Synthia Sydnor
Biographic Data
| ID | 254041 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Synthia Sydnor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Synthia |
| FAMILY NAME | Sydnor |
| SIGNATURE | SYDNOR S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Sport: Its Pentimento
To respond to the charge “reflect on Gary Osmond's ideas and apply them to one specific smell and its relationship to sport,” I could entangle histories of Title IX, settler colonialism, or the marketing of a particular sport odor from my personal history: perhaps the smell of field hockey and lacrosse locker rooms; the seasonal fragrances of grass; bodies’ collective odor on the hot bus ride home, especially when we adolescents were all menstrua…
Antecedent and Aftermath
This article revisits a controversial 1998 Journal of Sport History (JSH) article by Synthia Sydnor titled “A History of Synchronized Swimming.” It focuses on interrelated aspects of selected academic texts both hostile and sympathetic to the 1998 article and exegesis of the theory, method, biography, and scholarship on which the article was based, underscoring that the composition, theory, and methodology of the article were influenced by belove…
Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health
The origin story of Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health contains a 2019 Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture symposium, “Landscape, Sport, Environment: The Spaces of Sport from the Early Modern Period to Today.” Dumbarton Oaks, a research library in Washington, DC, founded by Robert and Mildred Bliss, organizes symposia specifically in Byzantine studies, pre-Columbian studies, and …
Social Justice Through Sport and Exercise Studies: A Manifesto
This manifesto reimagines social justice in physical cultural studies by renaming, broadening, and building new characterizations of the body, dis/ability, mental health, exercise, social oppression, and sport. We problematize embedded 'myths' in exercise and sports studies scholarship for purposes of informing praxis-based research, and emancipatory practical agendas. These 'myths' include the embodied tragedy myth, the myth of bodily control, t…
Ice Dancing to Arirang in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games: The Intersection of Music, Identity, and Sport
This cultural-interpretive essay offers critical commentary on Koreanness, racial ideology, hegemonic racial power, and racialized cultural taste with the aim of interpreting the sport–music nexus by examining a case of the interface between music and sport: The authors focus on the case of the Olympic ice dance that the South Korean team performed for the Korean traditional folk song Arirang at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. The auth…
Cultural Anthropology of the Penn State Tragedy
The essay uses the theoretical-methodological strategy of notes and listing (following the practices of Susan Sontag and Umberto Eco, among others) to illuminate particular, unique historical and cultural-anthropological aspects of the Jerry Sandusky-Penn State scandal/tragedy. Special attention is devoted in the essay to critique of depictions of the Catholic Church, ancient Greece, the 'unsayable,' and social memory in regard to their links to …
Plotlessness, Ethnography, Ethology: Play
The authors of this article hail from perhaps disparate fields of biology and cultural studies. The authors use ethnography and ethology, which have offered parallel modernist responses to the challenge posed by Otherness, as touchstones for exploring modernist responses to the theories/methods of the research texts that are produced and performed in their respective disciplines; for example, ethnography typically promises a supreme moment of ins…
Lovely: Dialoguing With Norman K. Denzin
This article is an early 1990s experimental text that takes the form of an e-mail exchange between University of Illinois scholars Nate Kohn and Synthia Sydnor. The authors sought in their composition to pay tribute to the life and thought of Norman K. Denzin and to illuminate Denzin's place in the development of the disciplines of communication studies and kinesiology. The writing echoes Denzin's call at the time for re-imagining social science …
Man, Play and Games – A Review Essay
Roger Caillois (trans. Meyer Barash), Man, Play and Games (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [Originally published as Les jeux et les hommes, 1958 by Librairie Gallimard, Paris; Eng
To the Extreme: Alternative Sports, Inside and Out
New Times, Physical Education, and Cyberspace
Social Justice Through Sport and Exercise Studies: A Manifesto
This manifesto reimagines social justice in physical cultural studies by renaming, broadening, and building new characterizations of the body, dis/ability, mental health, exercise, social oppression, and sport. We problematize embedded 'myths' in exercise and sports studies scholarship for purposes of informing praxis-based research, and emancipatory practical agendas. These 'myths' include the embodied tragedy myth, the myth of bodily control, t…
Ice Dancing to Arirang in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games: The Intersection of Music, Identity, and Sport
This cultural-interpretive essay offers critical commentary on Koreanness, racial ideology, hegemonic racial power, and racialized cultural taste with the aim of interpreting the sport–music nexus by examining a case of the interface between music and sport: The authors focus on the case of the Olympic ice dance that the South Korean team performed for the Korean traditional folk song Arirang at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. The auth…
