Deborah Booth
Biographic Data
| ID | 215367 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deborah Booth |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deborah |
| FAMILY NAME | Booth |
| SIGNATURE | BOOTH D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Otago |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7869-4864 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 117 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
South Asian Climate Transnationalism: Beyond Diasporic Humanitarianism
South Asia is currently on the front line of the global climate emergency, with the region experiencing increasing, devastating crises resulting from climate change and ‘climate coloniality’ (Sultana, 2022). This article, drawing upon original qualitative research, explores the relationship between the South Asian diaspora and climate action within South Asia. We introduce and chart the nature and dynamics of contemporary South Asian climate tran…
A Foundation of Critical, Emancipatory Social History
Historians of sport have established a vibrant and productive academic field with dozens of texts now qualifying as “classics.” Richard Gruneau's Class, Sports, and Social Development (1983) is one. When I commenced my PhD in the late 1980s, Class, Sports, and Social Development yielded an unprecedented breadth of intellectual and theoretical insights to critique the power structures and imbalances in, and the ideological dimensions of, modern sp…
Diasporic engagement and the climate crisis in Kerala: Inclusive disaster relief and reconstruction
India has been identified as one of the most vulnerable countries within the global climate crisis. Kerala has been highlighted as a hotspot of climate vulnerability within India, and this was illustrated by the floods of 2018. Nearly, 500 people lost their lives during the floods and 1.4 million were displaced, with the reconstruction programme still taking place today. Anecdotal andmedia accounts have suggested that the Keralan diaspora played …
Experiments in history: The voice of Bondi
How might we distil the meaning of a place amid a myriad of competing representations, perspectives and narratives? In this article, I address this question with a case study of Bondi Beach, Australia. Bondi is a synecdoche for an Australian beach lifestyle, and for urban congestion, dysfunction and the destruction of the natural world. I argue that appeals to historical facts, which are invariably contested, can never reconcile disparate represe…
Action Sports and the Olympic Games: Past, Present, Future
The Lure of the Beach: A Global History by Robert C. Ritchie
Reviewed by: The Lure of the Beach: A Global History by Robert C. Ritchie Douglas Booth (bio) The Lure of the Beach: A Global History By Robert C. Ritchie. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 321. The Lure of the Beach is a grand narrative of the development of beach resorts. Author Robert Ritchie begins his narrative on the English beach in the eighteenth century, where the upper classes, upon the advice of medical practitio…
Routledge Handbook of Sport History
New Perspectives on Old Themes
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a host of examples of the entanglement of politics in sporting nationalism. It presents that historians look more closely at the political and economic regulation of time and space as the driver of the emergence and development of modern forms of sport. The book identifies a relatively recent interest among historians of s…
Form and Performance in Oral History (Narratives): Historiographical Insights from Surfing and Snowboarding
In this article we revisit the use of oral testimony in sport history. The article comprises three substantive sections. In the first, we argue that oral testimonies are typically cast as narratives, even though they are usually generated as a series of responses to individual questions. Narrative configurations raise issues about the relationship between the structural design of the text, or form, and the real-world events, actions and processes…
Physical Culture and the Making and Preservation of Bondi Beach
Bondi, arguably Australia’s best known surf beach, raises questions about the relationships between physical cultures and the natural and built environments. In this paper I explore these relationships through an historical analysis of swimming, surfbathing, surf lifesaving, and surfing, and their contributions to the making and preservation of Bondi Beach. The physical cultures that formed at Bondi in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cent…
The Burden of Over-Representation: Race, Sport, and Philosophy
Sport and Modernity
Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora
Book Review| October 01 2019 Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora Dawson, Kevin. Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 351. Index and illustrations. $45.00, hb. Douglas Booth Douglas Booth University of Otago Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2019) 46 (3): 412–414. https://doi.org/10.54…
Nature sports: Ontology, embodied being, politics
In nature sports athletes interact with the surfaces, textures and fluids of physical geographical features as well as the dynamic forces that create them. These interactions have largely been ignored by social constructionist thinking in the social sciences; social constructionism renders the natural environment inert, passive, and malleable for human meaning and use. In this article I argue that the elements of natural environments produce affe…
Embodied Identities: Sport and Race in South Africa
Disentangling Race: Re-Narrating Apartheid Sport
This paper involves a search for interracial entanglements in South African sport and considers how these experiences may be narrated. The paper comprises three sections. The first provides an overview of traditional narratives of apartheid and apartheid sport that focus on race as a perpetual marker of social division. The second section shifts attention to the gaps, blind spots, mistakes, paradoxes, ironies, anomalies, ambiguities and invisibil…
