Call for Papers: Public Sport History and Community Sport

Symposium by the Centre for Applied History

Tuesday, 5 December 2023, Macquarie University

Hybrid face-to-face and online event

Photograph of two cricket players walking onto the pitch during a game on 22nd December 1965, Mount Gambier [State Library of South Australia, BRG 347/2435].

This symposium will explore intersections between Public Sport History and Community Sport. It provides an opportunity for reflection on scholarship that these topics have generated in recent years and for collaborative discussion about current projects and the state of the field today. For the purposes of the event, we are defining Public Sport History broadly as the production, representation or consumption of sports history in the public sphere, for diverse audiences by a wide range of practitioners and organisations.

We are interested in exploring the importance of historical knowledge, education, employment, research and expertise outside of university environments, as well as connections and collaborations between academics, ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ historians, cultural institutions, sporting organisations and the media.

We encourage reflective papers that interrogate processes, practices, representations or understandings of Public History in community sports-related research projects or community sports history in the public sphere. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: oral history, public memory, sports history in the media and in documentaries, commissioned histories, museums and cultural institutions, collaborations with community sports associations, gender, race, narrative, sporting statues and memorials, heritage and preservation, popular culture, and vernacular sports history.

Contributions will be selected for a Special Issue of an international sports history journal, such as The International Journal of the History of Sport, depending on the mix of papers.

The symposium will feature a keynote address by Dr Guy Hansen, Director of Exhibitions, National Library of Australia: Grassroots: Community sport collections at the National Library of Australia.

Conference Papers: 20 minutes in length.

Abstracts due: 6 October 2023.

Please submit abstracts to: tanya.evans@mq.edu.au

For further information please contact: Matthew Bailey: matthew.bailey@mq.edu.au; Tanya Evans: tanya.evans@mq.edu.au; Keith Rathbone: keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au