Public History, Sporting Heritage and Archives: Working with the Private and Non-Profit Sectors

The continuities between sport, leisure and tourism studies are more compelling than the differences. A second point relates to the whole employability agenda in universities at the moment. One element of this is the student experience. As I became aware at Adidas, there are a whole generation of young graduates who use multiple internships to build a CV ahead of getting a permanent job. Another element of employability relevant for today is the role of board membership in developing the CV of Early Career Researchers. Because sport is largely such an old boy network, many boards are looking for diverse Non Executive Directors to assist their public relations profile as the recent Trophy Women Report in National Governing Body Leadership indicated. There are also increasing numbers of sporting heritage and museum collections. Thirdly, access to the archives of sporting bodies is going to get more highly politicized as they become increasingly wealthy and concerned to project corporate social responsibility.Aside from all of these very good reasons to get involved, my final motivation is the intellectual journey I’ve been on in following object based research. Like the History of the World Cup in 24 objects exhibition and brochure that I co-curated and wrote with David Goldblatt, this approach lends itself to doing public history