Deadline for sending your abstract: 1 May 2019
The University of Lausanne’s Institute of Sport Sciences and the Social and Political Sciences Faculty will be hosting the 2019 CESH Congress from 12th to 14th September. The theme chosen by the organisers is Youth, Youngsters and Sport from Antiquity to the Modern Day. We are inviting explorations of this theme from historians from all horizons, including those outside the fields of history of sport, history of youth and history of education. In addition, the congress will include several sessions for researchers wishing to present papers on aspects of the history of sport other than “youth”.
The theme for this year’s congress was chosen in response to the fact that, even though sport is commonly associated with youth, few sports historians have focused on the issue of age. Indeed, research into the history of sport has tended to concentrate on aspects such as sportspeople’s/spectators’ national, social, gender or racial identities, rather than on age/age groups. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule in fields such as the history of physical education, the history of bodily and moral discipline policies and the history of supporters. At the same time, research into the history of youth and youngsters has rarely examined physical activities and sport except through brief considerations of military training or leisure pursuits.
Hence, the organisers of CESH Lausanne 2019 decided to encourage historians to embrace the issues of age and age groups and to adopt an intersectional approach (nation, class, social group, race, gender) in order to assess the role played by young people in the emergence, development, spread and consumption of sport and sporting cultures. Contributions may be bottom-up, examining young people as actors in the history of sport, top-down, exploring the effects on young people of policies drawn up for them by adults, or, better, both bottom-up and top-down.
Although the term “sport” is used here in its widest sense and to cover all forms of bodily exercise that have been practiced from Antiquity to the modern day, whether for military, religious, health, educational or economic purposes, or simply for pleasure, researchers are encouraged to use and examine the actual terms the actors involved used to describe their activities and avoid any unsubstantiated use of the word “sport”.
In addition, “youth” and “youngsters” are necessarily plural concepts, as definitions of age groups and the symbolic functions associated with them vary considerably between different societies and periods of history. Indeed, historians, sociologists, ethnologists and anthropologists have shown that the ages at which childhood and youth begin and end vary from one civilisation to another, from one social category to another, from one gender to another, and from one era to another. What is the case from a sports perspective?
In order to go beyond national and Eurocentric approaches, we are particularly interested in contributions examining issues on different geographical scales (local, regional, national, international, transnational) or from a non-European (including colonial and post-colonial) perspective. In addition, we would like to encourage contributions focusing on the Middle Ages and the modern era, as periods that have been slightly neglected compared with Antiquity and the contemporary period.