ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how the understandings/ influences/scholarly groundings and trajectories have led us to reflect on praxis within physical cultural studies (PCS) scholarship. If PCS is a collective and democratic project – incorporating a productive tension of divergent foci, viewpoints, and opinions that are loosely united by a common concern with contextualizing the complex field of physical culture – then its generative core needs to demonstrate a critical dynamism that fights off the inertia created by the all-too-easy adoption of empirical, theoretical, and/or methodological certainties. Indeed, if anything, and as indicated below, there is an uneven, unbalanced set of academic moorings that traverse the commitment to praxis and which have come to the fore in differing intensities, in theoretical, empirical and methodological explorations of PCS – praxis in PCS can be seen as a complex assemblage of scholarly trajectories that meet, clash, co-habit and exist in often uneasy coalescence within various efforts to contextualize physical culture.
