McKinesiology.

Abstract

Within this paper, we address how kinesiology–in a similar fashion to other disciplinary enterprises–has become enmeshed with the dictates of the market, privatization, efficiency, flexibility, and the accelerated rationalization of society, associated with the advent of late capitalism. Hence, we outline how these market considerations implicitly and explicitly privilege centrally controlled, efficiency oriented, rationally predictable, and empirically calculable ways of knowing, and of knowledge generation (Ritzer, 2004). We propose that these processes not only further wed kinesiology, the University, and implicated subjects (students as well as Professors) to the logics of the capital, but also place such concerns over human needs, civic and moral responsibilities, public values and critical contents (Giroux, 2010). These non-rational and incalculable pedagogical outcomes are crucial foundations for democracy, political freedom and equality (Brown, 2006), yet are apparently devalued in contemporary kinesiology as in other formations of (higher) education. Pace Ritzer (2006), we thus expose the epistemological McDonaldization evident with kinesiology, which we argue has resulted in a field stymied by what elsewhere has been described as its “inconvenient truth” (Andrews, 2008); namely, the intellectually and humanity limiting scientific doxa apparent and embodied within the constitution of kinesiological departments, curricular, journals, and, indeed, the kinesiology academy itself.