduate with a specialization in exercise science, science was not taught as one paradigm of specific knowledge with specific assumptions, value judgments, and epistemological limitations within a broader field of competing paradigms of thought within Kinesiology. Instead, positivistic scientific knowledge in the form of exercise science knowledge was very often presented by faculty and discussed by students as a wide range of universal and infallible 'facts' about the world that were unquestionably valid and could not be challenged by critical thought or alternative paradigms. My experience resonates with Kuhn's (1996) assertion that scientists are not taught or trained to understand how the paradigm and practice of positivistic science, like any paradigm of thought (academic or otherwise) is a fallible, partial, limited and limiting means of knowing the world. In addition, he asserts that because scientists are not often trained in the philosophy of science or the sociology of knowledge they very often are not aware of the way in which scientific knowledge can be infused with popular cultural ideologies of the day; instead, they often consider their positivist scientific way of thinking as the only natural, valid, and legitimate means of knowing the world (Kuhn, 1996). Now, I am not claiming that all scientists because they go by the name of 'scientist' are guilty of not knowing how scientific inquiry is what Barthes might call a 'mythologized social practice.' I did come across a scientific literature review (St Clair Gibson et al, 2003) that outlined why a particular paradigm was used over another.
"Before examining the mechanisms responsible for the conscious sensation of fatigue, it is necessary to discuss briefly the more general issue of consciousness itself. There are two basic theories of consciousness, which have been debated for centuries. The first is the theory of dualism, which suggests that consciousness is a mental state which exists autonomously and is not dependent on brain structures for existence. [4] The second is the theory of monism, which suggests that consciousness is a direct product of activity in specific brain structures. [5,6] While this argument is complex and beyond the realm of this review, the theory of dualism is more difficult to support from a scientific perspective, and remains a philosophical concept (Hallett M, unpublished observation). In this review, we therefore discuss conscious perception of the sensation of fatigue from the monistic perspective. (St Clair Gibson et al, 2003, p 167-8) The above excerpt does a good job of explaining that there are other ways of looking at the mind/body dilemma, but for this researcher, only one allows for scientific inquiry. Furthermore, what I like most about these scientists' discussion is that dualism is not disregarded as being less valid even though it cannot be used by these positivist scientists. The excerpt shows this particular positivist scientific researcher has a knowledge of the history of a century-long philosophical debate on consciousness and reveals that by selecting a particular philosophical foundation for their research, the authors are making a choice, or better yet, constructing how they will come to understand "the conscious perception of the sensation of fatigue." But more importantly, this study shows that scientists can think paradigmatically if they are trained to do so. Clearly, these researchers' way of knowing fatigue, which acknowledges the particularity or philosophical limits of their viewpoint, is no doubt a product of their education as scientific researchers that taught them not to understand scientific research as the only valid, legitimate, or ideal means of knowing the world.
Yet, even when a paradigm, such as British Cultural Studies newly emerges in a field, like say, Kinesiology, it doesn't do away with previous ways of thinking and knowing, rather, new paradigms can change how people make sense and give meaning to something like human movement from one historical moment to another, and one culture to another. A shift in ways of thinking can never be totally broken from previous ways of thinking because new ways of thinking are always created out of a shared culture and history (Hall, 1980). While it is fair to say that each subfield comprising a Kinesiology department has its own history to tell, the shared history and culture of URI's Kinesiology department is an alloy of these competing/overlapping paradigms tempered over time. New ways of thinking, such as a BCS perspective can have subtle impact in the departmental culture, but the previous paradigm still has a lot to say if a new one happens to emerge, mostly because it was the paradigmatic eyewitness of the rupture (Hall, 1980). When Raymond Williams published Culture and Society he witnessed just such a rupture. The fundamental break from the Leavis tradition wasn't because Williams, Thompson or Hoggart viewed the canon of great literature as insignificant, but that the study of those texts excluded studying cultures like: popular culture, media culture, the lived experiences of working class people in everyday spaces and places, and the politics of culture-cultures they thought were worthy and ripe for academic study.
Much like St Clair Gibson et al (2003) compared the paradigms of dualism and monism to reflect the thought processes behind some of their intellectual choices, I will compare the paradigms of positivists and constructivists to reflect mine.
First, it is important to note that any paradigm can be broken up into three main criteria for evaluation and comparison: ontology, epistemology and methodology. The highest order belief or the one that is overarching is ontology, which in this case, is thought of as our ability to access reality. For a positivist "an apprehendable reality is assumed to exist [beyond the influences of humans], driven by immutable natural laws and mechanisms" (Guba & Lincoln, 1994:109). Because positivists believe the universe is guided by natural laws, the knowledge they produce or epistemology, takes the shape of making a claim on being able to 'find' generalizable and universal 'Truths' about the world.. This view of ontology is held by positivist scientists who assume that only a single reality exists in nature. They believe this singular reality, which exists with or without human knowledge, is only accessible through application of the scientific method. Accessing truth, for the positivist, is accomplished through using the scientific method which it is believed will ensure objectivity or the exclusion of human bias. Only through use of the scientific method can objective, impartial and direct access to a single external reality and 'Truth' can be captured, in the view of the positivist scientist.
As is the case in any paradigm, ontological beliefs inform the methodology a researcher uses; in this case, the positivist uses the scientific method whose values are generalizability, objectivity, internal and external validity, and reliability because of their belief that a single reality exists in nature. This method, then influences epistemology or what knowledge is believed to be. Ontology, epistemology and methodology work together to support each other. Our belief about the nature of reality affects how we go about discovering it. For instance, since science believes in an apprehendable world beyond that constructed by humans, it makes sense that the scientific method would be imagined by positivists as excluding the influence of human subjectivity because human perceptions are assumed to be inherently biased so that they disrupt the process of capturing natural order of 'reality.' This methodology-and the cultural authority given to it in Modernity-allows scientists (and lay persons) to (falsely) believe that when they employ the scientific method in their research, the scientific knowledge they 'discover' or 'find' is an objective, or the capital 'T" truth, about people and/or the world because they believe the scientific method ensures objectivity and eliminates human bias from the research process. To connect all of this back to my discussion about paradigms, we must keep in mind that if an academic field tacitly puts positivistic science (or any one particular scholarly paradigm) at the center of its departmental culture (whether through curricula, public definitions of what it means to be a member of that department, etc.) then it is only allowing for one certain type of knowledge to be deemed valid; it only asks and investigates certain types of questions, and it only allows certain things to be said and deemed valuable.
Whereas positivists pretend that it is possible to exclude human bias when they execute their research via the scientific method, cultural studies scholars begin their work very often by recognizing the researcher's subjectivity and bias in the final written products of the research and realizing that any form of research (including positivistic research) is necessarily constructed through human subjectiveness. Guba and Lincoln (1994) classify constructivism and critical theory as two separate paradigms, but since my analysis relies solely on these two paradigms I will explain them both separately.
The ontological viewpoint of constructivism is that multiple "realities [exist and] are apprehendable in the form of multiple, intangible mental constructions, socially and experientially based, local and specific in nature (although elements are often shared among many individuals and even across cultures), and dependent of their form and content on the individual persons or groups holding the constructions" (Guba & Lincoln, 1994:110-1). What this means is, from a constructivist position, there is a recognition that there are different ways of viewing, knowing, and experiencing the world and developing a perception of social reality. From this vantage point, all knowledge is understood as being socially constructed and therefore incapable of embodying absolute truth. When a constructivist produces research it is always in part a study of self, because the researcher is understood to be inescapably a part of the social context producing knowledge. Along similar lines, critical theory attempts to make sense of the social structures erected by such social forces as politics, economy, history, and gender that give people a sense of the 'real' world (Guba & Lincoln). The two major tensions between constructivism/critical theory and positivism, which work their way through my thesis are the oppositional worldviews of the respective researchers and the type of knowledge they produce.
Constructivists/critical theorists understand that the researcher is always present and that knowledge produced through research is always partial, limited, and subjective.
Positivists on the other hand, believe that through the use of the scientific method and quantification the researcher's bias is eliminated and that the knowledge produced is an objective truth. I reached for a book, one that was close at hand to pretend that I was working. I happened to pick up Barker's Cultural Studies and thumbed to a random page. On page 220, dead center was the heading "The postmodern subject." A little further down was one of his check marks of definition or key ideas and this one read: "The decentered or postmodern self involves the subject in shifting, fragmented and multiple identities. Persons are composed not of one but several, sometimes contradictory identities." (p 220). Not much new there, but when I thought about how that relates to neoliberalism and what goes on here in the department I hit upon this thought. Neoliberalism has extraordinary powers of atomizing people. By eliminating the bonds that hold us together socially, we as neoliberal subjects work to legitimize a centralized, hierarchical, and in this instance at least, a corporate power relationship. In a Foucauldian way of looking at it (I think), the atomization redirects our energy from engaging in social goods, to practices that benefit us as individuals. Since the neoliberal subject sees success through economic status and rewards, 'playing the game' means also being a productive docile body. Further, success is visible through the accumulation of material things and professional standing/respect, in short 'playing the game' works. But, and I hope this is where a good thought happened, 'playing the game' also means that some of our identities, desires, and humanity is given up. That is the moment of fracture. While neoliberalism is centralizing, it is also decentralizing as it helps create these multiple identities when we have to separate our desires/identities in order to 'play the game.' What postmodernism allows me to do at least, is understand the why or how the formal/informal public/private identities are constructed. 'Playing the game' doesn't get rid of the other ways of being like before the moment of fracture, so energy gets put into the informal network. Recognition of a centralized power structure stifles what can be said, views that they may not perceive to be in the individuals best interest consensus depending. Perhaps behind the jokes and the too easy laughs-the Stepford niceness-is a collective awareness that around the table are dogs playing poker. Is it a question of people not wanting to give up more of their humanity than they already have? Does it matter what is said at all? Or, how can my thoughts benefit me? These questions all have something in common, they lack a consideration for broader concerns, more complex concerns. Again, what does it say when the first question stops being asked? Just below the above quote is one from Hall, "The subject assumes different identities at different times, identities which are not unified around a coherent 'self'. Within us are contradictory identities, pulling in different directions, so that our identifications are continually being shifted about. If we feel that we have a unified identity from birth to death, it is only because we construct a comforting story or 'narrative of the self' about ourselves. (Hall, 1992b:277).
I thought here that Hall may be slightly off, not in the idea, but in how this happens. That thought is unfounded I know, especially since I have read the text surrounding this quote. I just was thinking that maybe it isn't competing discourses that fracture our identities, at least not only competing discourses (this is how I assume Hall would eventually go, by ideology which hails us from contradictory discourses?). I think that in part we are fractured by the way, in this instance neoliberalism, overdetermines signs, language and ideology. Can we also be pulled in different directions by discourses that layer too many meanings on the same symbol? For instance, what it means to be American can be used for so many different qualities that when we are confronted with multiple options that all relate to what it means to be an American we have to choose and in so doing fracture ourselves.
I just wanted to write these down, while they fluttered by my consciousness.

