In this article, we explore the relationship between public recreation policy and planning and the transformation of urban governance in the context of the Police Athletic League centers in Baltimore, Maryland. In light of contemporary discussions of the role of youth programs for sport and physical activity within post-industrial cities, the origination, development, and eventual demise of Baltimore's network of Police Activity League centers is an instructive, if disheartening, saga. It illustrates the social and political rationales mobilized in justifying recreation policy and programming, the framing of sport and physical activity as preventative measures towards crime and juvenile delinquency, and the precarity of such initiatives given the efficiency-driven orthodoxies of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey, 1989). This analysis emphasizes how the PAL centers were designed to 'fill the void' left by a declining system of public recreation, thereby providing an example of a recreation program as part of the "social problems industry" (Pitter & Andrews 1997).

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In their conception of the “third shift,” Dworkin and Wachs argue that working mothers engage in fitness and bodywork in addition to the first shift of professional work and the second shift of household labor and childcare. Within this third shift, the goal for women is to “erase physical evidence of motherhood” and return to the pre‐pregnancy self. The cultivation of a body socially defined as “good” and “attractive” thus serves as a visible illustration of an embodied subjectivity anchored in morality and neoliberal personal responsibility, signifying a strong woman who has her body and her life under control. Utilizing thematic analysis to examine dominant constructions of embodied motherhood in popular texts and products, this article offers five conceptual categories to explore why and how women in engage in bodywork. Understanding how women operationalize the third shift of fitness and bodywork is important because it helps to unpack the struggles of contemporary motherhood and the competing realities of home, work, and self‐care.

Based on the ecological model of active living, the neighborhood environment may relate to individual physical activity (PA) behaviors. The purposes of this study were to (1) generate a replicable neighborhood-level physical activity location availability score (PALAS) from data variables associated with physical activity among adolescents and adults, and apply this score to Baltimore City, Maryland, and (2) determine if relationships exist between PA and PA location availability. Geographic information systems (GISs) were used to create the PALAS. Using linear regression models, we examined relations between objectively measured PA among low-income, urban, predominantly African American adolescent girls (n = 555, 2009–2012 data collection), and the PALAS rating of their neighborhood environment (neighborhood PALAS) and their home neighborhood area (PALAS variables/subcomponents within 0.25 miles of the home). A PALAS map of the study area was created, illustrating neighborhoods varying in availability and variety of PA locations. After adjusting for confounders, a higher neighborhood PALAS (β = 0.10, p = 0.041) and the presence of a recreation center in the home neighborhood area (β = 0.46, p = 0.011) were associated with more minutes per day spent in moderate to vigorous PA. Policy makers and stakeholders should consider increasing access to PA locations as a strategy to promote PA among adolescent girls.

This commentary highlights a recent trend of anthropocentrism (a focus on human-centered interests and activities) in the media coverage in the United States and Europe on the disruption of the contemporary sports industry caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors argued that the coverage promotes anthropocentric narratives by framing the pandemic as an external force causing a temporary and unforeseen “hiatus” in the sports industry. As a result, media consumers learn about human interest stories associated with consumer demand and industry adaptation: stories that renormalize, rather than question, the sports industry in its current and hegemonic form. Such media discourses bypass an opportunity to consider the longstanding entanglements of human and nonhuman actors in sporting contexts, rethink sport through environmental and nonhuman perspectives, and, ultimately, advance more progressive, democratic politics. The commentary employs a posthumanist lens to critique the recent anthropocentric media coverage, highlighting the ways in which it reproduces the dualist logic of neoliberal capitalism and deflects attention to the human and nonhuman relations that have always existed in contexts of sport and human physicality.