As an attempt to think about the popularization of Korean sport history, this paper discusses three main things. First, it will be introduced what public/popular history is, how it has been developed, and why it is important to history as an academic discipline. Second, it will be summarized how sport historian embraced public/popular history into their practices in terms of what theoretical, critical, and methodological aspects they have focused. Third, I will discus why public/popular history is useful in the ways in which Korean sport history envisions its popularization in Korean society. To be more specific, I highlight two ideas: an insight for understanding sport history as a process and sport historiansʼ role of critic. Based upon these two, I will argue that Korean sport historians might need to actively embrace practices of public/popular history into their studies of the Korean sporting past.
The purpose of this paper is to map how sport sociologists and sport historians have engaged in the study of race and/in sport. Focusing on scholars with two communities of the North American Society for Sport Sociology & Sport History, it investigates themes, historical/sociological philosophy, theoretical/methodological issues that underpin their works. To be more specific, mainly four types of research are detailed: 1) popular narratives that mostly celebrate black athletes’ success in sport, 2) so-called the early academic works that highlight the positive role of sport in advancing the issue of race in relation to social justice, unification, equality, and so on, 3) a group of researches informed by the positivism, which attempt to discover, investigate, identify racially problematic phenomena, incidents, policies, or incidents and explain why they happen, what makes them problematic, and how to solve such matters, and 4) critical paradigm that orients cultural studies based researches that attempt to explore the relationship between sport and race with focus on interpretive, theoretical, and reflective approaches. In conclusion, it is discussed why I pay attention to the critical paradigm, what it’s emergence means to the sporting academy, and in what ways we can embrace it into the Korean sporting academy.