Qualitative Research
Qualitative and critical research, since the postmodern turn, place a high value on the idea of researcher reflexivity grounded in the understanding that all researchers, both quantitative and qualitative, scientific and social scientific, produce their research from their own unique experiences, standpoints, knowledges or paradigms, and historically constituted cultures (Richardson, 1994). While 'postmodernism' is by now a well-worn sign that has referred to a historical moment, an epistemological break from modernism, and an art or aesthetic movement among other things, in academia it represents an epistemological orientation characterized by "the doubt that any method or theory, discourse or genre, tradition or novelty, has a universal and general claim as the "right" or the privileged form of authoritative knowledge" (Richardson, 1994:517).
Additionally, postmodernism urges researchers to be skeptical of all claims to knowledge, particularly, but not exclusively, those that make claims to a singular, universal Truth about human kind or the social world. For Richardson, the ideas of postmodernism have opened up the field of qualitative research to new methods of researching and writing. In the aftermath of the postmodern turn, some within the field of qualitative research have argued for the need to make room for the explicit inclusion of the writer's voice in scholarly texts (Anderson, 2006, Denzin, 2006, Richardson, 1994. It is at this moment where I am compelled as a learner by Richardson's writing. If researchers begin to include themselves within their work then a funny thing happens to the expectations of what they can claim to know as Richardson explains, "a postmodernist position does allow us to know "something" without claiming to know everything. Having a partial, local, historical knowledge is still knowing. In some ways, "knowing" is easier, however, because postmodernism recognizes the situational limitations of the knower. Qualitative writers are off the hook, so to speak. They don't have to try to play God, writing as disembodied omniscient narrators claiming universal, atemporal general knowledge; they can eschew the questionable metanarrative of scientific objectivity and still have plenty to say as situated speakers, subjectivities engaged in knowing/telling about the world as they perceive it" (Richardson, 1994:518).
Contemporary qualitative researchers influenced by the postmodern turn no longer ignore this inescapable insertion of the human into the process of knowledge production. Indeed, they claim that all researchers are unable to fully free themselves from bias and subjectivity in their research. As Denzin (1994) explains, "the methods for making sense of experience are always personal" (p. 501). This statement is especially true for those whose projects are aligned with British Cultural Studies (BCS).

But why is it important to have what Mills (1959) calls a 'sociological
imagination' that seeks out the above types of qualitative questions? For me, I think it is important to understand how we as researchers are limited in what we can claim to know. Understanding that our knowledge and approach to research is limited by our worldview developed through personal experiences, education, and social position as well as what broader social forces our research wagon can get hitched to (knowingly or unknowingly), leads to a generative, more inclusive conversation and exchange of ideas. It occurs to me at this point that I probably do not need to press too hard to get researchers from various disciplines to buy in to what I am saying. However, I imagine a more visceral and negative response would be more forthcoming from some, when discussing how race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and culture can shape a person's worldview and how those social norms get institutionalized in part through the kind of knowledge our research produces. But, my faith in Richardson's beliefs about the value of qualitative research and the illumination of the unavoidable contingencies involved in the production of knowledge, also means that I recognize the limits and contingencies of the scientific knowledges produced by those Kinesiologists who execute their research mainly or exclusively through use of positivist or post-positivist assumptions, the scientific method, quantitative measures and outputs, and statistics. This is a recognition that places me on the critical, constructivist side of the paradigmatic steel curtain mentioned in Chapter 1. It is a recognition that means that I see something that they cannot, do not, will not, or perhaps want not to see. To speak this recognition publicly in the URI department of Kinesiology, especially in a classroom, is to be seen as a heretic surrounded by a church full of believers in the faith of Science with a capital 'S.' Practically speaking, in my experiences, it meant, on more occasions than not, becoming isolated, marginalized, devalued, and discredited when I chose to express these ideas that are commonly accepted by qualitative researchers who have made the postmodern turn.
As a qualitative researcher working after the postmodern turn, I consider it an ethical standard and the responsibility of the researcher to attempt to be assiduously self-reflexive about the process of doing their work; from conception to completion.
Being self-reflexive means the researcher can explicitly describe how their experiences, academic training, theories employed, identity, and social location to name a few, influence the way in which the research is approached, conducted, interpreted and represented. The logics of self-reflexivity operate from the belief that all representations of reality are political and influenced by power relations, but in no way constitute 'True' facts. At the same time, BCS researchers realize that despite their best efforts to be reflexive about how their research is influenced by personal biography, cultural politics and the horizons of knowledge of a particular historical moment, they will undoubtedly not be able to account for all of the ways that their research findings may be as symptomatic of the times in which they study and the peculiarities of their own experiences and knowledges as representative of even bounded and humble truths about the cultures and peoples they study.
But, through the implementation of a Cultural Studies theoretical and methodological framework one way culture can be analyzed is as "a discursive formation. . . of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society" (Barker citing Hall, 2008:5). In the instance of this thesis, studying the 'discursive formation' of URI's Kinesiology department centers on critically examining the types of Kinesiological discourses created through the everyday cultural life of URI's Kinesiology department.
For example, in theory, Kinesiology departments like URI's do not share a common canon of knowledge across all of its subfields (Physical Education, Exercise Physiology, Exercise Science, Sport & Exercise Psychologies, and Cultural Studies of Sport & Physical Culture). But, in practice, any given Kinesiology department can establish particular ways of knowing human movement or doing Kinesiological research as 'normal' (and others as different or abnormal) mainly through something as simple and perhaps inconsequential or unintentional (for members of the normative group at least) as the casual use of their specific, sub-disciplinary languages, discourses, or epistemological frameworks within formal and informal departmental conversations or the framing of pertinent topics for coursework or research as if they were universal. Within such a departmental culture, the idea or recognition that there is no shared, common, foundational or collectively agreed upon canon to Kinesiological education within the URI Kinesiology department is an important cultural observation because it is something that those whose subdisciplinary knowledges are positioned as normal don't often immediately recognize. So, I am interested in illuminating how certain discourses and knowledges about the study of human movement are more highly valued and made to appear more 'normal' than others through the everyday life of the department. To struggle against this form of normative power through discourse is to attempt to disrupt how this form of 'common sense' reproduces this power. In my experiences coming up through the Kinesiology department as an Exercise Science (ES) undergraduate and my eventual crossover to Physical Cultural Studies (PCS), the day to day interactions of students and faculty tended to represent ES knowledge as the only imaginable way of knowing and studying human movement. So what I am attempting to make plain is how ES knowledge was constructed as normative for what the study of Kinesiology has come to mean at URI, and to recognize my thesis as a resistive act within this normative culture to attempt to broaden the ways in which Kinesiological knowledge is produced and valued at URI.
In particular, what this thesis attempts to make visible are the common, everyday practices of the departmental community that enable an exercise science view of Kinesiology to operate, in most spaces and times, as the unspoken, common sense, or 'normal' way of understanding human movement in the University of Rhode Island's Kinesiology department from 2010 through 2012. To do so, I want to tell my own story of how this normalization of exercise science based ways of knowing human movement within the department created a host of additional obstacles, marginalizations, stigmatizations, and negotiations for me as a Physical Cultural Studies graduate student so that my daily experiences increasingly led me to feel like an 'other' within the Kinesiology department at the University of Rhode Island.

Becoming an academic writer
"Qualitative research has to be read, not scanned; its meaning is in the reading" (Richardson, 1994:517) What I like most about doing cultural studies work is how I find new connections, meanings, and so I get to constantly develop new ways of seeing the world as I encounter new forms of information about various social worlds. My initial view of academic writing (before encountering qualitative research and the writings of academics like Denzin, Fausto-Sterling, Lynch, and Richardson) was one of separation and dispassion, mostly because I first learned about it as taking the form of scientific writing. In contrast, writing for me has always been a safe haven defined by personal disclosure, making sense of the world around me, and expressing myself in a poetic manner. In short, writing was the means through which I could express and feel like the person I most want to be. Within the margins of the page, I can have an intimate conversation with another human being. If I am brave enough to reveal myself through the telling of my thoughts and experiences, why then can't we create at least a hidden space of understanding within each other's minds. I admittedly have a strong idealist bent that tends to amplify the wistfulness of my thoughts and writing. I cannot deny that I have fantastic imaginings about the type of understanding I am seeking. But, from a technical standpoint, by 'understanding,' I am thinking in terms of postmodernism as "the doubt that any method or theory, discourse or genre, tradition or novelty, has a universal and general claim as the "right" or the privileged form of authoritative knowledge" (Richardson, 1994:517).
From a more hopeful, if not reasonable, standpoint, I want the reader to be mindful that I am present and going through the joys, pains, and pressures of a human life much like they are. We all have a particular relationship to the world and postmodernism does not locate 'true knowledge' in any one paradigm of thought or way of knowing.
How does Richardson get to this point of the need to include the writer's voice within postmodernism? As I look over the claims she made and that I am now recreating here, I discover that I was again drawn to distraction by discovering the structure of her argument. I forgot to ask the important question of how postmodernism gets us to the point of doubt and opens the door for reflexivity.
Richardson performs this above trick by connecting poststructuralism to postmodernism like so.
"Poststructuralism links language, subjectivity, social organization, and power. The centerpiece is language. Language does not "reflect" social reality, but produces meaning, creates social reality. Different languages and different discourses within a given language divide up the world and give it meaning in ways that are not reducible to one another. Language is how social organization and power are defined and contested and the place where our sense of selves, our subjectivity, is constructed. Understanding language as competing discourses, competing ways of giving meaning and of organizing the world, makes language a site of exploration, struggle." (Richardson, 1994:518)  As I draw this chapter to a close, I come back to the Hour 3 email I sent to Dr.
Kusz because it is a good example of what draws me to qualitative research and the self-reflexivity of the postmodern turn. I get to learn a language that helps me at this point in my academic career make sense of the physical cultures as felt through bodily experiences in a creative and academically accepted way.