The Bondi Surfer: An Underdeveloped History
History is an empirical-analytical and a narrative-linguistic interpretation of the past. By-and-large, historians of sport ignore the relationship between these two strands, which is critical to understanding historical practice. In this article, I draw on the work of the philosopher of history Hayden White to expound the empirical-analytical and narrative dimensions of surfing (boardriding) and surfers (boardriders) at Bondi, Australia’s world-…
Origins in History and Historiography: A Case Study of the First Swimmer at Bondi Beach
The search for origins is a hallmark of historical practice; origins are also fundamental to historical narratives, the predominant form by which historians present their interpretations of the past. Yet, paradoxically, history is ill-suited to studying firsts or origins. As the historian of culture and influential figure in historiography Jacob Burckhardt reminds us, single beginnings are rare phenomena. In this article, I investigate this parad…
Bondi's Big Rock: Explanations and Representations in Coastal Geomorphology
Sitting on the shore platform at Ben Buckler, the north-east headland of Bondi Beach, Sydney, is a large isolated boulder, weighing around 235 tons. In this article I analyse geomorphological explanations for, and historical representations of, the boulder, locally known as the Big Rock. Explanations for and representations of Bondi's Big Rock typically appear in discussions and debates about changes to the New South Wales coast and the impact of…
History, Sociology and Critical Sport Studies
This chapter discusses emergence, development and influence of the critical streams in sport history and sport sociology. It examines differential development and impact of critical sentiments, themes and theories on sport history and sport sociology. The critical sentiments and perspectives associated with the radical cultural Zeitgeist were yet to surface in either historical or sociological investigations of sport which continued to be framed …
Aborigines and the ‘Sport of Kings’: Aboriginal Jockeys in Australian Racing History. Revised Edition
In Aborigines and the ‘Sport of Kings’ John Maynard aims to underscore the contribution of Aborigines to Australian horseracing, to introduce the topic to Australian history, and to herald a new se
The Myth of Bondi's Black Sunday
On 6 February 1938, five bathers drowned while swimming between the flags at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia. In surf lifesaving history, the day is known as Black Sunday. The dominant heroic narrative of Black Sunday highlights freak surf conditions and the gallantry, efficiency, and adeptness of Bondi's volunteer surf lifesavers. In this article I analyse this representation as a myth. Here I employ the French philosopher Roland Barthes' concept…
Invitation to historians: The historiographical turn of a practicing (sport) historian
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 whic…
Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures: Revealing Bodies
Sport History in Brazil: Cementing Local Foundations, Strengthening a Subdiscipline
Research Article| October 01 2013 Sport History in Brazil: Cementing Local Foundations, Strengthening a Subdiscipline Douglas Booth Douglas Booth School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences, University of Otago Correspondence to [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2013) 40 (3): 371–376. https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.40.3.371 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Sh…
(Re)reading The Surfers’ Bible: The affects of Tracks
I recently returned to the coast and started buying Tracks again. I wanted to tell you that the skin-creeping buzz I felt from the anticipation of an impending new issue has returned, and I love it
Hitting Apartheid for Six? The Politics of the South African Sports Boycott
In the political struggle against apartheid, protesters and opponents of the South African regime adopted a range of strategies and tactics, including a boycott of sport. This article analyses and evaluates the effectiveness and significance of the sports boycott that passed through various stages with respect to objectives and goals. Boycotters initially sought to deracialize South African sport. By the early 1980s, the sports boycott was one of…
Migration, development and inequality: Eastern Punjabi transnationalism
Drawing on original, ethnographic research in India and the UK, in this article we discuss the impact of transnational activity on the Doaba region of East Punjab, India. We argue that some recent studies have underplayed some of the less progressive consequences of Indian transnationalism. In particular, we contend that they have underestimated the extent of division between transnational migrants and Indian non-migrants and downplayed the relat…
Nature sports: Ontology, embodied being, politics
In nature sports athletes interact with the surfaces, textures and fluids of physical geographical features as well as the dynamic forces that create them. These interactions have largely been ignored by social constructionist thinking in the social sciences; social constructionism renders the natural environment inert, passive, and malleable for human meaning and use. In this article I argue that the elements of natural environments produce affe…
History, Culture, Surfing: Exploring Historiographical Relationships
In this three-part article I examine the relationship between sport and popular culture through the concept of affect. In particular, I am interested in the historiographical implications of this relationship. In the first part, I argue that social historians of sport typically consider sporting bodies as social constructions to the exclusion of (embodied) affective experiences that I place at the core of popular culture. In the second part, I di…
