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6 - A Critical Analysis of Past and Present Campaigns to Challenge Online Racism in English Professional Football
- Edited by Imran Awan, Birmingham City University, Irene Zempi, Nottingham Trent University
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- Book:
- Hate Crime in Football
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 03 April 2024
- Print publication:
- 13 November 2023, pp 83-102
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Summary
Introduction
Inside Wembley Stadium, the men’s England manager, Gareth Southgate, huddles his players together for a final team talk before the players step up to take their penalty kicks. First for England is Harry Kane, who scores with a shot that is low and to the goalkeeper’s right. Next is Harry Maguire, who smashes the ball into the top right of the goal. However, Marcus Rashford hits the post and Jadon Sancho’s and Bukayo Saka’s efforts are saved by Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma. It is the final of the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) European Football Championship (Euro 2020), held in July 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and England have been defeated on penalties. Sadly, the online racist abuse which followed soured what should have been a proud moment for English football, as the national men’s team had reached their first major tournament final since 1966.
After the penalty kicks, in the ensuing moments online, the three young England players who missed theirs were rendered Black and ‘foreign’ above anything else, thereby exposing people’s deeply held views concerning race relations. Of particular interest here is the fact that a Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) report released in June 2022 highlighted that more than a third of the online abuse during the final came from online accounts based in the United Kingdom (UK). To offer further context, the abuse mirrored online reactions a decade prior towards Black English players Ashley Cole and Ashley Young, who also missed penalties against Italy during Euro 2012 (Press Association, 2012). The Euro 2020 case illustrates both the ease with which online racism is expressed and its frequency – it sadly represents yet another chapter in the history of online racism within football. What is clear is that forms of hate and forms of racism are evolving, with much of this moving online. Indeed, while racist chants and insults, and even bananas, were once hurled at players inside football stadiums, we can now observe these epithets in multiple digital forms. Many strategies (past and present) have sought to challenge online racism in football, some being more effective than others.
Seven - Excitement Processes, Embodiment and Power Relations in Sport and Leisure
- Edited by Stephen Mennell, University College Dublin, Alexander Law, University of Abertay, Dundee
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- Book:
- The Anthem Companion to Norbert Elias
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 28 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 08 August 2023, pp 129-148
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Summary
Introduction
Norbert Elias is recognised today as a major contributor to the development of the sociological tradition over the past century. This chapter introduces readers to the broad oeuvre of figurational research on sport and leisure, produced by Elias in collaboration with Eric Dunning in Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Elias and Dunning 2008 [1986]). Matters of the human body and excitement processes were also outlined in Elias's (2009a) work on the sociology of knowledge where he eschewed the dichotomy between ‘body’ and ‘mind’. Here, we examine some of the creative seams in their work that have been taken up by successive generations. As we have noted elsewhere (for example, Liston 2011; Maguire 2005), there is now a 50-year corpus of figurational research on sport and leisure forms throughout the world. This has been ambitious in scope and precise in conceptual development: all the while being open to empirical verification and testing. Taken as a whole, it confirms Elias and Dunning’s (2008) basic contention that these phenomena could not be understood without reference to the overall social standards of conduct and sentiment because knowledge about sport and leisure was knowledge about society. To illustrate this, we outline the main ideas set out by Elias and Dunning on sport, leisure and the quest for excitement/exciting significance (Elias and Dunning 2008; Maguire 1992). This is a necessary precursor to appreciating the contribution of figurational work to understanding violence and sport and the social roots of football hooliganism conducted by the Leicester School. Thereafter we explore matters of identity, embodiment and power relations that are revealed in figurational research on medicine and health, and on gendered and national identities. Initially, we provide an overview of the theory of civilising processes as it applies to sport, leisure and the human body. This is important because ‘sociologist of sport’ is too limiting a descriptor for many of the researchers mentioned here, including Eric Dunning most notably.
Civilising Processes, the Body and the Quest for ‘Exciting Significance’
People do not just have an embodied self, a ‘body’: it is more correct to think of people's ‘bodies’ and ‘bodies of people’ as living formations of people acting out their lives in cultural and structural contexts.