British Cultural Studies
It isn't that there are no limits narrowing what I can take BCS to be, but as Hall states cultural studies is a "sustained work of theoretical clarification" (Turner, 1992).

Since a British Cultural Studies [BCS] analyst views every historical moment
as being produced out of specific social, political, cultural and economic conditions that intersect and overlap in complex expressions of power and meaning (Barker, 2008;Turner, 2003) culture that recognizes that it doesn't necessarily pre-exist people in a given time and place, but culture is something that people co-create in every time and place out of particular social, historical and political conditions they do not get to choose. What this means is that culture is not really a tangible or fixed thing. And it certainly is not some sort of knowable Truth to which I have direct access. The word that often appears in critical theory is 'imagined;' Althusser's definition of ideology as an "imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence" (Storey, 1993:118), "imagined communities" (Anderson, 1983), or "sociological imagination" (Mills, 1959). The use of the phrase 'imaginary' as it relates to culture is bound together through language; and as Saussure argues, "the function of language is to organize and construct our access to reality." (Storey, 1993:70).
So, how is culture understood and theorized through a BCS optic? Any description of what British Cultural Studies has to begin by giving an account of how its practitioners understand culture. In fact, according to some histories of the field of BCS, the field of began with Raymond Williams' (1958) publication of Culture and Society, which among other things argued for a reconceptualization of the meaning of culture, which would change the way culture could be imagined. Prior to the publication of Culture and Society, the idea of culture that dominated in literary criticism circles and was casually held by many lay people was Matthew Arnold's idea that culture represented "the best that has been thought and said in the world" (Storey, 1993:21) or what is commonly described as 'high culture'.
Arnold thought of culture as a means of maintaining social and political order in modern society used by upper classes to promote particular notions of civility and morality canonized in the fine arts to discipline themselves and other social classes (Storey, 1993). These elitist attitudes about culture were promoted by F. R. Leavis 4 , whose paradigm for studying culture dominated literary criticism at the time of Williams' publication of Culture and Society. The Leavis tradition, as it is known, insisted only on the study of canonical texts in literature as they represented works of genius and as such offered high moral and intellectual value.
"Extolling, in his phrase, "the Great Tradition," Leavis privileged literature above all other disciplines, as offering a special morally edifying force. In so doing, he followed MATTHEW ARNOLD, who in Culture and Anarchy (1869) claimed that the literary canon could provide a civilizing "sweetness and light" to society, in effect assuming the redemptive power previously enjoyed by religion." (Norton, 2001(Norton, :1565 Yet Williams believed that this Leavisite approach to the study of culture as only high culture was limited, because it didn't help in understanding society or the 'whole way of life,' of a particular culture at a particular time. For Williams, culture existed anywhere and everywhere. One could study the cultures which shape the life of any individual (particularly working class individuals and the cultures in which they lived), or one could study the culture of a social institution, or the culture that was popular in a given time period and/or social space. As Turner (1992) describes the ideas: "Emerging from a literary critical tradition that saw popular culture as a threat to the moral and cultural standards of modern civilization, the work of the pioneers in cultural studies breaks with that literary tradition's elitist assumptions in order to examine the everyday and the ordinary: those aspects of our lives that exert so powerful and unquestioned an influence on our existence that we take them for granted. The processes that make us-as individuals, as citizens, as members of a particular class, race, or gender-are cultural processes that work precisely because they seem so natural, so unexceptional, so irresistible" (2).
The break from the Leavis tradition was not simple, complete, or the work of Williams exclusively. Richard Hoggart (1957) in The Uses of Literacy and E. P Thompson (1963)  are also relevant to understanding the BCS perspective on studying the specificity of how cultures get created and reproduced. These moments represent a specific time when sociological, economic, political and historical forces articulated in a unique way, specific to a particular place to produce a new meaning of culture.
For BCS scholars, the study of culture can be understood as akin to the study of language, as "language gives meaning to material objects and social practices that are brought into view by language and made intelligible to us in terms that language delimit" (Barker, 2008:7 How meanings get constructed socially and change over time is another dominant feature of BCS. Ferdinand De Saussure's theory of language underpins much of the way a BCS perspective sees the world, "to understand culture is to explore how meaning is produced symbolically through the signifying practices of language" (Barker, 2008:76). De Saussure's theory of language, "explains the generation of meaning by reference to a system of structured differences in language. He explores the rules and conventions that organize language (langue) rather than the specific uses and utterances which individuals deploy in everyday life (parole). Saussure, and structuralism in general, is more concerned with the structures of language than actual performance. Structuralism is concerned with how cultural meaning is produced, holding it to be structured 'like a language'. A structuralist understanding of culture is concerned with 'systems of relations' of an underlying structure that forms the grammar which makes meaning possible" (Barker, 2008:76).
Though BCS has moved beyond a strictly structuralist perspective, it still values Saussure's assertion that "the function of language [and a culture in which one lives] is to organize, to construct, indeed to provide us with our only access to, reality" (Turner, 1992:13). It is in studying the process through which language and meaning are organized and constructed that British Cultural Studies work is interested.
Language organizes and can compel people to act in particular or preferred ways. It can also organize social relations within particular spaces and times. As mentioned above, a unique aspect of BCS work is that it understands the cultural process through which meaning is made to be influenced by very specific political, economic, and social forces and conditions at a given moment in time. Finally, BCS scholars also foreground in their analyses the ways in which power relations are constituted through language use, as well as how social power can be resisted through the creation and/or mobilization of language or counter-language (counter-discourses or counterknowledges).
Another concept that is important to BCS work is that of signifying practices.
Through signifying practices social meanings and power are (re)produced in a culture.
A signifying practice can be anything that conveys or produces social meaning (i.e.
words, comments, clothing, bodily gestures, etc. In most of the classrooms I sat in as a Kinesiology student, a Kinesiological discourse of exercise science was the language or signifying practice in which meaning about human movement was organized, produced, and legitimized. In most spaces of the University of Rhode Island's Kinesiology department, it is the language of exercise science that organizes the way that human movement is discussed, imagined, and understood. This language of exercise science often imagines humans through the metaphor of the body as machine with inputs and outputs; as an organism whose biological and physiological operations are studied in a way that abstracts them out of history, society, and politics, meaning that this way of understanding human bodies and human movement often discursively removes or distances human bodies and movement from the complex social environments in which we live. This mode of understanding human movement prefers to construct its knowledge through quantitative measures, statistics, and classifications or categorizations that have a tendency to turn humans into objects of knowledge that minimize the complex and specific aspects of their humanity.
Conversely, in a Kinesiology classroom where a Physical Cultural Studies language or way of knowing was used the way the body was talked about and 'known' was as a person or social subject embedded in a society, where social conditions heavily influence how humans choose to move their bodies. Physical Cultural Studies practitioners believe that all knowledge is political and the meanings assigned to how and why humans move are contested terrains where social subjects constantly reinforce or resist social norms at particular times and places. Physical Cultural Studies tries to understand how certain knowledges come to be dominant, whose interests are served by those knowledges and whose interests get marginalized by them. Signifying practices, the cultural practices through which particular meanings are articulated to a social object or a part of the social world, are essential for one to recognize and understand in order for one to comprehend how particular knowledges about human bodies and movement get produced and valued over others.
The key signifying practices of the Kinesiology department that established an exercise science/exercise physiology viewpoint as the taken for granted, unspoken, For many Kinesiology students who specialize in exercise science and who value a paradigm that seeks to optimize health behaviors or athletic performance (and does not always attend to the contradiction that exists between these goals), this was the type of knowledge that gives its audiences a comforting sense that the world is ultimately knowable if one simply learned/memorized these nuggets of 'Truth.' These assertions of 'Truth' were explained to be valid and generalizable to all 'individuals.' One exercise science professor did use phrases such as 'we think' or 'we believe,' or 'we studied,' which did suggest some sense of the provisional nature of scientific knowledge of human bodies and movement. But such phrases ultimately did little to disrupt the authoritative manner in which exercise scientific knowledge was often delivered in URI Kinesiology classrooms. As this mode of delivery echoed from speaker to speaker and from room to room because exercise science and exercise physiology classes dominate undergraduate curricula, it simultaneously gave the impression amongst many undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty that the entire Kinesiology community spoke with one voice, and thought with one mind.
I remember talking with my Biochemistry professor after one class about how it seemed to me that biochemistry had many of the answers that exercise scientists were looking for and s/he responded, "no, we just look on a different scale." I remember being pulled up short by this response for I was expecting agreement from him. But his reply was immediate, casual, and seemingly drawn out of experience.
Yet through this interaction with this biochemist I learned that not all professors of science speak with one voice or give the impression that scientific knowledge is absolute, infallible, without limits, or beyond critique. Perhaps most importantly, I learned that scientific knowledge is also subject to representation. In this case, the biochemist refused to make claims about exercise physiology because s/he was aware of biochemistry's paradigmatic limits. So, in some instances the seeming unity of a scientific narrative can be called into question.
Likewise, Stuart Hall, one of the most influential BCS thinkers, who also directed the CCCS from 1968-79, describes the epistemological rupture of the study of culture as "untidy" with a "characteristic unevenness of development" (Hall, 1980:57).
Hall goes on to emphasize that "what is important are the significant breaks-where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes" (Hall, 1980:57 the individual's place in it, and the range of possible relationships to that world and its parts" (Guba & Lincoln, 1994:107). The logic of Kuhn's notions of 'paradigms' and epistemological breaks parallels Foucault's notion of discourse and method of genealogical analysis that looks for epistemological ruptures. For Foucault, "discourse constructs, defines and produces the objects of knowledge in an intelligible way while at the same time excluding other ways of reasoning as unintelligible" (Barker, 2008:20). Held within these descriptions of discourses and paradigms are ideas of the political and provisional character of knowledge, the particular subjectivities that knowledge produces and are produced by, and the relational positions of the individual to the world. This idea that particular ways of knowing the world are confined to particular historical moments and societies is also vital to the way BCS conceptualizes culture. In writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dispelled the notion that scientific discovery has been a consistent linear progression throughout time, much the way Foucault did with his History of Sexuality (1976,1984), much the way West views physical birth as inescapably the most humble of beginnings, but what happens during the "journey from womb and tomb" as he says, is worth examining. Along with our physical birth is the birth of self, the mixing of biology and 5 The phrase, "come down on humanity with love" drew the following comment from Dr. Kusz: "Why is this masculine? 'to come down on humanity' is an awkward phrase for a man whose performance attempts to position him as no better than any other human, so would he come down to humanity, or say, 'commune with humanity with love.'?" My response to this comment was as follows: "I am attempting to show a tension here as to the complexity of masculinity. I am viewing West coming from a very hegemonic masculine standpoint, even though I am sure his investment and performance is different. The tension, for me, is that I see such confidence and authority in his performances that it is hard to reconcile the community aspect. My 'natural' tendency is to think of confidence and authority as a hierarchical and exclusive subject position. This idea is relevant to Hour 1 and how I positioned you. The "Patricide" piece was a way to work through this tension. At the end, I hint at the realization that maybe knowing that my performance as a father to my son could result in my own metaphysical death. It was a way to 'come down' to humanity. The goal is to make this transition with love, rather than despair." ideology, but also the death of any hopes of true self-determination. My birth certificate documents my height, weight, time and type of human I start off being.
When the doctor announced to my mother "it's a boy," my metaphysical self was conceived.
Even Yet even how I have come to see a classroom, has changed through the experience of my cultural studies education. It is more than just desks, chairs, teachers, and students, where concepts and information is packaged-hopefully within some form of intentional pedagogical strategy-and delivered to students for their intellectual enrichment. Hidden within and amongst those material objects (at least to eyes not trained in socio-cultural analysis), I can observe a place where specific cultures are produced and experienced out of institutional and individual practices cocreated by students and professors. Some experience the social practices and relations that get constructed in a class as events that happen 'naturally,' unproblematically, and automatically, 'just as anyone does,' they might say. People who share this view often believe this because the subject matter and its associated ontological and epistemological underpinnings correspond with the world view with which they arrived at class.
Meanwhile, another student may experience the same class in a radically different manner; she may wonder why no one is questioning the professor, because the knowledge presented runs so counter to her experience of the world. I witnessed an example of this during a Philosophy of Science course, where a student was speaking out about his experiences with severe ADHD and the medications he was required to take in order to be able to function from day to day. In this case, the professor was expressing a generality that children today are too quickly diagnosed with and medicated for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Though this exchange was not contentious, it did make me more wary of accepting generalities about social issues. In other words, a classroom is never simply, nor straightforwardly, just a site of learning. Through the use of BCS ideas, I have come to see and recognize in my own experiences in the URI Kinesiology department the way in which a classroom can function as a site of struggle, a contested terrain where various groups struggle over whose ideas about the world are allowed or made to count, and whose get marginalized and/or overlooked. More specifically, I now recognize a classroom as a site struggle over of what constitutes 'legitimate' knowledge about human movement. And depending on which side one is positioned, the dominant or subordinate, a classroom can be experienced as comfortable or uncomfortable. The point is that this thesis is not merely a simple personal choice made in a social vacuum, but is itself a product of culture.
My experiences in the summer 2008 led me on an intellectual journey that drew me to cross over from originally wanting to become an exercise scientist as an undergraduate to wanting to become a Cultural Studies analyst as a graduate student.
While the explicit project of this thesis is to examine how various forms of Kinesiological knowledge are valued within the everyday construction of the departmental culture, in a sense it is also my attempt at beginning to unpack, make sense of, and come to terms with, the story of my academic crossover and the experience of what it was like navigating the intellectual landscape as the sole PCS graduate student in an ES dominant Kinesiology department.
BCS work makes visible how cultural practices are shaped by overarching, specific socio-historical conditions, social contexts, institutional norms, and power relationships that are often invisible and too abstract for most people to recognize (Barker, 2008;Turner, 2003). Through every day, habitual institutional practices that people perform everyday, social power is formed within a given social context such as a Kinesiology classroom. From a BCS perspective, the production of culture is inherently a political process (Barker, 2008;Hall, 1985;Turner, 2003). The formation of social norms in any culture always privileges those who embody those norms or whose social interests are served by them, while it simultaneously marginalizes alternative viewpoints and ways of being that do not reflect or willfully resist the cultural norms that organize social action in that given cultural context (Rabinow, 1984). The takeaway here is: cultural practices are socially constructed by people out of the material conditions available to them, including the social contexts and power relations that organize that context (Barker, 2008;Storey, 1993;Turner, 2003).
For instance, when I entered Dr. Kusz's KIN 278 class in the summer of 2008, I understood human movement solely to be a product of physiological, biochemical, and biological processes located within an individual's body because this was the way of understanding human movement-the positivistic science mode of understanding human movement-that was made normative in the majority of the classrooms of the URI department of Kinesiology when I arrived. This way of understanding human movement is, of course, dominant in part because science has been socially constructed in the Western world as the dominant way to understand how the world works (Denzin, 2001, Denzin & Lincoln, 2005. But I had also learned to adopt this positivist interpretive framework for understanding human movement as the foundational means through which a Kinesiologist should understand human movement because all my previous Kinesiology courses were founded on this epistemological view of human movement created by the ES-trained faculty in the department. It must not be overlooked how this view of human movement is not a pre-determined or 'natural' aspect of a Kinesiology department, but rather a product of a social process; an undergraduate curriculum was created by Kinesiology faculty through an ongoing social process of evaluating the content of departmental curricula annually, which is unavoidably political as well (as I will explain in the following chapter). What I did not know at that time was that this change in my Kinesiological specialization was not simply a shift from one way of knowing human movement to another, but it involved a significant existential and identity shift as well. A shift not only confined to my identity as a Kinesiologist, but that, most unexpectedly, forced me to reimagine my social positions as a straight, white, American, male as well. This shift, in retrospect, was not something for which I was fully prepared. But this shift has been one of the most formative parts of my education as a graduate student, person, and citizen.
In particular, as I shifted from an ES student to a PCS one, I went from being a privileged member of the departmental community as an exercise science subject, to becoming a marginalized PCS/Kinesiological 'other' within the space of the department. Stated differently, my subject position within the departmental community shifted from being a part of the culturally dominant normative and majority group within the department to becoming a member of PCS subgroup who are a small minority in the department and whose way of knowing human movement is not only different from, but at times oppositional to, the positivistic science view of human movement that is cast as the normative way of doing Kinesiology in the department through small, daily acts of silent assumption and/or assertion. As this example tries to illuminate, culture is a dynamic social process that is unavoidably political and has real effects on the identities, experiences, and social relations of members of a cultural community.

