The days are long gone when sports history was regarded as a trivial, apolitical arena for “fans with typewriters” (Tony Mason). Nowadays, the academic study of sports is in vogue among scholars from a range of different disciplines. Indeed, the tenuously sown “seeds of a postmodern discourse” (Douglas Booth) have begun to bear fruit. Thus, sports history has shown its potential for exploring, analyzing and understanding social regulations and power relations, embodied cultural practices, or modes of objectification and subjectivation in which sports and sportswomen/men (and the researchers themselves) are deeply embedded.

This workshop aims to demonstrate and discuss the potential of sports history. More precisely, in a colloquium type format framed by two public lectures, we want to address and draw attention to the multilayered notion of sports and its historiography as contested political terrain. Therefore the workshop comprises three text-based historical case studies that exemplify and illuminate some political aspects of disparate sporting fields from different world regions. In addition, the aforesaid lectures by two eminent scholars in the study of sports, Doug Booth (University of Otago, NZ) and Kasia Boddy (University of Cambridge, UK), will enable us to cover broader theoretical ground and sketch more facets and a wider picture of sports history as contested political terrain.

We particularly want to scrutinize sports as a set of cultural practices that encompass and reinforce the existing power dynamics, social inequalities, and the agency and struggles of individuals and social groups. This first perspective deals with the simultaneous political interplay between domination and resistance in the social arena of sports; or in other words: between structural formations, historical actors, their practices, and the discourses that revolve around sports.

At the same time, we also want to rethink the political praxis and potential of doing sports history. In short, a second perspective considers the complex process of researching and writing sports histories. Thereby we will focus on the positioning of the researching and writing embodied self, the shaping of hybrid narratives and commitments to witnessing and responsibility. Additionally, a third perspective of the workshop will deal with the nexus of combativeness/soldierness, the military and sports. In so doing, we aim to shine a light on negotiations of the fragile and highly policed boundaries of sporting bodies and socio-cultural configurations.

The workshop in Erfurt (2012) is the final part of the tripartite conference schedule of the cooperative research project “Sports, Bodies and the Self: Sports History as Social and Cultural History of Modernity” (funded by the German Research Foundation). The first conceptual conference on “intersectionality theory & moving bodies” took place in Hamburg (2010), followed by the second international conference in Berlin (2011), entitled “workout: sports & labor in history.” Above all, these conferences, like our joint venture in general, aim at contributing to sports history as an intersection of social and cultural history and histories of the human body.