A Life Surrounded by Sport History, as a Non-Sporting Critical Feminist.

I am a historian, specialized in sport history and in women’s history, and started my research career in Finland in the mid-1970s. The main framework of my research has been popular movements and voluntary organizations in sport, from the nineteenth century to nowadays, with a social historical, grassroots and minority emphasis. Class, gender, language and ethnicity have been the main points of view in my work. In my paper, I discuss less my relation to sport history as science and its theories and methods. Instead, I approach the subject more as a personal process: how I, as a non-sporting woman, came into sport history and women’s history in sport, and which circumstances and contacts have been forming my research interests and life. At the end, I discuss sport historians’ contemporary relation to the understanding of (sport) history and its representations, asking how is the responsibility of the past affecting our ways to understand and interpret the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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