Ron Mower

Fall 2010 marks the beginning of my third year in the Physical Cultural Studies program under the advisement of Dr. David L. Andrews.  During my time here, PCS has supportively enabled me to explore and direct my research agendas and interests, which currently include the racial and cultural politics of sport celebrities; late capitalist logics and the cultural economies of post-industrial urban space; popular memory, filmic representations, and the visual uses of (sport) history in postmodern consumer culture; (trans)nationalism, global sport, and symbolic production; and the processes and forces impacting the socio-spatial polarizations of ethnicity, class, gender, and health within the revitalized entrepreneurial city.  In preparation for my dissertation, I am currently conducting preliminary ethnographic fieldwork within Baltimore City to examine the contemporary structure and experience of voluntary sector provisions for health, physical activity, and sport amongst the city’s disadvantaged in the wake of de-industrialization, neoliberal policies, and urban decline. This Fall I will be teaching KNES 484: Sporting Hollywood and in the past have served as a teaching assistant for KNES293: History of Sport in America, KNES 287: Sport in American Society, KNES 485: Sport and Globalization, and KNES 289Y: The (In)Active City: The Physical Cultures of Metropolitan Baltimore. In 2006, I graduated Summa cum Laude from the University of Maryland with a B.S. in Kinesiology and earned a M.S. in Sport & Leisure Commerce from the University of Memphis in 2008.