The Skeleton Key: Sport as Exemplary Domain for Integrative Explanation of Personal Attainments

• Prof. Jeremy Freese (Stanford University)

Keynote: Jeremy Freese Room: N6, Building HZM 1st Floor Sociology is often identified as a “perspective” or style of explanation, for which references to genetic differences represent the epitome of Not Sociology. Yet, everyone from the most casual fan to the most sophisticated sports scientists recognizes in sporting achievements an obvious role of physiological and other traits that are genetically influenced. Just as much is recognized that sporting triumphs are typically not just sheer physiological triumphs but represent longrunning investments in preparatory environments. Sports therein provide an easier site to consider ways that biology, psychology, and society intersect in human differentiation and attainment than other domains of human affairs in which discussions of biology—and especially genetics—are inevitably more fraught. As such, bio-psycho-social thinking with respect to sport might not just help illuminate phenomena specific to sport but may have more general usefulness for the social sciences. This argument will be advanced with references to a variety of sports, but perhaps most notably with respect to women's skeleton.

Researching Embodiment in Multi/Interdisciplinary Spaces: Possibilities, Problems and Practices

• Prof. Cassie Phoenix (Durham University)

Keynote: Cassie Phoenix Room: N6, Building HZM 1st Floor It is well established within the sociology of sport and related fields that the body and embodiment is essential to understanding engagement in, and experiences of, sport and physical activity. The body is, after all, a constitutive part of human experience (Merlau-Ponty, 1945); not something that we have, but rather something that we are, or are becoming. In this way, the body is a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities” (Butler, 1997, p.404). It subsequently calls for analytical attentiveness to embodied, contextualised interactions accomplished in lived spaces. In this presentation, I will draw on our past and current research into everyday life and the body, to reflect on the possibilities, problems, and practice of researching embodiment. Delving deeper into case studies examining the lived experiences of menopause, chronic illness, and weather in relation to movement contexts, I show how knowledge of these phenomena have undoubtedly benefitted from multi/interdisciplinary ways of knowing, yet often in ways that have failed to make bodies a meaningful presence. I will move on to discuss some of the strategies we have used to address this and will present examples of creative arts-based resources developed in this process. I will finish by reflecting on how the doing of embodiment research within multi/interdisciplinary settings can itself also be experienced as an ‘incessant materialising of possibilities’, and what has felt to be essential when navigating that.