Pre-URI: A Prior Self, Exploring Massachusetts
My family moved around a lot in the early to mid-1990s, when I was between the ages of 12-16. The change in scenery also came with a change in socioeconomic status from middle class to working class, a distinction most apparent the year we lived on Cape Cod. It was there that I first listened to music from a CD while at a friend's house and was made aware by others of how I dressed differently. I wore mostly hand me downs from my two older and much larger brothers. In fact, at the time I was shorter than six out of the seven other members of my family. So, I am sure I looked quite funny in wrinkly button down shirts that swallowed my arms. Though, my experience living at the Cape has forever altered my choices in clothing. I would like to say that my 'choice' to dress down was a form of resistance, but as I look back it was more of an attempt to regain a sense of control over my inability to win the category of 'best dressed.' I carried this to an extreme when a few years later, I showed up at my brother's high school graduation dressed in the shabbiest clothes I could find, drawing the ire of my mother. The most significant realization I had at the Cape was how I went from being known on the whole as being a smart kid and an athlete, to being a smart kid that tried but failed to make any of the school sports teams. For the first time, I was the small kid who got bullied in the halls. This experience was the first noticeable split in the seamless notion of self I had previously carried with me from place to place.
Little did I know then that these experiences would help me to make sense of some of the feelings and experiences I encountered after announcing my allegiances to PCS over against ES. After two and a half years in Monson, our landlord decided to sell the house we were renting. In 1995, after nearly four years we made our way to Barre, MA the place we initially left for Cape Cod. I was back, yet it was all different, the people, the school, and me. While I could write much about this particular time, marked mostly by my confusion of sorting out what I wanted to do versus the pressure of living up to other's expectations of what I was supposed to do, the key development for me was not just that the head could be separated from the body as it was in Cape Cod, or that we have only a limited control over the turns our lives take, as in the case of Monson, but that our notions of self can be multiple, fragmented, and even contradictory.
Instead of a senior prom we had a formal dinner dance. Since I had moved to Barre, I was involved in Navy Junior Reserves Officers Training Corps (NJROTC). Getting back to the dinner dance, my oldest brother now in college and working at Filene's Basement offered to buy my outfit for the dance using his employee discount. While I was standing on the box getting fitted, my brother's coworker asked me if I was going into the service like my brother. Matt answered for me, "No, he's a pacifist." It is hard to imagine that a few weeks later, I would be signing the papers for active duty in the US Navy.
I'll have that label back, please.

Analysis
In the analysis that follows, I use a British Cultural Studies (BCS) as well as a Foucauldian optic to illuminate and critically examine everyday practices, discourses, and attitudes that undergird or give a distinctive and discernible structure to the culture of the URI Department of Kinesiology. One notable goal of the BCS mode of studying culture is to shed light on the complex social process through which a set of everyday cultural and discursive practices produce a specific hierarchy of knowledge and power (Barker, 2008;Storey, 1993;Turner, 2003 For many people who belong to the normative social group in a given cultural place, the everyday discursive and cultural practices that enable certain relations of power between community members to be produced may be invisible. Because these relations of power are often invisible to those who are a part of the normative or dominant group, much of my labor as a cultural critic in writing this thesis has been spent trying to create a clever enough argument and amass evidence to convince the normative social group, which I argue is the members of our departmental community who identify with the specialization of exercise science and exercise physiology, that my interpretations of the implicit knowledge-based norms of our department are valid. Denzin (1994) describes the resistance to qualitative studies as follows: The academic and disciplinary resistance to qualitative research illustrate the politics embedded in this field of discourse. The challenges to qualitative research are many. Qualitative researchers are called journalists, or soft scientists. Their work is termed unscientific, or only exploratory, or entirely personal and full of bias. It is called criticism and not theory, or it is interpreted politically, as a disguised version of Marxism or humanism (19).
In fact, I find Denzin's quote here particularly informative because when I began scheduling interviews at the start of this project, one exercise scientist quipped, "Are you going to try and turn us all into Marxists?" Of course, I could have chosen not to concern myself with trying to convince exercise scientists that BCS ways of knowing the social, historical, cultural and political forces and conditions influencing human movement and qualitative methodologies such as autoethnography should be taken seriously in the study of human movement, and that they should be something they value if they truly seek their goals of promoting health and physical activity among populations deemed 'unhealthy' or 'unfit.' But, following an ideal of BCS work, I was compelled to study the politics of knowledge construction in the URI Kinesiology department because I am interested in promoting social change and justice, which in this case, I conceptualize as trying to construct a bridge across that paradigmatic steel curtain that invisibly, but materially seems to organize the department's intellectual culture (Andrews, 2008;Barker, 2008;Denzin, 1994Denzin, , 2001Denzin, , 2005Kretchmar, 2008;McKay, Gore, and Kirk, 1990;Richardson, 1994).

