ABSTRACT
In Disciplining Bodies in the Gymnasium: Memory, Monument, Modernism we approach important aspects of this debate from a new and more interdisciplinary direction than that usually taken in commentaries about the discipline and profession of physical education in higher education. Our focus is upon the disciplining of the body in educational and architectural space. We want to understand how knowledge about the body’s physical education and training is culturally embedded, constituted at the ‘local’ level in a particular historical era and geographical place, yet
influenced by the broader Enlightenment project of technological rationality and ordered progress. A central challenge for anyone reflecting on the life sciences these days is to understand in what ways knowledge claims around the body are permeated by cultural values and yet are also empirically reliable. One approach is to accept that knowledge development and the trajectory of disciplinary paradigms ‘are fully part of their historical era, bearing the cultural fingerprints of those eras and the subsequent ones that practice and maintain them in their cognitive core’.4
