Matthew D. Lamb’s research while affiliated with Pennsylvania State University and other places

This article explores the emancipatory potential of misuse. Through the practice of parkour, I investigate misuse as a form of empowerment within entanglements of power demarcating acceptable uses of city space. I critically examine my experience practising parkour on Monument Circle in Indianapolis, Indiana. The research questions include, first, how can we define the misuse of space? What can the misuse of Monument Circle teach us about how architecture communicates the interests of power? Can parkour be a practice of empowerment that challenges spatial expectations of use? Foucault’s discussion of disciplinary power theoretically frames the understanding of discourse, power and the use of misuse. Lefebvre’s theorizations on the production of space ground an understanding of the body in and around architecture. Offered here is an analysis of parkour’s misuse of architecture and its challenge of disciplinary power codified and maintained in the built environment.

This article examines how the confluence of sports and masculinity articulates with modern capitalism in shaping subjectivities crucial to performing in the hypercompetitive corporate world. We explore how Tough Mudder, as part of a larger matrix of power relations, provides a site that allows participants to gain rhetorical proof of their “fitness” within that world. Furthermore, our purpose is to demonstrate how the logic of neoliberal capitalism is reflected within Tough Mudder challenges that culminate in an embodied performance of discipline toward that logic. We also argue that these challenges act as “functional sites” that are specifically produced and mobilized for the training of individuals’ minds and bodies to align them with the values of a dominant political and economic order.