Description:

Conversations about Gender, Race and Technology in the 2022 FIFA World Cup

Football is one of the most popular sports worldwide, and the FIFA World Cup is a sporting and media event of global reach. In this virtual panel, a series of distinguished specialists will address issues concerning gender, racial, ethnic, and technological dynamics at play in the 2022 World Cup in particular, and in football in general. Register online via Zoom.

Panelists

Harry Collins, Cardiff University, “VAR has developed an overcomplex solution to a simple problem”

In football, VAR seems to have become captured by technology. It exhibits the same kind of surrender to technology that we are seeing in the spread of artificial intelligence (AI). The problem that was to be solved by VAR was created by television replays. TV replays put the public in a better position than the referee to assess rapidly occurring incidents on the field. The simple solution to this is to allow referees to see TV replays, preferably on big screens at the stadium visible to the public as well. The on-field referee should then make the final decision based on the enhanced view offered by the TV replay. As it is, often inaccurate technology and hidden judges are misleading crowds and complicating decisions unnecessarily

Harry Collins is distinguished research professor at Cardiff University. He is an elected fellow of the British Academy and winner of the Bernal prize for social studies of science. His 25 books cover, among other things, sociology of scientific knowledge, artificial intelligence, the nature of expertise, tacit knowledge, and technology in sport. His contemporaneous study of the detection of gravitational waves has been continuing since 1972 and he has written four books and many papers on the topic. He is currently looking at the impact of the coronavirus lockdown on science due to the ending of face-to-face conferences and workshops and on the role of science in safeguarding democracy. He has explored how the use of video assistant referee (VAR) technology impacts sport and is the editor of "Bad Call: Technology’s Attack on Umpires and Referees and How to Fix It."

Brenda Elsey, Hofstra University, “Social Justice and Technology at the 2022 World Cup”

The role of technology in the anti-discrimination efforts within football has yet to be fully explored. On the one hand, clubs around the world are experimenting with technology to make their stadiums more inclusive for differently abled spectators and less environmentally draining. This talk considers the possibilities and problems of new technologies in efforts to combat homophobia, racism, and sexism in the qualifiers and the World Cup 2022.

Brenda Elsey is a professor of History at Hofstra University specializing in gender, politics, and popular culture in Latin America. She is the author of "Citizens and Sportsmen: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile," and co-author with Joshua Nadel of "Futbolera: A History of Women's Sport in Latin America" (both University of Texas Press), co-editor of "Historicizing the Pleasure and Politics of Sport," a special issue of the Radical History Review, as well as many articles. She has also written for The Guardian, New Republic, and Sports Illustrated and co-hosts the sport and feminism podcast, "Burn It All Down." Elsey is also development lead in the Americas for the Fare Network, which works on anti-discrimination in global football, monitors international matches for sexism, racism, and homophobia, and develops grass-roots projects. Her current manuscript project, "Losing to Win," is under contract with University of North Carolina Press.

Rayvon Fouché, National Science Foundation, “Does technology make the beautiful game less beautiful?”

Sport is a creative human endeavor; but it is also deeply technoscientific. In the recent past, soccer’s (football’s) gravitation toward computational efficiency is not without consequence. Specifically, what does it mean for the spirit of the game to use technology to assist human officials, or outright replace them? What does it mean to champion a machine-like rule enforcement that is not mirrored in the rules? Does imperfection have a place in the modern technoscientific game?

Rayvon Fouché is the director of NSF's Social and Economic Sciences Division. His work explores the multiple intersections between cultural representation, racial identification and technological design. He has authored or edited "Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), "Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power" (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), "Technology Studies" (Sage Publications, 2008), the 4th Edition of "The Handbook of Science & Technology Studies" (MIT Press, 2016), and "Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). Fouché was the inaugural Arthur Mollela Distinguished Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. He has received grants and awards in support of his research and teaching from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Illinois Informatics Institute, Illinois Program for the Research in Humanities, University of Illinois' Center for Advanced Study, National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. 

Claudia Kozman, Northwestern University in Qatar, “Cultural norms and gender expectations in the WC: A Global South view”

The 2022 Qatar World Cup is a first in many aspects. Perhaps one of the most talked about topics has been the country’s cultural and religious codes that prohibit specific behaviors. Intertwined with issues of gender, these and other similar topics have been covered predominantly from a Western perspective that oftentimes ignores alternative explanations. How does a Global South voice add to this normative narrative? And what positive experiences can we expect from this mega event in Qatar? 
 
Claudia Kozman is an assistant professor in residence in the Journalism and Strategic Communication program at Northwestern University in Qatar. She conducts research on sport journalism, focusing on media coverage of issues that go beyond the entertainment value that sports bring. In particular, she examines media sourcing and framing of sports issues in relation to politics and health. As a former sports journalist, Kozman has worked 13years in sports, and in football as the press secretary of the president of the Asian Football Confederation.

Moderator Pablo J. Boczkowski (he/él) is Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is founder and director of the Center for Latinx Digital Media, and faculty director of the Master of Science in Leadership for Creative Enterprises, both at Northwestern, and co-founder and co- director of the Master of Science in Leadership for Creative Enterprises, a joint initiative between Northwestern and Universidad de San Andrés, in Buenos Aires. In 2020 he was named fellow of the International Communication Association, and in 2022 elected chair of the fellows. His research program examines the dynamics of digital culture from a comparative perspective. He is the author of six books, four edited volumes, and more than 60 journal articles, including "The digital environment: How we live, learn, work, and play now" (with Eugenia Mitchelstein).