Towards New Materialist Sport History

This chapter provides a brief introduction to new materialisms and considers how such approaches may be taken up to expand the ethico-onto-epistemology of sport history. It offers two key new materialist concepts – lively matter and spacetimemattering – that have the potential to expand the field towards a more-than-human sport history. New materialist thought is concerned with the material processes of the world and with the lively capacities of matter itself. Sport historians have extensively explored the complex relationship between time and space. New materialisms encourage methodological innovations aligned with its ontological and theoretical foundations. Diffraction is one such approach that has been used to explore spacetimemattering and has the potential to extend historians' ways of doing research. In a diffractive approach, different disciplines, concepts, theories, and/or data sources can be brought into 'conversation with one another', such that we 'engage aspects of each in dynamic relationality to the other'.