Plotlessness, Ethnography, Ethology: Play
The authors of this article hail from perhaps disparate fields of biology and cultural studies. The authors use ethnography and ethology, which have offered parallel modernist responses to the challenge posed by Otherness, as touchstones for exploring modernist responses to the theories/methods of the research texts that are produced and performed in their respective disciplines; for example, ethnography typically promises a supreme moment of ins…
Lovely: Dialoguing With Norman K. Denzin
This article is an early 1990s experimental text that takes the form of an e-mail exchange between University of Illinois scholars Nate Kohn and Synthia Sydnor. The authors sought in their composition to pay tribute to the life and thought of Norman K. Denzin and to illuminate Denzin's place in the development of the disciplines of communication studies and kinesiology. The writing echoes Denzin's call at the time for re-imagining social science …
New Times, Physical Education, and Cyberspace
New Times, Physical Education, and Cyberspace
To the Extreme: Alternative Sports, Inside and Out
Man, Play and Games – A Review Essay
Roger Caillois (trans. Meyer Barash), Man, Play and Games (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [Originally published as Les jeux et les hommes, 1958 by Librairie Gallimard, Paris; Eng
Lovely: Dialoguing With Norman K. Denzin
This article is an early 1990s experimental text that takes the form of an e-mail exchange between University of Illinois scholars Nate Kohn and Synthia Sydnor. The authors sought in their composition to pay tribute to the life and thought of Norman K. Denzin and to illuminate Denzin's place in the development of the disciplines of communication studies and kinesiology. The writing echoes Denzin's call at the time for re-imagining social science …
Cultural Anthropology of the Penn State Tragedy
The essay uses the theoretical-methodological strategy of notes and listing (following the practices of Susan Sontag and Umberto Eco, among others) to illuminate particular, unique historical and cultural-anthropological aspects of the Jerry Sandusky-Penn State scandal/tragedy. Special attention is devoted in the essay to critique of depictions of the Catholic Church, ancient Greece, the 'unsayable,' and social memory in regard to their links to …
Plotlessness, Ethnography, Ethology: Play
The authors of this article hail from perhaps disparate fields of biology and cultural studies. The authors use ethnography and ethology, which have offered parallel modernist responses to the challenge posed by Otherness, as touchstones for exploring modernist responses to the theories/methods of the research texts that are produced and performed in their respective disciplines; for example, ethnography typically promises a supreme moment of ins…
Ice Dancing to Arirang in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games: The Intersection of Music, Identity, and Sport
This cultural-interpretive essay offers critical commentary on Koreanness, racial ideology, hegemonic racial power, and racialized cultural taste with the aim of interpreting the sport–music nexus by examining a case of the interface between music and sport: The authors focus on the case of the Olympic ice dance that the South Korean team performed for the Korean traditional folk song Arirang at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. The auth…
Social Justice Through Sport and Exercise Studies: A Manifesto
This manifesto reimagines social justice in physical cultural studies by renaming, broadening, and building new characterizations of the body, dis/ability, mental health, exercise, social oppression, and sport. We problematize embedded 'myths' in exercise and sports studies scholarship for purposes of informing praxis-based research, and emancipatory practical agendas. These 'myths' include the embodied tragedy myth, the myth of bodily control, t…
Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health
The origin story of Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health contains a 2019 Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture symposium, “Landscape, Sport, Environment: The Spaces of Sport from the Early Modern Period to Today.” Dumbarton Oaks, a research library in Washington, DC, founded by Robert and Mildred Bliss, organizes symposia specifically in Byzantine studies, pre-Columbian studies, and …
Antecedent and Aftermath
This article revisits a controversial 1998 Journal of Sport History (JSH) article by Synthia Sydnor titled “A History of Synchronized Swimming.” It focuses on interrelated aspects of selected academic texts both hostile and sympathetic to the 1998 article and exegesis of the theory, method, biography, and scholarship on which the article was based, underscoring that the composition, theory, and methodology of the article were influenced by belove…
Sport: Its Pentimento
To respond to the charge “reflect on Gary Osmond's ideas and apply them to one specific smell and its relationship to sport,” I could entangle histories of Title IX, settler colonialism, or the marketing of a particular sport odor from my personal history: perhaps the smell of field hockey and lacrosse locker rooms; the seasonal fragrances of grass; bodies’ collective odor on the hot bus ride home, especially when we adolescents were all menstrua…
Sports, Gender, and Society (6 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Media studies (4 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Anthropology (3 works) · Art (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · History (3 works) · History (3 works)