Page Contents: Conference Theme | Keynote Speakers

Conference Theme

The tripartite theme for Sporting Traditions XVI is ‘Conceiving, locating, and narrating sports history’. These three verbs are, arguably, central to the craft of sports history today. Sporting Traditions XVI provides a welcome opportunity to debate recent developments in sports history methods, theories and research paradigms. The event will mark the 30th anniversary of Sporting Traditions conferences, which began in Sydney in 1977. It is timely, therefore, to reflect on how the sub-discipline of sports history has evolved in Australia and New Zealand. In that regard, Sporting Traditions XVI intends to showcase some of the most innovative and reflective research in academic sports history.

(1) The term ‘conceiving’ is chosen to explore the roles of author imagination, construction, and individual perspective in history scholarship. The baggage of historians is much more than the photocopied documents they take home from archives. Should historians therefire identify their underlying ontological position, their epistemological assumptions, and indeed locate their work in a particular research paradigm?

(2) The term ‘locating’ is chosen to emphasise the importance of sources, sites, and places for history. These traditionally range from archived documents and images through to museums and artefacts. Additionally, sports studies researchers have utilised interview methods and oral testimony to glean memories and information not available in official repositories. Sports scholars have also become interested in human bodies as sites for research data – such as with ideas about embodied gender differences through sport and socio-physical perceptions of ‘race’ in sports performance.

(3) The term ‘narrating’ relates to the processes of story-telling in history and the multi-faceted role of authors as narrators. Social and cultural historians, like writers of fiction, can be guided by conventions associated with narrative performance - characters, emplotment and style. Should historians therefore be more cognisant of the rhetorical dimensions of history writing? How might authors benefit from a better understanding of history as a discursive practice?

Keynote speakers

Prof Allen Guttmann is one of the founding pillars of academic sports history internationally. His research range, scope and depth of analysis are admired universally. Prof Guttman’s historical studies include analysis of the Olympic Games, sports spectators, sport and imperialism, sexuality and sport, and women in sport. His major books include From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports, Columbia Univ Press, New York, 1978; Sports Spectators, Columbia Univ Press, New York, 1986; Women’s Sports: A History, Columbia Univ Press, New York, 1991; The Erotic in Sports, Columbia Univ Press, New York, 1996; Games and Empires, Columbia Univ Press, New York, 1996; Japanese Sports: A History, Univ of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2001; and The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games, Univ of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2nd edition, 2002. Prof Guttmann has recently been awarded the North American Society of Sports History book prize for his Sports: The First Five Millennia, Univ of Massachusetts Press, Boston, (2005).

Susan Birrell works from a critical cultural studies perspective. Her early research centered on feminist analyses of sport, including articles that called for more serious scholarly attention to this neglected aspect of girls' and women's experiences.  Her collection of essays, Women, Sport and Culture (1994), co-edited with Cheryl Cole, documents the state of the art of feminist analyses of sport in the early 1990's. Birrell’s recent work focuses on the ways that particular discourses generated within the world of sport work to consolidate dominant relations of power in the culture at large. Together with Mary McDonald, Birrell has produced the edited volume Reading Sport: Essays on Power and Representation (2000), which comprises critical readings of sport celebrities including Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, and Nancy Lopez, as well as key incidents in sport, such as the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan controversy and the Lisa Olson locker room incident. Prof Birrell’s current research project is an interrogation of the discourses and intersecting relations (race, class, ethnicity, nationality and gender) that surround the climbing of Mt. Everest.

Dr Phillips has emerged as a world leader in sports history methodology, theory and the narrative process. In this context Dr Phillips has produced “A critical appraisal of narrative in sport history: Reading the surf lifesaving debate”, Journal of Sport History, vol. 29, no. 1, 2002, pp25-40; “Deconstructing sport history: The postmodern challenge”, Journal of Sport History, vol. 28, no. 3, 2001, pp327-44; and “Diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties: Globalisation theory and ‘reading’ amateurism in Australian sport”, Sporting Traditions, vol. 18, no. 1, 2001, pp19-32. Of particular note is Dr Phillips’ most recent book: he is editor of the pathbreaking collection Sport History into the New Millennium: A Postmodern Analysis, State University of New York Press, 2005.

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