Surfing '60s: A case study in the history of pleasure and discipline∗
(1994). Surfing '60s: A case study in the history of pleasure and discipline. Australian Historical Studies: Vol. 26, No. 103, pp. 262-279
Sites of Truth or Metaphors of Power? Refiguring the Archive
Historians have made extensive use of archives for retrieving knowledge about the sporting past. Indeed, most practitioners will agree that archives are indispensable storehouses of sources, particularly official documents. But some historians are also taking a second look at archives. Rather than conceptualizing archives as sites of knowledge, they view them as sites of power. This article examines the place of archives in sport history and look…
Seven (1 + 6) surfing stories: The practice of authoring
‘History’, Alun Munslow (2010 Munslow, A. 2010. The future of history, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 148) reminds us, ‘is primarily an authoring activity’. In this article I discuss authoring as a practice in which historians with their political, ideological and ethical dispositions and beliefs mobilize and translate evidence from the past and create narratives, that is, constitute the past as history. My particu…
Escaping the past? The cultural turn and language in sport history
The cultural turn in sport history, and the accompanying shift from the study of sport as a social practice towards the interpretation of sporting cultures, ushered in a healthy new interest in the social and political power of language. However, notwithstanding closer attention from sport culture historians to the way their subjects use language (discourse, texts, narratives) to constitute, transmit and transform culture, few reflect critically …
Action Sports and the Olympic Games: Past, Present, Future
The Bondi Surfer: An Underdeveloped History
History is an empirical-analytical and a narrative-linguistic interpretation of the past. By-and-large, historians of sport ignore the relationship between these two strands, which is critical to understanding historical practice. In this article, I draw on the work of the philosopher of history Hayden White to expound the empirical-analytical and narrative dimensions of surfing (boardriding) and surfers (boardriders) at Bondi, Australia’s world-…
In- Between the Flags: Reflections on a narrative of Surf Life Saving Australia
Why did the history committee of Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) invite me, a staunch critic of the surf lifesaving movement and an active surfer, to join the team that wrote the official centennial history – Between the Flags: One Hundred Summers of Australian Surf Lifesaving – of this iconic Australian institution and movement? In this article I critically reflect on my participation in SLSA's centennial history project and on my narrative co…
Mandela and Amabokoboko: The Political and Linguistic Nationalisation of South Africa
South African sports officials recently agreed to retain the Springbok as the emblem and sobriquet of the national rugby team. The decision, which followed protracted debate, raises important questions about the construction of national identity in the post-apartheid era. Why has this traditional symbol of white racial superiority been reprieved? And can Springbok rugby help mould all South Africa's peoples into a nation...with common feelings of…
Olympic city bidding: An exegesis of power
In this article I analyse the bidding process to host the olympics as a complex set of power relationships between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and candidate cities. My analysis looks at both macro-political conditions and relationships and the micro-motives and psychological predilections of IOC members and the principals of candidate cities. Unlike traditional political studies that largely infer the goals and ambitions of individu…
Beyond history: Racial emancipation and ethics in apartheid sport
Social historians confront a paradox. Working within a framework of modernist-inspired, empirical–analytical history, they conceive their narratives arising from objective evidence. But the narrative choices they make with respect to content (i.e. facts, concepts, context) and form (i.e. metaphors, emplotment, focalization) reveal their general commitment to emancipation and the liberation of minority groups and women from oppression and subjugat…
Sport history and the seeds of a postmodern discourse
Thirty years after its conception and development as a branch of social history, academic sport history is in a state of flux. The empirical, inferential and objective principles and tenets of modernist academic sport history face an increasing challenge from postmodernism, an explicitly self-conscious and reflexive form of thinking that is recasting history as a constructed discourse of the past. In this article I look at the growth of postmoder…
Surf lifesaving: The development of an Australasian ‘sport’
The South African council on sport and the political antinomies of the sports boycott
In the 1970s and 1980s the anti‐apartheid movement recognised the South African Council on Sport (SACOS) as its domestic sports wing. This article analyses and evaluates SACOS's politics in the context of apartheid, the international sports boycott and moves by the National Party to deracialise sport. In the belief that sport transcended race and politics, SACOS pursued negotiations with white sports officials to integrate and democratise South A…
United sport: An alternative hegemony in South Africa
Form and Performance in Oral History (Narratives): Historiographical Insights from Surfing and Snowboarding
