Invitation to historians: the historiographical turn of a practicing (sport) historian

Abstract

My intellectual engagement with history has spanned three decades and passed through three identifiable phases. In the initial phase, I appropriated history as raw context for understanding the present which I conceptualized as accumulated structures and relationships transmitted from the past. In the second phase, precipitated by a fortuitous historiographic turn, I positioned my practice as a specific form of emancipatory social history in which I advocated for freedom from constraining social structures and repressive political systems/relationships. In this phase, I also began to critically reflect on and critique the empirical -analytical method of my earlier historical works on sport in apartheid South Africa, the Australian surf lifesaving movement and surfboard riding (surfing) culture; in the process, I reconceptualized myself as a historian-author. Today, my interest in history revolves around historians as authors, histories as the products of authors and the fluid nature of historical representations.

Remembering Alun Munslow

“…Encouragement was Alun's forte and he kindly called The Field a 'tour de force' (Munslow 2008, 566). Later he invited me to write a piece in the 'Invitation to Historians' section of Rethinking History (Booth 2014).…”