Sport in History

British Society of Sports History
Sport in History

The Sport in History Podcast brings you the latest research with interviews and talks with leading sports historians and up-and-coming researchers into Sports History. The podcast is a British Society of Sports History (BSSH) production from the UK's leading scholarly society for the history of sport. Click through to the BSSH website for further information on our events and to find out how to join the Society. https://www.sportinhistory.org/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. Matt McDowell on Surfing & Modernity in the North of Scotland

    24 OCT

    Matt McDowell on Surfing & Modernity in the North of Scotland

    New podcast host and Editor Max Portman talks to Dr Matthew L McDowell about Dr McDowell's new book 'Surfing and modernity in the North of Scotland', published in September 2024 with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The book discusses the existence and evolution of surfing in the region, from the 1960s to the present day. It does not, however, focus just on surfing: it also acts as a history of the region itself, and examines the possibilities and limits of surfing, sport, and activities like them being used as a means of reinventing communities. These are all themes that Max and Matt cover in their interview as they discuss the global and local cultures of surfing, the history of the Caithness and Sutherland Regions and how Ceefax (remember Ceefax?!) & the BBC weather report were useful tools in a surfer's arsenal. We also talk about the Sport, “islands”, people, and politics conference that Matt is organising on Scottish island of Orkney in June 2025. All in all, it's an hour's worth of insightful research on an under-developed part of Sports History. About Our guest: Dr Matthew L. McDowell is a Lecturer in Sport Policy, Management, and International Development at the University of Edinburgh, Moray House School of Education and Sport. He is the author of A Cultural History of Association Football in Scotland, 1865-1902 (2013), and an editor of The International Journal of the History of Sport. Previously, Matt was Chair of the British Society of Sports History (2017-19) and an editor of Northern Scotland (2020-23) and has a PhD in Scottish history from the University of Glasgow. His other publications examine a variety of phenomena in the history of Scottish, British Empire/Commonwealth, and Atlantic Rim sport, including: football, sporting events, lifestyle sport, curling, and sport’s relationship with politics. Matt is originally from New Jersey he has resided in Scotland for almost twenty years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1h 4m
  2. Abhinava Srivastava on Enacting ‘speed’ as Samman (honour): Fast bowling and sporting masculinity in Contemporary India

    15 OCT

    Abhinava Srivastava on Enacting ‘speed’ as Samman (honour): Fast bowling and sporting masculinity in Contemporary India

    In this seminar paper, the enabling potential of ‘speed’ is theorized to study how bowling fast on cricket field has increasingly allowed a section of working-class and lower-middle class young Indian males to assert their claim over the metropolitan and cosmopolitan world of the game in contemporary India. The argument developed in this paper is how a bodily ideal and aspiration espoused by a group of working-class fast bowlers can be taken as a form of negotiation and upward mobility as against to an elite, upper-caste bodily ideology celebrated and enthusiastically embraced by batters. It begins by examining how the problem of not having enough fast bowlers shaped the colonial and postcolonial imagination on a discursive level. The chapter then attends the possibilities inaugurated by the raftaar (speed) for a group of interlocutors to theorize their bodily-world and the various alternative meanings they deploy to challenge dominant, upper caste masculinity and claim national and international stage of the game.  Abhinava Srivastava is a fifth-year PhD scholar in the department of sociology at Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida, India. His research project is centred on locating postcolonial subjectivities through an ethnographic encounter with India’s rapidly changing ‘Cricket Culture’. His thesis explores meanings, values, and claims that are produced through the appropriation of the game at various demographic level that range from the international to local. Such an exploration offers a promising account of the distinct cosmopolitan sensibility, idiom and expectation around Cricket Culture that goes into the making of new postcolonial culture and social identity in India. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    41 min

About

The Sport in History Podcast brings you the latest research with interviews and talks with leading sports historians and up-and-coming researchers into Sports History. The podcast is a British Society of Sports History (BSSH) production from the UK's leading scholarly society for the history of sport. Click through to the BSSH website for further information on our events and to find out how to join the Society. https://www.sportinhistory.org/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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