Victoria University's Football Studies Unit will host an international football conference to be held at VU in the week following the AFL grand final at the end of September.
Speakers will include Eric Anderson from the University of Bath, an expert on football and sexuality, Jayne Caudwell from the University of Brighton, whose research interests include women's soccer, and VU football historian Dr Rob Hess. The theme is Triumphs, Trials and Traumas, with streams on Gender and Sexualities, Memories and Identities and The Global and Local Worlds of Football. The conference website has details.
The conference was announced at the launch of the University' Sport and Culture Group 2010 program yesterday with an impressive list of activities including a new research digest and the latest edition of the Bulletin of Sport and Culture.
Led by Associate Professor Bob Stewart, Associate Professor Dennis Hemphill and Dr Hess, from the School of Sport and Exercise Science, the Sport and Culture Group has been providing a platform for academic commentary on the cultural underpinnings of sport for 16 years. It now has 14 active members from the VU academy.
The Bulletin, which was first published as a newsletter in 1994, had grown to become a reputable journal whose editors have been approached by publishers offering to produce an online version, Dr Hess said.
The latest edition contains articles on athlete-coach sexual relationships, the management of problem players in professional codes, and the rise of the Melbourne-based Anti-Football League (AFL). Intriguingly, the AFL is again on the rise after interest waned for many years "" it now has a website antifootballleague.org with links to pages on Facebook and Myspace.
Another initiative flagged at the launch is a plan to expand the University's Professor Football experts guide to include an online discussion forum later in the season.