The tensions felt across the various subdisciplines, which comprise
Kinesiology departments in unique arrays across the United States was the focus of Kretchmar's (2008) work, "The Utility of Silos and Bunkers in the Evolution of Kinesiology." In this article, Kretchmar offers a history of how Kinesiology departments became organized into 'silos' and 'bunkers.' They did so in order to legitimize and add depth to a field of study-sport, exercise, 'gym,' and today, human movement-that traditionally wasn't as highly valued within academia because it was often focused on studying bodies and leisure activities often deemed to be 'not serious' (as they are imagined in opposition to work) in relation to fields that focused on 'real' and 'serious' topics related to work and being oriented around 'the mind.' McKay, Gore, Kirk (1990) note in another account of the historical evolution of Physical Education departments to become Kinesiology departments, that many Physical Educators, in a move made to attempt to achieve more academic credibility for their field, often attempted to connect physical education research and teaching with positivistic, quantitative science and its professional status and capital. Today, the sociology of sport and its subfield of PCS faces a crisis of survival due to the ever increasing value placed on the positivistic quantitative mode of studying human movement within Kinesiology departments and universities as a whole (Andrews, 2008).
In the face of the ever expanding ES silo within the Kinesiology department, it is important to consider how everyday discursive and cultural practices that enable certain relations of power to exist between community members are rendered invisible, because people will more and more regard these practices as being 'just the way things are done.' As Storey-borrowing the ideas of Barthes-explains, everyday cultural practices within a given place, like an academic department, can work to mythologize particular ways of being and relating to the world that are considered 'normal' in that cultural place.
In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts…it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves. (Storey citing Barthes, 1993:82) The important process at work for Barthes is how the historical and political struggles over ways of knowing and being get lost, or 'mythologized,' as one naturalizes the everyday acts and relations of institutional life and asserts that those acts 'mean something by themselves.' Part of the work of cultural criticism is to demystify the process through which particular forms of Kinesiological knowledge are made to matter through the everyday labor and 'common sense' discursive and social relations of departmental members, faculty, students, and staff.

Stories of the history of the URI Kinesiology department
Through When one looks at this longer history of the department is it quite easy to reveal that everyday, habitual acts, social relations and discourses within a culture do not just naturally occur, nor are their meanings self-evident. In fact, these everyday aspects of the departmental culture are a product of a long historical social process that makes a culture day after day, as seemingly mundane social practices are repeated, reproduced by others, and usually go unquestioned as simply 'the ways things have always been done.' In other words, members within a cultural community like an academic department construct a particular way of being in the world and of knowing the world-what Barthes might call a myth-that operates as the cultural 'common sense' or what many come to know as a 'natural' way of being in a given space and time.
For members whose social interests and ways of knowing and being are affirmed and recognized by the social norms of that cultural place, they may rarely notice, identify, or even be able to verbally detail and explain the very existence or specific content of these ways of knowing and being because they simply regard them as 'common sense.' For them, these social norms are most often described as just 'the way things are.' BCS practitioner, Paul Willis states this idea more eloquently when he writes, "It is one of the fundamental paradoxes of our social life that when we are at our most natural, our most everyday, we are also at our most cultural; that when we are in roles that look the most obvious and given, we are actually in roles that are constructed, learned and far from inevitable" (Willis, 1979:185).
Yet, for those who participate in a culture but do not represent or always fit within its dominant social norms or value system, this form of common sense is not so 'common,' nor is it invisible or imperceptible as they exist on a day-to-day basis. In fact, for these members of the culture, they often bump into and experience social, cultural, or political 'friction' when their comments (ways of knowing) or actions (ways of being) interrupt, challenge, or rub up against the 'invisible' boundaries that constitute, and are constituted by, this particular form of common sense and its attendant social norms and values.
For a BCS analyst, the goal of critical cultural study is to illuminate the social norms and values that people within a culture make meaningful (Barker, 2008;Turner, 2003;Storey, 1993). It is assumed that the norms and values of any given culture are always produced out of complex social interactions and cultural histories, themselves always already the result of past and on-going political struggle (or a struggle over finite resources or specific ways of representing and imagining the world). The norms, values, and common sense that are created within a culture by its members usually serve the social interests of some (those who then enjoy social advantages and benefits) over others. These dominant norms and values can also frame what gets said, where it gets said, and how it is allowed to matter within a culture.
As an exercise-science-undergraduate-turned-physical-cultural-studies- Kinesiology department that may superficially appear to be epistemologically inclusive, but whose everyday norms are constituted through a particular positivist scientific view of human movement that is largely ahistorical, asocial, and apolitical is to experience life as constantly swimming into the current, constantly having one's ideas or values uncritically questioned, ridiculed, discounted, or even ignored. In sum, my existential experience of being a Kinesiologist whose knowledge of human movement is predicated on the premises of critical, self-reflexive, radically contextual, qualitative research (the premises of the work of PCS) shares much in common with the experiences of members of any non-normative or subaltern social groupalienation, frustration, self-doubt, and anger that comes from recognizing and living in an alternative social reality than the dominant or normative social group; an experience marked by seeing most clearly and obviously that which is invisible to all those who consider themselves to be part of the 'normal' or dominant social group.

Hour 9: Rhetoric of Tombstones
From a distance I regarded two cars speeding, Along a thin slip of dirt cutting through the cemetery grass. Following the sedans with bewildered eyes Headstones wraith-like in their blur as dust clouds rise, Choking off both rest and peace. I sensed elemental unease as a fundamental law of the cosmos' No speed above solemn, was being broken.
I wonder at the irreverence shown, the reckless escape of a place of permanent destination In which everyone has a headstone with which to collide. A place to deposit our own memories, In brown earth leaving the rest To posterity and the rhetoric of tombstones.
Driven is the man who stares at the wall, Meticulously hung scientific publications, The silver eyes of thumbtacks reflecting back While holding the past in place. deeds forming ranks across the bulletin board, each a trophy, each highlighting the empty spaces of an incomplete row. Each a whisper of fleeting relevance, As the march of progress inexorably speeds away. He's satisfied with being unsatisfied Reaching down to apprehend the bones of reality Articulating himself to the world. inconveniencing folks in the department, which wasn't always the case. I used to think nothing of walking into a professor's office to ask a question or run a thought by them.
That was before though. Before, I 'went to the dark side,' as one faculty member put it, and seemingly forfeited my claim to be intelligible to those who occupy what I have come to understand as the privileged norm; the exercise science norm. It occurs to me then, that displaying my access to his private space may not be polite in the least.
But, in a way, I feel as though this is my space too now and I don't want to be locked out of it.
We greet each other in practiced casual tones as neither one of us are willing to admit to retreating behind a locked door. Yet, we are subtly and not so subtly corralled here by the entrenchment of a way of thinking antithetical to our own. This way of thinking also erects a social structure that over time, step by step, brought Kyle and me together.
Just prior to me knocking on Kyle's door a member of the Kinesiology staff member asked me if I was "going into the tomb?" I replied. "What do you mean?" "You and Oliver go in there and don't come out for hours!" she exclaimed. "That's because it's our sanctuary," I replied. It isn't one of our own choosing though.

