Somatic Podcast

Hosting the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi was a part of growing domestic and international Russian political presence that has taken place under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. Alongside military, political, and covert actions, the games served as a public facing form of ‘soft power’ for Russia. Hosting the games was part of asserting to the world and his people the might of a new Russia, Putin's Russia.

In this episode we worked with Stanis Elsborg and his research partner Andreas Juul Jeppesen to explore the symbols and messages embedded in the Sochi games. In turn this provides a lens through which we can reflect on the lasting effects of this new direction for Russia.

The episode is based on the collaborative work of Stanis and Andreas who co-authored a research project titled: Dreams of Russia - To what extent and in what sense was the Olympic Games in Sochi 2014 used politically with particular emphasis on the opening and closing ceremonies completed while at the University of Copenhagen in the department of nutrition, exercise, and sport.

Stanis' ongoing work in sports history can be found at: http://idraetshistorie.dk/

At its essence, this episode is about the experience of traveling west on Amtrak passenger trains in the United States. Since about 2008, I've personally traveled west on many an Amtrak train, so many that I have difficulty counting the exact number. Some trips were to visit friends, some were to visit girlfriends at the time (one who, at that time, was living in Northern Montana), some were because I was living out west for graduate school. But, each trip, the traveling experience seemed so palpably meaningful. And with each subsequent trip, I became more aware and reflective of each experience: how it relates to the experiences of my fellow travelers, the workers on the trains, but also how the experience was in important ways a deeply affective, emotive, embodied experience. So, with a recent traveling experience, I recorded a portion of my journey, as the train traveled through the American Midwest at night. I then created original music (written, played, and recorded by myself) to help convey, complicate, and expand the expression of the soundscape and its meaning. In this episode, I present this weaving of soundscape and music, and narrate my experience of train travel. It's a digital audio story of my train experiences.

A new music track for a future Somatic Podcast episode on the physical culture/bodily experiences of train travel.

Photo is of the Western Nebraska landscape at night. Photo was taken by me while traveling east by train.

In this episode of Somatic, we talk with Professor Brett Hutchins of Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. As an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, Prof. Hutchins has been developing research on The Mobile Media Sport Moment: Markets, Technologies, Power. As an integral part of his research program, Prof. Hutchins developed his MediaSport Podcast Series, in which he interviews leading international researchers and scholars on the prescient sociocultural, political, and economic issues related to sport and media technology. Now with twenty-seven episodes, MediaSport has become one of the multiple successful sport studies podcasts available to listeners all over the world via online audio platforms such as iTunes and Soundcloud. In the episode, we talk at length with Prof. Hutchins about his experience with MediaSport and podcasting in general, as well as ask him for his insight on the significance of the current “digital media sport” (Hutchins & Rowe, 2013) moment and the importance of digital audio forms for researchers and scholars of sport.

In this episode we explore the history and spaces of suburbia, focusing on the role of physical activity in the shaping of suburban life. The story and development of American suburbs is a long, complicated, and often overlooked social history, but what many people forget is their persistent role as spaces where people exercise, play sport, and seek leisure. In developing the episode we spoke with several contributors to examine questions not only of what the suburbs have been in the past, but what they could be in the future as places where people are physically active. It is becoming clearer with each day that cities continue to spill out into their surrounding districts, and there are intense commercial pressures to privatize and enclose the public/open lands of the these communities. Here we examine how these pressures have been dealt with in suburban communities and what these communities can do to preserve land in accessible and equitable ways.

This episode is a discussion with Helen McBride, a young feminist activist living in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her graduate historical research explored the role of Northern Irish women community organizers within the peace process during the Troubles. While in Laramie she became involved in the community’s Take Back the Night and SlutWalk events. When she returned to Belfast following her graduate work, she became heavily involved in the feminist activist community, co-founding the city’s Hollaback chapter, joining the Belfast Feminist Network, and becoming a member of the Belfast Go Girl collective of young, creative women, as well as the city’s local roller derby community.

This episode deviates slightly from previous Somatic episodes in that it is a more personal journey of contemplation. In this episode, I talk about my PhD research on the history of the international garden city movement, specifically two prominent planned communities that emerged as a result of the movement: Letchworth Garden City in the United Kingdom, and Greenbelt, Maryland in the United States. Playing recorded soundscapes from my visit to these communities, I reflect on my experience visiting and staying in these communities, talk about the history, and ponder the significance of such planned communities in terms of how they help us rethink the meaning of our bodies in relation to our built environments. As a result, the episode involves a mixture of approaches in that I both talk about the history of garden city ideals, and ponder my own somatic experience in the communities. It’s kind of like a personal journey and soundscape that I’m hoping is in some way informative and interesting to you, the listener.

In this episode we took a break from our usual format and tried out something new. We are going to try to stay as close as possible to a monthly schedule with our main episode releases, but there are times when we want to be able to go outside of that routine and put out a show that may need to be more timely or that does not quite fit a normal format.

These episodes will be referred to as 'Somatic in Brief' and will be listed as half numbers (2.5 in this case). There is not a specific time limit we are going to keep to, but the idea is to stick to a shortened discussion, often put together to respond quickly to a particularly relevant and sometimes time sensitive topic.

In this 'brief' we took a look back at the work being presented at the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport conference, this year held in Tampa.

Bike share programs, sometimes also referred to as cycle-hire schemes, are becoming an increasingly common place part of transportation infrastructure and programming in cities around the world. In this episode we had a chance to sit down and talk with Transport for London’s (TFL) Duncan Robertson to understand what this specifically looks like with in London. Specifically we were interested in connecting the function of the scheme with the political intent of former mayor Boris Johnson, and what this might mean for the future of the program.

The Olympics is one of the biggest sporting events in the world that connects to a wide array of global and local political, economic, social, cultural, and technological processes. As such it has received a lot of attention, both in the popular media and through academic analysis. In order to cut through this multiplicity of voices and opinions we turned to Dr. Bryan Clift to explore how he views to games in Rio and what it means for the future of the Olympics.