Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Everyone has an opinion on football. Fans can be incredibly passionate and tribal when it comes to supporting their beloved team. But, those opinions, and that passion, can often turn into anger, violence and hate. Through social media platforms, those reactionary outbursts or carefully crafted comments can be sent directly to players, managers, referees, commentators, pundits and sports journalists.
In this Cultural Conversation, I will outline some of the headline findings from a three-year project called 'Tackling Online Hate in Football' (TOHIF). The TOHIF team gathered and analysed 50 million tweets relating to online hate in men's and women's football tournaments between 2008-22. We can chart the spikes, triggers and wider socio-political trends through this 14-year dataset. We also conducted interviews and focus groups with over 200 participants including players, managers and sports journalists. The presentation will highlight how online hate and abuse is experienced and what impact it has on the target. The presentation conclude by offering solutions around how to mitigate and challenge the threat of online hate, abuse and harms in football and beyond.
Leeds Cultural Conversations is a series of public lectures organised by the Centre for Culture and Humanities at Leeds Beckett University. The series is run in partnership with Leeds Central Library and each event showcases a different piece of leading research being undertaken by our academic colleagues to a wider public audience, with discussion and debate encouraged by all that attend.
Events take place monthly in Leeds Central Library, over lunchtime and are open to all.
Dr Daniel Kilvington is a Reader and Course Director in Media and Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University. His teaching and research focuses on race/ethnicity, racism and anti-racism in sport and new media contexts. He is widely published in academic journals, and is author of five books, including Sport, Racism and Social Media (2015), British Asians, Exclusion and the Football Industry (2016), and Sport and Discrimination (2017).
Dr Kilvington is the co-founder of the international Sport and Discrimination Conference series, and has presented a number of keynote papers at academic and industry events. He has delivered many EDI focused workshops for organisations including BBC Sport, Sky Sports News, Reuters. He is the co-founder of the Talking Race podcast series, Trustee of the Zesh Rehman Foundation (ZRF), and is a member of the West Riding County FA's Inclusion and Advisory Group (IAG). In 2020, Dr Kilvington delivered a TEDx talk entitled The Virtual Stages of Hate.