Speaking of PCS
A discourse is a recurring pattern of language about a phenomenon; it is a portrayal of reality, a world view that becomes part of the normative understandings that frame and shape how the phenomenon is to be understood. Dominant discourses tacitly and explicitly construct reality by governing what is said and what remains unsaid. Thus, privileged discourses sanction specific human interests and regulate human actions because once a discourse becomes institutionally privileged, others are effectively marginalized. Those who dominate political discourses have considerable influence on social policies and practices. (Sage, 1993:154-5) The intelligible, but that I wasn't steered back to Dr. Kusz for advice. In contrast, when I would ask the same Exercise Scientist questions about muscle fiber types, I was directed to another Exercise Scientist, "who had forgotten more about muscle fiber types than this professor had ever known" who could better answer my questions.
In this example, ES knowledge was represented as a sort of community knowledge within the department that was valued and shared albeit unequally of the arguments Freeman made, which in and of itself wasn't an uncomfortable moment. But, the 'devil's advocate' strategy was seemed to only be employed when PCS grounded research was presented. The questions focused mostly on the qualifications of the researcher to make the claims Freeman made. Such questions as "How can he know that?" worked to discredit and devalue this type of PCS knowledge I presented. In contrast, positivistic quantitative science oriented presentations, where discussed with questions such as, "How could this study have been better?" and "What would you have done different?" These questions do not call into question the legitimacy of the type of research, but were seen as teaching moments to aid students in thinking about and presenting scientific journal articles.
These experiences are some of the informal and subtle ways that a knowledge hierarchy was constructed on an everyday basis within the department. This sort of experience can have a lasting impact on the type of knowledge to which students of URI's Kinesiology department are exposed and which knowledges are portrayed as most important or crucial. But, it seems that the failure to refer or redirect me to speak with Dr. Kusz about my question is a symptom of the paradigmatic steel curtain that exists within the department so that the study of human movement remains oriented by the ontological and epistemological assumptions and starting points of the exercise science positivists.
The normativity of an ES view in the department was also frequently established in speech acts that used humor to make light of PCS ideas, assumptions, and viewpoints. The first time I witnessed the use of humor as a marginalizing force downplaying the value of a PCS perspective was during my first semester as a graduate student. Oliver Rick, the very first URI Kinesiology PCS graduate student, was giving a presentation about his thesis project in a graduate class. Part of his presentation covered the constructivist notion that multiple realities exist in the world; the idea that an individual's understanding of reality is based on one's perspective, itself the complex product of one's experiences, education (both formal and informal), standpoint, and culture. This basic premise-that the social world is constructed by people, including even how we are taught to perceive the world through the limits of language and discourse-that for a PCS student is foundational for understanding how 'common sense' in a culture gets socially constructed, was met by a Kinesiology All of the other thesis presentations-all made by students whose training was grounded in exercise science-were met with serious, respectful discussion about the projects.
Another interesting part of this moment and interaction was the way in which the PCS student, Oliver, responded, almost defensively, by feeling compelled to take more time to lay out this basic idea of social construction of reality which grounds his thesis project so that it could be better understood by those primarily trained in exercise scientific ways of knowing the world. This moment illuminates the extra work required of PCS students and faculty to have their ideas and perspective taken seriously within departmental relations. It also shows how students, in this case, graduate students subtly learn from this professor that the validity and value of PCS scholarship can be questioned and even ridiculed. Finally, the moment also reveals how exercise science research premised on positivist and empiricist assumptions is the 'real' or 'legitimate' Kinesiology research in the department.
Perhaps this joke was made by this Kinesiology professor because the ideas of Oliver's thesis were outside his/her area of expertise, so s/he could not offer any thoughtful commentary on his thesis topic. But this seemingly mundane act, likely made without any ill intent or malice, is an excellent starting point for exemplifying In my view, there is immense potential in producing more complex forms of scientific knowledge through the combination of the ideas of the life sciences and critical theory.
Both academic fields have ostensibly the same goal-understanding the relations between the biological and the social, with the body as the site of such inquiry. But, of course, the methodology is what separates the two. Science seeks to eliminate subjectivity, adopt a position of objectivity, and quantify findings in an attempt to isolate and discover effects of variables. In contrast, critical theory rests on the idea that every optic is a subjective one (even Science's viewpoint) while it uses qualitative methods to describe and analyze how social, economic, political, and environmental forces and conditions of a given historical moment produce social actions, relations of power, and the ways we think about bodies, identities, and everything in the world.
By producing a Master's thesis that combines both approaches, I believe it will be possible to create a unique and novel form of interdisciplinary research that respects the virtues of both approaches while also exposing their limits. The bold goal of my project here is to contemplate how Kinesiologists emanating from disciplines of exercise science and physical cultural studies-disciplines which may not share common epistemological or ontological assumptionsmight produce a unique and novel piece of interdisciplinary research greater than the sum of its parts.
Possible aspects of study within thesis:  First and foremost, execute the study as it would be performed by a typical Exercise Science Master's student, being sure to maintain the integrity of the study's intent as conceived by the PIs  At the same time, examine the institutional structure and conditions (structures created by funding agencies, contemporary universities putting a premium on grant money as new revenue stream in these 'leaner and meaner' times of higher education) shaping the way scientists develop and produce knowledge through a specific study  Analyze the genesis of the inclusion of Tai Chi as exercise intervention (historicize the appeal of Eastern cultures in contemporary increasingly globalized, Western societies like the US)  Analyze social process of training Western (white, American?) novices to execute exercise intervention (What happens when an Eastern martial art is divorced from its' home culture and re-appropriated in a Western society for a Western scientific study?)  Examine the social process of executing the study (relations amongst researchers, researchers and participants, and between participants; social dynamics of the recruitment process-How does this process work here at URI, with its internal specificities, social location, etc.?)  Examine assumptions made by researchers regarding gender (how are intragroup differences managed? Gender results explained via biological determinist argument? Via interactional model between the social and the biological)  Utilize Foucault's theory of modern power as disciplinary and normalizing to examine the role that Kinesiologists perform in the everyday production and application of modern power  Utilize audience reception theory to determine how scientific knowledge is taken up and redeployed by kinesiology students Possible Thesis Format: Part I: Introduction Brief introduction to goal of study-oriented by British cultural studies and grounded in the theories of science studies (Kuhn, Latour, Fausto-Sterling, etc.), this study will examine the process through which contemporary scientists grounded in a Life Sciences orientation develop knowledge about bodies, culture, and possibly even obesity.
Among other things, this study will take an in depth look at the social, political, and economic forces which implicitly orient the funding of scientific research studies are funded, whose interests are served and the goals of the scientists involved. Interviews of PIs, research assistants, and even participants will be done. Outline of the history of the development of field of Kinesiology as well as the contemporary social moment when grant-driven research is highly valued at URI (and in contemporary academia).
Part II: Scientific Thesis This part will look exactly as a stand-alone thesis typical of the Master's thesis format produced by students of Dr. X and Dr.Y.
[This part would be evaluated by Drs. X and Y at the defense, but not by Dr. Kusz and other faculty whose inclusion would be due to an expertise in Science Studies, Sociology of Knowledge, or Philosophy of Science].

Part III: Analysis of Social Process of Executing a Diet and Exercise Intervention Study
The study will observe, detail, and then examine the social process through which scientific knowledge from the life sciences is produced. How this knowledge is produced through interactions between PIs and their training, as well as their decisions throughout the conception and execution of the study may be discussed. All interpretations of this social process will be discussed and clarified with the PIs and others associated with the study throughout. As is standard today, ethical ethnographic work involves a cooperative process between researcher (Justin) and subjects (all those involved in the study) in the production of the final research text (in this case, thesis) so that all parties have a voice in producing what would be considered a fair representation of the social process of the production of this scientific knowledge. Concerns about interpretations of this social process are expected. Reflections by the PIs regarding possible interpretations will be discussed any time they would like. I promise that my interpretation of the social process of producing this scientific knowledge will not focus on personal issues, but positional ones.
Possible chapter-Utilize audience reception theory to determine how scientific knowledge is taken up by kinesiology students In this chapter volunteers from an Exercise Science course will answer questions about the lessons they've learned about sex differences through readings of their exercise physiology text. Possible differences between the way the knowledge is encoded by the authors and decoded by the students will be examined.
Part IV: Conclusion-This chapter may be a contemplation on the process of doing this unique form of interdisciplinary research. What were the difficulties faced when researchers not sharing common epistemological and ontological starting points attempt to collaborate on a scientific study? What are the potential virtues and difficulties of combining critical theory with positivist science?

[Parts I, III, & IV would be evaluated by Dr. Kusz and other faculty whose inclusion would be due to an expertise in Science Studies, Sociology of Knowledge, or Philosophy of Science at the defense, but not by Drs. X and Y].
Thesis Committee: From the Graduate Manual: 8.42.2. Thesis Committee. Each student enrolled in a master's degree plan that requires a thesis must have a thesis committee. This committee is usually composed of at least three members of the Graduate Faculty, including the major professor who serves as chairperson. The second member of the thesis committee shall be in the same discipline and/or department as the major professor, or from a closely related department. The third member of the committee is from an outside area unless specifically approved otherwise by the Dean of the Graduate School. (URI Graduate Studies Manual) The thesis committee can be more than three members and I would have Drs. X, Y, Z, and Kusz, and at least one other member whose expertise lies in science studies, sociology of knowledge, or philosophy of science on my committee.
I sincerely appreciate your consideration, affording me the opportunity of exploring the complexities of interdisciplinary approaches to research and hope my thesis will demonstrate the value of broadening philosophies of knowledge production." The above outline was the product of my desire to bring together two academic disciplines that I thought complemented each other by picking up where the other left off. I was excited about this opportunity. It seemed to be the answer to the agonizing question of which specialization to choose, ES or PCS.

