Prashant Kidambi BSSH Conference 2020 Keynote

It’s the keynote in the fourth instalment from the BSSH 2020 Conference as we hear previous podcast guest Dr Prashant Kidambi deliver a wide-ranging Sir Derek Birley Memorial lecture on the writing of sports history. Informed by CLR James’s classic text Beyond the Boundary Prashant discusses the boundary in sports history – both as a literal dividing line and as a metaphor for ways of thinking about sport’s relationship to wider events. He questions how the history of sport is premised on looking beyond the boundary to the world outside, which he argues leads practitioners into a neglect – wilful or absent-minded – of the events that happen on the field of play itself compared to popular writers. He also argues that the boundary needs to be considered as a temporal device as well as spatial. We need to think about how we divide up events in sport and the effect this has on the narratives and analysis that we construct around sport and its relationship to society. Stick around for a lively Q&A with BSSH members thinking through Prashant’s ideas and sometimes questioning them. We also hear the Society’s Chair, Raf Nicholson, announce the 2020 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize winner – the most prestigious award for academic sports history in the UK. But if you want to dive straight in to Prashant’s lecture it begins at around the 7m 30s mark.