ABSTRACT
Adopting a transdisciplinary approach commensurate with physical cultural studies (PCS), this chapter explores some of the extant sociological, anthropological and social-psychological research on active embodiment in relation to injured, pained and disrupted bodies. From the myriad different approaches available in researching social-psychological area, here the chapter focuses on the impact of identity disruption and the role of 'identity work' in dealing with the injured body in the physical-cultural context of distance running, drawing on data from 'disrupted body projects'. The concept of 'identity work' has been utilized within various disciplines, and here is theorized from a symbolic interactionist perspective specifically. Concepts of materialistic and vocabularic identification are utilized in the analysis, which theorizes from data generated by two research projects on distance running, one collaborative autoethnographic project and one autophenomenographic; the former focusing on an extended injury period of two years, and the latter incorporating several shorter injury periods.