In this article we revisit the use of oral testimony in sport history. The article comprises three substantive sections. In the first, we argue that oral testimonies are typically cast as narratives, even though they are usually generated as a series of responses to individual questions. Narrative configurations raise issues about the relationship between the structural design of the text, or form, and the real-world events, actions and processes…
Disentangling Race: Re-Narrating Apartheid Sport
This paper involves a search for interracial entanglements in South African sport and considers how these experiences may be narrated. The paper comprises three sections. The first provides an overview of traditional narratives of apartheid and apartheid sport that focus on race as a perpetual marker of social division. The second section shifts attention to the gaps, blind spots, mistakes, paradoxes, ironies, anomalies, ambiguities and invisibil…
The Myth of Bondi's Black Sunday
On 6 February 1938, five bathers drowned while swimming between the flags at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia. In surf lifesaving history, the day is known as Black Sunday. The dominant heroic narrative of Black Sunday highlights freak surf conditions and the gallantry, efficiency, and adeptness of Bondi's volunteer surf lifesavers. In this article I analyse this representation as a myth. Here I employ the French philosopher Roland Barthes' concept…
Invitation to historians: The historiographical turn of a practicing (sport) historian
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 whic…
A Diasporic Indian Community: Re-Imagining Punjab
This paper examines a UK Jat Sikh Punjabi diasporic community. Existing studies of such communities focus upon processes of identity formation within the UK. We suggest that British Asian identities are shaped by social processes within South Asia as well as the UK. In particular, we argue that meanings of home, amongst the UK diasporic group studied, are being importantly shaped by dynamic social and cultural processes within East Punjab. Becaus…
Evidence revisited: Interpreting historical materials in sport history
This article identifies the interpretation of historical materials as the essence of contemporary historical practice. It then compares three different approaches to interpretation, namely, reconstructionism, constructionism and decontructionism, through case studies of four common categories of historical materials found in the field of sport history: official documents, oral testimonies, films, and photographs. The key to understanding the thre…
Development (Review Article)
South Africa: The politics of pre‐negotiations, 1989–1991
The international community has hailed South African state president, F.W. de Klerk, a ‘liberator’. De Klerk liberalised the political process and deracialised aspects of state and society. But how committed to racial reform are be and his government? The regime's policies, strategies and tactics over the last two years raise many concerns that the international community has either baulked or simply ignored. The argument that the government must…
The consecration of sport: Idealism in social science theory
Surfing '60s: A case study in the history of pleasure and discipline∗
(1994). Surfing '60s: A case study in the history of pleasure and discipline. Australian Historical Studies: Vol. 26, No. 103, pp. 262-279
Books reviews
J. Neils (ed.), Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Pp. 227, 24 colour plates, 170 b&w illus. $49.50 (£37.50) cloth; $19.95 (£13.95) paper. ISBN 0–691–03612–8 (cloth); 0–691–00223–1 (paper). Steven H. Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Pp. xxi + 352. Illustrations, bibliography, indexes. $39.95. ISB…
United sport: An alternative hegemony in South Africa
Mandela and Amabokoboko: The Political and Linguistic Nationalisation of South Africa
South African sports officials recently agreed to retain the Springbok as the emblem and sobriquet of the national rugby team. The decision, which followed protracted debate, raises important questions about the construction of national identity in the post-apartheid era. Why has this traditional symbol of white racial superiority been reprieved? And can Springbok rugby help mould all South Africa's peoples into a nation...with common feelings of…
Nudes in the sand and perverts in the dunes
(1997). Nudes in the sand and perverts in the dunes. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 21, Fatal shores, pp. 170-182
Sports History: What Can Be Done
In the early 1980s, Redman (1984) reported that sports history is ‘alive and free and growing in academe’ (p. 38). A few years later Park warned that sports history was in a ‘descending spiral’. This article analyses the rapid turn around in the fortunes of sports history and its ongoing decline over the last decade in the curricula of university departments of physical education. While changes within physical education, including its scientisati…
The South African council on sport and the political antinomies of the sports boycott
In the 1970s and 1980s the anti‐apartheid movement recognised the South African Council on Sport (SACOS) as its domestic sports wing. This article analyses and evaluates SACOS's politics in the context of apartheid, the international sports boycott and moves by the National Party to deracialise sport. In the belief that sport transcended race and politics, SACOS pursued negotiations with white sports officials to integrate and democratise South A…
Surfing: The cultural and technological determinants of a dance
Functionalism, Sport and Society
Surf lifesaving: The development of an Australasian ‘sport’
Hitting Apartheid for Six? The Politics of the South African Sports Boycott
In the political struggle against apartheid, protesters and opponents of the South African regime adopted a range of strategies and tactics, including a boycott of sport. This article analyses and evaluates the effectiveness and significance of the sports boycott that passed through various stages with respect to objectives and goals. Boycotters initially sought to deracialize South African sport. By the early 1980s, the sports boycott was one of…