Do both.
Indeed, my decision making would have been much easier if I hadn't already developed a sense from being in the department for close to three years that PCS was viewed negatively by the Kinesiology department's faculty and students. But, this moment in my graduate studies turned out to be one of the most generative in that it revealed the presence of that paradigmatic steel curtain in the Kinesiology department at URI. I was hopeful, naïve, and an admittedly more than a bit idealistic that I would be allowed to pursue my proposed study. Dr. Kusz later wrote an email to me stating: I do remember being a bit pessimistic that the project would ever get off the ground. But, if I really thought there was no possibility of the project coming to fruition then I wouldn't have allowed you to spend time trying to make it happen. So, I guess I was cautiously optimistic about the endeavor. Aware that it probably wouldn't take place, but hopeful for you that it would.
In retrospect, it is interesting to read Dr. Kusz's thoughts about my proposal because, at the time, I didn't really consider what his expectations of the proposed study were for a couple of reasons. One, my desire to position myself as a unique student, thinker, and person within the department didn't allow me to consider the possibility that my proposal would not be well-received. Second, PCS work, Dr. Kusz once said to me was, "a do it yourself project," meaning that the object of study, methods of study, and the theory used are largely based on the social problem or issue being addressed. And thirdly, it seemed that much of our (Dr. Kusz and I) energy back then was focused on trying to develop strategies to convince ES minded faculty and students that there are alternative ways to study Kinesiology informed by a critical 'sociological imagination' that were equally important, and could, perhaps, be married to the positivistic quantitative and biologically based ways that dominated the department.
The meeting between the two PIs, Dr. Kusz, and myself was held on December As our meeting took shape Dr. Kusz and I began to try to explain how the PCS part of my thesis would study their research process as a social practice/process. They didn't seem to understand what this would mean. So Dr. Kusz attempted to explain, as an example, how a socio-cultural study of their research practices might address their use of Tai Chi in the study. This might mean examining what happens when a Chinese health and fitness practice is appropriated by Americans and dislocated from its cultural history. The follow-up questions of one PI seemed suspicious that Dr. Kusz viewed this dislocation of Tai Chi from the culture of origin as negative. Although, Dr. Kusz tried to assure this PI that it wasn't necessarily negative. Here, it is interesting to see how the language and ideas of PCS seems to be read by these positivist scientific-trained researchers as negative or to be regarded with suspicion.
In all honesty, I remember feeling the same way when I read PCS informed journal articles for the first time in KIN 278. Indeed, this suspicion regarding sociocultural ideas also surfaced in a later meeting with these PIs when I was working as a study coordinator on their Tai-Chi study and the topic of how we might better motivate the participants to lose weight was being discussed. I suggested we educate the participants about the subtle ways in which food choices are influenced by the placements of more unhealthy food choices at waist level at grocery and convenience stores. This was an idea I had learned about in KIN 508 Physical Activity Promotion: Theory and Practice. It seems to be another case where my attempt to integrate knowledges learned from various Kinesiological disciplines was met with a disbelieving chuckle at the idea that we are not always fully aware of the choices we make by the PIs. Here the basic PCS notion that culture and norms invisibly influence the choices many people make in their lives even if in ways they may not be fully aware elicited laughter. What became apparent to me then was that to those not trained in PCS ideas, the notion of being absolutely in control of one's choices is taken for granted as absolutely true and questions about the limits of one's control over their choices are met with suspicion, dismissal, or even anger.
But, in this case of studying their research practice, for these positivistic researchers, it seemed their concern or suspicion was based on a belief that Dr. Kusz or I would insert a certain bias or value judgment into the study-and one they might not want associated with their work-by asking questions about the cultural meanings that emerged through the American researchers' use of Tai Chi. I think their suspicions, at least in part, were a product of their disbelief that there was anything to learn from studying their research as a social practice or process. This disbelief is, I think, a product of their training as researchers where they are not familiar with (or have chosen not to give credence to) critiques which highlight how the preferred method of positivistic science-the scientific method-is still a social practice created and executed by humans, and thus, fallible, subjective, and partial in the knowledge it produces even if it represents itself as objective and unbiased.
During another moment in this meeting, I remember one of the PIs rubbing his/her temples in what seemed to be an attempt to figure out how to translate the PCS viewpoints and methods into terms of measurement and validity. As our conversation continued, one PI expressed concerns regarding whether I, as a Master's student, was qualified to make 'valid' and informed qualitative observations of researchers and study participants. This concern immediately followed a point in our conversation when one of the PIs cautiously admitted that it seemed to him/her that men in this professor's classes generally take a test of quad strength more seriously and competitively than most of the women. I then suggested that perhaps this was due in part to how the Keiser machine might be read as a masculine piece of exercise equipment and the history of limited restricted access of women in weight lifting settings. The PIs looked baffled by my response, one that introduced the idea that the machines weren't simply machines, but cultural meanings, indeed, gendered meanings could be articulated to, and stick with, them. I then responded impulsively and argumentatively, "What qualifications does a first semester ES grad student have to be able to coordinate a funded ES study?" Little did I know that my impulsiveness would generate a telling admission from one of the PIs when s/he said: "They just have to follow procedures." The questions about my qualifications as a student learning how to do qualitative research brought to the fore how a positivist way of performing research was made to be the gold standard-having the highest value-for how to do Kinesiology research within our conversation. Part of the (re-)production of this normativity of positivist science in the department in this moment seemed to entail the expression of a deep suspicion of qualitative research and an overwhelming silence or lack of awareness of the social constructedness and limits of positivistic, quantitative scientific work. Together, this suspicion and silence combined to enable positivistic, quantitative work to be re-established as the legitimate, authoritative, and yes common sense means of doing research within the department at a time when it could have been disrupted.
More specifically, the PI's comment reveals their positivist assumption that any ES graduate student can administer an ES study because 'following procedures' through the employment of the scientific method automatically ensures the study will be objective and absent of any bias. Interestingly, the two graduate students tapped to work on this study, me being one of them, played no role in the construction of the study's research questions and objectives, ostensibly rendering the social process by which the study was conceived invisible to us. I am reminded here of a time when an ES professor confided to me that, "what you do [PCS research] is harder than what I do [ES research]. All I do is enter data into a computer and it tells me the results." In comments like these, if they are to be taken at face value, reveals the idea that this Kinesiologist believed that the positivistic and quantitative mode of producing Kinesiology knowledge was as natural and objective as to not be human at all. But more importantly in terms of showing how positivistic quantitative science was made normative in the department in this moment, this view seemed to be asserted in this meeting in order to police the boundaries of what counts as permissible Kinesiological research, especially when I tried to marry these two paradigms together. Here is where the way in which the PIs' suspicions and anxieties surrounding my ambitions to integrate qualitative methods and critical theory with a traditional ES master's thesis impacted me personally. It was hard to have my desire to incorporate PCS ideas into a project that was essentially the work of two master's theses-something I thought I would be lauded for because I was pursuing a more ambitious course of study than that of a typical Kinesiology master's student-be met with suspicion that was partially expressed as a challenge to my qualifications.
Ironically, my proposal was addressing ideas, issues, and questions of epistemology, ontology, and methodology that the ES graduate students, and perhaps even these PIs or other Kinesiology faculty, did not even contemplate in their training. Yet, rather than be rewarded and valued for asking such questions, my research questions and ambitions were regarded with suspicion and my qualifications were called into question. Again, this seems ironic given the PI's admission that the ES graduate students needed little in qualifications to run one of their research studies.
In the end, I discovered through this experience that the ontological, epistemological, and methodological divide was too large to bridge-at least in terms of this sort of project-within the department in 2010-11. I came away with a new purpose, that of trying to analyze how and what knowledge gets produced and legitimized in the Kinesiology department. And, I rededicated myself to PCS.

The Physiognomy of URI's Kinesiology Department
As a means of understanding of how ES knowledge gets institutionalized within the URI Kinesiology department, the analysis that follows focuses on the

URI Kinesiology Undergraduate Specializations & Curricula
In 2010-11, the Kinesiology department at URI offered 3 undergraduate major specializations to the nearly 600 students matriculating through the program: exercise science, health and fitness, and physical education. The exercise science specialization overview provided on the Kinesiology website reads as follows: This specialization prepares students to analyze physical activity, exercise, and sport in a physiological context, with an emphasis on basic science courses. Students are trained to assess, design, and implement exercise programs for individuals who are apparently healthy and those with controlled disease. Students learn to evaluate health behaviors and risk factors, conduct fitness assessments, write appropriate exercise prescriptions and motivate individuals to modify negative health habits. The exercise science specialization provides students with more than 25 credits in basic science courses in areas such as anatomy, chemistry, and physiology. The rigorous curriculum provides a strong foundation for advanced study in the allied health professions, including exercise physiology, cardiac rehabilitation, physical therapy, physician's assistant, chiropractic medicine or occupational therapy. (University of Rhode Island Department of Kinesiology, accessed June 25, 2012) As one examines the rhetoric of the above overview of the exercise science specialization one should note how it gets established as a 'rigorous' area of study by locating its' epistemological foundation in the knowledges of the basic biological sciences and with its clinical and health care/medical professional aspirations. As I will detail later, in comparison with the Health Fitness Professional overview, the exercise science overview goes out of its way to establish its worthiness as a major by associating itself with the prestige often given to the biological sciences, with their faith in positivism and the scientific method, and as an alternative route for students interested in working in the allied health field. Anyone familiar with the history of physical education and its later iteration, Kinesiology, knows the field has always had to contend with the prejudicial treatment of physical education, exercise, and sport in higher education as being inferior to other 'more serious' disciplines (Kretchmar, 2008).
It is important to note that the type of exercise science that is represented in the above overview is a medicalized version of exercise science training that emphasizes preparing students for clinical careers, so much so that the Kinesiology department employs its own Clinical Internship Director. Many of the exercise science members of the department's faculty are affiliated with the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and they often convey a message of valuing this affiliation with students, or one quickly learns informally from other students that becoming a member of ACSM is a valued status by many within the department. Indeed, many exercise science faculty members and some of their graduate assistants attend the annual regional and national conferences. Another sign of how a particular medicalized mode of exercise scientific knowledge was subtly valued and normalized in the URI Kinesiology department culture was through a prominent faculty member including a platitude from an ACSM initiative (American College of Sports Medicine, 2012) "Exercise is Medicine' on the name plate outside of the member's office. The reason I point out this subtle sign of the normativity of the exercise science mode of doing Kinesiology is because it is an example of how exercise science ways of knowing are casually asserted and assumed to be 'the common way of doing Kinesiology' in the department at URI. This medicalized exercise science view is thus constituted through this and other similarly infused speech acts and cultural practices of its community members. For example, one of the centralizing themes through many of my undergraduate Kinesiology courses were the ACSM risk factors for heart disease. These risk factors include among others: hypertension, fasting glucose levels, and cholesterol levels. In order to obtain this information one would have to visit one's doctor and get blood work done.
Another example is how developing an exercise plan for a client/patient is described as an exercise 'prescription.' So, when they occur, such acts imply that there can be a particularly, legitimate way to be a Kinesiologist and it is usually constituted through a scientized and medicalized language.
The cultural legitimacy given to this medicalized and positivist scientific mode of Kinesiological study is, of course, overdetermined by American and Western cultural histories of valuing positivist scientific ways of knowing above all others. But such an implicit assertion belies the fact that Kinesiology is a unique field of inquiry that cuts across multiple disciplines like education, psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, and indeed, the biological sciences. So any act or statement that masks, dismisses, minimizes, or erases this multiplicity in how one can do Kinesiological research can be understood as a political act that establishes a discursive field in which lines of power can be draw a particular regime of truth normalized, and in the case of the Kinesiology department at URI, the way that alternate or opposing viewpoints about how human movement is studied get 'othered.' But if the actors that make up a departmental community do not believe that there is one, singular, and essential way of studying human movement, then, at least in theory, competing ways of knowing human movement should be considered equally valid and valued. In fact, the best way to assess whether or not such values were practiced would not be to look only at the rhetoric of departmental philosophy on the website, but to examine the everyday normative cultural practices of the department; for example, to look at things such as: how various forms of Kinesiological knowledge are valued in the specific undergraduate specializations offered, how curricula are constructed, and how valued resources are allocated within the department.
The health and fitness specialization (HFS) overview provided on the Kinesiology website reads as follows: This specialization trains students to assess, design, and implement individuals and groups exercise and fitness programs for individuals who are apparently healthy and those with controlled disease. Students learn to evaluate health behaviors and risk factors, conduct fitness assessments, write appropriate exercise prescriptions and motivate individuals to modify negative health habits. There is an emphasis on applied sciences, with coursework available in the areas of health promotion, nutrition, communication, and human development. This specialization prepares competent Health Fitness Professionals for careers in corporate fitness and wellness, personal training, community fitness, and hospital-based fitness and wellness centers. Students also use this specialization to prepare for graduate study in exercise science, health promotion, and wellness. (University of Rhode Island Department of Kinesiology, accessed June 25, 2012) According to the above overview, the end product of being educated through the health and fitness specialization is to become "competent Health Fitness Professionals" (University of Rhode Island Department of Kinesiology, accessed June 25, 2012). While this overview shares some of the same language as the exercise science overview, there are some interesting differences in the overviews; specifically, three words: "analyze," "rigorous," and "strong" appear in the exercise science description, but are absent from the health professional overview. The exercise science overview uses as part of its description "prepares students to analyze [emphasis added] physical activity, exercise, and sport," (University of Rhode Island Department of Kinesiology, accessed June 25, 2012). The use of the verb "analyze" here seems to indicate deeper level of intellectual development can be expected when compared to the HFS overview. To further the point, the exercise science specialization promotes itself as "a rigorous curriculum" that offers a "strong foundation for advanced study" (University of Rhode Island Department of Kinesiology, 2012). Now compare 'rigorous' and 'strong' to 'competent.' Why isn't the HFS curriculum promoted as rigorous?
While both the ES and HFS specializations promote and incorporate positivist and quantitative scientific modes of understanding human movement, they are by no means on equal footing in the department. Looking at the curriculum sheets, there are significant differences in the types of courses students are required to take. Within their Kinesiology determined areas of study, ES students are only required to take one class that is not quantitative and positivistic science based. The specialization electives are also mainly oriented around positivist and quantitative science-based classes. The science requirements for HFS students are only marginally different, they have two classes that aren't necessarily classified as quantitative science based. The difference in curricula between ES and HFS comes in the specialization electives.
HFS students are offered courses in business, communications, and other classes from the 'softer' social sciences where knowledge production isn't always as closely or solely aligned with positivistic, quantitative scientific work, but can also be qualitative, critical and social constructivist. These programs of study, with their core and specialization requirements place what students come to know as Kinesiology almost solely in the realm of the quantitative sciences, helping to promote a view of health and physical activity as being influenced primarily via factors found within an individual's body. This biologically inward gaze takes the body out of social and historical context, out of the realm of culture and society, and thereby limits or eliminates alternative, more sociologically and historically informed viewpoints on health and physical activity.
Even the potential career paths for ES and HFS are often discussed by faculty, staff, and students in hierarchical in terms of academic rigor and earning potential.
For those that choose ES as a specialization, it is an expectation that an advanced degree or professional certification will be in one's future. The above stated careers for ES students are exercise physiology, cardiac rehabilitation, physical therapy (a doctoral program), physician's assistant, chiropractic medicine or occupational therapy. These positions are knowledge workers that 'analyze' and 'assess' health, as well as are more closely aligned with medicalized notions of health intervention. The work of the head. Compare these to the corporate fitness, personal training, and wellness center careers listed for HFS, careers which for the most part take place outside the clinical settings. The work of the body. HFS careers tend to be more manual in their labor and do not afford the same value to expressing and demonstrating scientific knowledge.
As an example of this value system at work within the department, I remember when I met with the academic advisor to choose my undergraduate specialization, after being informed of my options, I knew I wanted what I perceived as the more rigorous science-based specialization of ES. At the time, I got the sense that HFS was given a lesser status by some within the department and was a good fit for those that did not have an aptitude for science.
Conspicuously absent from either of these specializations is any explicit mention of-or value placed on-learning about how people and physical activity are socially and culturally situated. Both specializations espouse training in assessing, evaluating, and measuring the health and fitness of 'individuals' based on bodycentered scientific knowledge. The role of the social, cultural, historical, economical, or political forces and conditions that enable and limit any person's choices and social opportunities relative to exercise and health aren't given enough value to garner a mention in the website information about each specialization. Additionally, exercise scientists have a penchant for regarding people as 'individuals.' This discursive designation works in such a way so as to fail to acknowledge people as cultural beings and instead turn them into 'individuals' who are largely abstracted from their historical, social, political, and cultural contexts. Moreover, the exercise scientist and health fitness professional tend to locate unhealthy behavior and health risk in the individual and in the physiological, with little to no mention of how an individual exists within and interacts with a social or cultural environment in which these behaviors and risks have been socially constructed.
The Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) specialization overview on the Kinesiology website reads as follows: The Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) program is committed to preparing students as successful teachers of physical education for all grade (K-12) licensing in Rhode Island. Reciprocal license agreements allow students to teach in most other states. Cognitive course work, teaching methods, educational foundations, and skill acquisition are part of the educational process. The program is enhanced by a variety of practicum experiences in school settings. Students of the PETE program will learn how to communicate with students of varying ages, abilities, and backgrounds and to apply scientific knowledge to physical education practice (University of Rhode Island Department of Kinesiology, accessed June 25, 2012).
Because of the external curricular demands of the School of Education and teacher education accreditation bodies, the PETE program is not as easily comparable to the ES and HFS programs, even though it shares the same Kinesiology core requirements as the other specializations, while differing in the specialization requirements and electives. Yet, in the description of the PETE curriculum, one of the explicit goals is to "apply scientific knowledge to physical education practice." But notably absent in this description is any emphasis on learning about the social and cultural contexts which shape physical education opportunities, resources, and preferences, or any mention of how social and historical conditions could influence the populations and schools in which some PETE students may live and work. In short, PETE students, like their ES and HFS counterparts, are being trained to view health, fitness, and physical education, mainly, or foundationally, on an individual level, where that individual is analyzed and assessed at the biological level. Additionally, they are being socialized to believe that the cultural authority of Kinesiological knowledge rests on its scientization, its focus on the body, and its ability to be quantified.
So then, the knowledge foundation embedded in the current form of the curricula for the URI Kinesiology major specializations has been socially constructed by faculty and staff and is perhaps chiefly responsible for the way the department transmits and normalizes to undergraduate students the idea that exercise science knowledge and 'Kinesiological knowledge' are synonymous and that quantitative and positivistic science is the primary and legitimate mode that Kinesiological knowledge takes. Stated differently, it is through faculty choices in the types and number of undergraduate Kinesiology specializations the department offers and the specific classes that get formally defined as 'requirements' and 'electives' that biological and physiological ways of understanding human movement, produced through scientific ways of knowing that are positivistic, quantitative, in their form get established in the minds of the majority of URI Kinesiology undergraduates as the dominant or even sole, legitimate, or 'real' way of explaining and understanding how and why human bodies move the way they do. This is especially true in 2010-11, a time when the overwhelming majority of URI Kinesiology undergraduates identify their major specializations as either exercise science or health fitness.

