The Worlds of Football III: Football Codes in the Asian Century

Victoria University's College of Sport & Exercise Science is pleased to host The Worlds of Football III - an international, multi-disciplinary, multi-code conference in January 2015.

The conference will be the ninth in a series of football studies conferences hosted by the College - its timing aligned with the staging of the Asian Football Cup in Australia.

The conference will be a platform for knowledge exchange across football codes in the context of the Asian century and is expected to bring together more than 100 football researchers, industry experts and PhD students.

The program features keynote speaker Satoshi Shimizu from the University of Tsukuba, Japan as well as panel discussions with guest speakers, forums and a free public lecture.

Conference details

The conference will take place over three days:

• 20 January 2015 – 5.30pm to 7pm, State Library of Victoria
• 21 January 2015 – 9.30am to 5.30pm, Footscray Park Campus
• 22 January 2015 – 9.30am to 5.30pm, Footscray Park Campus

Please arrive 30 minutes prior to the start time each day.

Day 1 of the conference will include a free public panel discussion on 'Football Codes in the Asian Century: Understanding the Past and Predicting the Future for Players, Teams, Clubs, Officials and Fans'.

Program & session locations

For a detailed outline of the conference, including session times and room locations, please refer to the conference program.

Keynote speakers

Professor Satoshi Shimizu

Professor Satoshi Shimizu

Satoshi Shimizu is a Professor at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. He is the current Chair of the Masters program in Health and Sport Sciences and Vice-Chair of the Tsukuba International Academy for Sport Studies.

Professor Shimizu is a leading scholar in Japan in the Sociology of Sport and Body Culture Studies. His research includes work on the cultural politics of baseball and football, cultural understandings of the body, and Olympic studies. Of particular interest for the conference is his ethnographic based research on fan cultures, both of local and national teams, in Japanese football. He has published widely in both Japanese and English, and has been the editor of the Japanese magazine Contemporary Sport Studies since 1998.

Associate Professor Jennifer Curtin

Associate Professor Jennifer Curtin

Jennifer Curtin is an Associate Professor in Comparative Politics and Public Policy at the University of Auckland. She has also worked at Monash University, University of Canberra and held a post-doc at ANU, where she completed her PhD. In 2012 she won a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to Georgetown University.

Over the past 15 years Jennifer has published widely on women, politics and public policy. Her work has involved feminist analyses of traditional political institutions, including parliament, cabinet, trade unions and the bureaucracy.

In 2011 she turned her interest to gender and the politics of sport, and she is currently writing a book on women and rugby in New Zealand from 1860s to the present, tentatively titled "More than a Man's Game". The research explores women's engagement with the game as spectators, fans, mothers, players, administrators and critics.

A consistent theme in Jennifer’s writing is a focus on women’s presence and agency in politics, revealing how women negotiate and challenge the institutional rules and norms that have often been created with only men in mind, and the successes that women have achieved for women as a result. Her work on women and rugby is no different.

Further information

For all conference information, including abstracts, registration details, and a draft program schedule, please contact [email protected].