Consciousness, Craft, Commitment: The Sociological Imagination of C. Wright Mills
A prominent critic of American life and the orthodoxies of American sociology in the 1950s, C. Wright Mills today wears the mantle of the father of radical sociology (Scimecca, 1977, p. 111). Summing up Mills’ life and work, Eldridge (1983, p. 112) pays tribute to his “innovative work in the sociology of knowledge”1 and his intellectual influence on his contemporaries. He also acknowledges the range of studies completed by Mills “in what was, aft…
Social Structure and Social Theory: The Intellectual Insights of Robert K. Merton
Many sociologists argue that “structural-functionalism” was the dominant theoretical perspective in sociology between the late 1930s and the early 1960s, especially in North America. From the perspective of sport sociology, Jarvie and Maguire contend that structural-functionalism “played a key part in the early development of the sociology of sport in North America and on both sides of what was then the European ‘iron curtain’ ” (1994, p. 5). Alt…
Escaping the past? The cultural turn and language in sport history
The cultural turn in sport history, and the accompanying shift from the study of sport as a social practice towards the interpretation of sporting cultures, ushered in a healthy new interest in the social and political power of language. However, notwithstanding closer attention from sport culture historians to the way their subjects use language (discourse, texts, narratives) to constitute, transmit and transform culture, few reflect critically …
Evidence revisited: Interpreting historical materials in sport history
This article identifies the interpretation of historical materials as the essence of contemporary historical practice. It then compares three different approaches to interpretation, namely, reconstructionism, constructionism and decontructionism, through case studies of four common categories of historical materials found in the field of sport history: official documents, oral testimonies, films, and photographs. The key to understanding the thre…
Sites of Truth or Metaphors of Power? Refiguring the Archive
Historians have made extensive use of archives for retrieving knowledge about the sporting past. Indeed, most practitioners will agree that archives are indispensable storehouses of sources, particularly official documents. But some historians are also taking a second look at archives. Rather than conceptualizing archives as sites of knowledge, they view them as sites of power. This article examines the place of archives in sport history and look…
A Diasporic Indian Community: Re-Imagining Punjab
This paper examines a UK Jat Sikh Punjabi diasporic community. Existing studies of such communities focus upon processes of identity formation within the UK. We suggest that British Asian identities are shaped by social processes within South Asia as well as the UK. In particular, we argue that meanings of home, amongst the UK diasporic group studied, are being importantly shaped by dynamic social and cultural processes within East Punjab. Becaus…
Migration, development and inequality: Eastern Punjabi transnationalism
Drawing on original, ethnographic research in India and the UK, in this article we discuss the impact of transnational activity on the Doaba region of East Punjab, India. We argue that some recent studies have underplayed some of the less progressive consequences of Indian transnationalism. In particular, we contend that they have underestimated the extent of division between transnational migrants and Indian non-migrants and downplayed the relat…
In- Between the Flags: Reflections on a narrative of Surf Life Saving Australia
Why did the history committee of Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) invite me, a staunch critic of the surf lifesaving movement and an active surfer, to join the team that wrote the official centennial history – Between the Flags: One Hundred Summers of Australian Surf Lifesaving – of this iconic Australian institution and movement? In this article I critically reflect on my participation in SLSA's centennial history project and on my narrative co…
(Re)reading The Surfers’ Bible: The affects of Tracks
I recently returned to the coast and started buying Tracks again. I wanted to tell you that the skin-creeping buzz I felt from the anticipation of an impending new issue has returned, and I love it
Sport history and the seeds of a postmodern discourse
Thirty years after its conception and development as a branch of social history, academic sport history is in a state of flux. The empirical, inferential and objective principles and tenets of modernist academic sport history face an increasing challenge from postmodernism, an explicitly self-conscious and reflexive form of thinking that is recasting history as a constructed discourse of the past. In this article I look at the growth of postmoder…
Beyond history: Racial emancipation and ethics in apartheid sport
Social historians confront a paradox. Working within a framework of modernist-inspired, empirical–analytical history, they conceive their narratives arising from objective evidence. But the narrative choices they make with respect to content (i.e. facts, concepts, context) and form (i.e. metaphors, emplotment, focalization) reveal their general commitment to emancipation and the liberation of minority groups and women from oppression and subjugat…
Sociology (36 works) · Political science (29 works) · History (28 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (28 works) · Law (27 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (26 works) · Art (23 works) · History (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (18 works)