Analysis Highlights
The preceding critical analysis of URI's Kinesiology department, which called on experiences from 2008-2011 attempted to situate the struggles over what gets counted as legitimate Kinesiological knowledge within a broader historical context and how the everyday practices (re)produces the normalization of ES. By calling on the works of Andrews, 2008;Barker, 2008;Denzin, 1994Denzin, , 2001Denzin, , 2005Kretchmar, 2008;McKay, Gore, and Kirk, 1990;Richardson, 1994) Indeed, even having the language to ask the questions they felt bubbling below the surface, reminded me of how I had a hard time expressing certain ideas about my identity prior to KIN 278. Unfortunately, this language barrier also seemed to inspire suspicion in Dr. Kusz and I's motives for wanting to examine science in action.
The attempt to combine ES and PCS methods of research also highlighted a difference in thinking about the role of the researcher. The study's PIs were not comfortable with my qualifications for making cultural observations about social influences of race and gender as it was viewed as biasing the study because there was no objective means to evaluate my claims. On the other hand, during the exchange it was mentioned that ES graduate students only had to follow procedures, which maintained the integrity of their objective claims. This divergence in thinking about the subjectivity of the researcher illuminated to me how certain modes of producing Kinesiological knowledge gets (re)created through everyday cultural practices.
I also, did a discourse analysis of the formal structure of the department, particularly what types of specializations are represented in the Kinesiology department's faculty and the undergraduate curriculum that make up program specializations. In looking at the faculty it was clear that those that specialize in ES were in the majority. I argued that the Kinesiology department privileges a medicalized version of ES knowledge through their affiliation with the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). The influence of the ACSM is also closely associated with many of the undergraduate core curriculum giving URI's Kinesiology a clinical authority. Moreover, I argue the ES is the most highly valued for of Kinesiological knowledge through the discourse used to talk about ES and HFS programs of study.
It is important for me to acknowledge that, in the end, I was given access and authorization to study the culture of the Kinesiology department. So, while I argue for the normativity of ES forms of knowing and studying Kinesiology, my thesis project was still able to exist, though not necessarily on terms and conditions of my choosing.

Hour 10: Being John Cage
One of my undergraduate free electives was a wonderful music course taught by George Kent. From this class, I first learned about American composer John Cage and his unique and eccentric works. Professor Kent described one piece Cage composed by overlaying a map of stars onto sheet music and then wrting in the notes where the stars lined up in the underlying bars. In short, it was a piece of music that was produced out of a method or procedure. The art appeared to be in the process rather than the end product. So, I produced a poem out of a method I constructed.
The following poem was created by lighting the book Fahrenheit 451 on fire and letting it burn for thirty seconds. I then took page 4 and wrote down every 4 th word in 4 word lines. Lastly, I took page 51 and constructed the stanza by taking every 5 th and 1 st word to create a 5 word line followed by a 1 word line. What I like about the last part of this poem is that it is so close to having meaning. I like the yearning for meaning.  veins, and capillaries were extracted out. Yet, the human shape still discernible, just looked fuzzy and sponge-like from a distance. Beside the maple, standing in contrast to the nonlinear form of the tree was a rigid telephone pole planted to hold wires steady and safe; extracted purpose. I smelled cow manure from a nearby dairy farm, the unique musky smell of horse, and the exhaust of a passing car. I heard a mourning dove lament and the tolling of a dump truck bed as a rock bounced out. I walked in and out of the shadows cast by the trees, history, and society.
In the opening scene of James Gleick's (1987) Chaos: Making a New Science, Mitchell Feigenbaum is "prowling around in the dark, night after night…heading nowhere in the starlight that hammers down through the thin air of the mesas" (P1). I was reminded of that imagery of a solitary man walking the border between loner and eccentric, on the brink of new discovery. Though the idea of a solitary man out on the frontier, unencumbered by social constraints, developing unique and world changing ideas appeals to my sense of manhood and individualism, I loosen my hold on those notions of grandeur as they tend to pull me away from thinking, connecting, and creating, into daydreaming about the imagined result of those pleasures. As proof, I have a couple emails to Dr. Kusz transcribing the dialogue of my future thesis defense.
Walking through the shadows of the trees, I began to understand that I was reformulating the boy's dream of saving the girl in the likeness of a classic western plot (Wright, 1994), the girl in this case being the Kinesiology department. The great irony of telling myself this story is that it was a way to recapture my masculinity from the subjugated realm of Physical Cultural Studies. In a weird way, in this fantasy, I was the hero and the saved at the same time. For through the act of saving, I would gain acceptance. One of the drawbacks I have noticed when exploring alternative territories of thought, no matter how lightly you hold those thoughts, is how social institutions and practices attempt to fix you in place. I was either in shadow or not and I got swept up in the political struggle over my own representation and validating cultural studies research as legitimate, which seemed to be interdependent. The more forcefully I argued the ideas of cultural studies, the more sensitive I became to what the silences, lowering of voices, avoidance of eye contact, and the overt politeness I encountered in the department meant.
Somewhere in these ten hours, I forgot why I came to be here in the boundary land.