By Thomas Horn, a BA (Hons) Multimedia Sports Journalism student at UCFB Wembley.
A group of UCFB staff (Michael Griffiths, Dr Patricia Mahon-Daly and Guy McCrea) and students (Ezekiel Conteh, Arjun Sharda, Anders Wickham and myself) finished the academic year by attending the 5th Annual Sport & Discrimination Conference held by the University of Sunderland in London last month.
The conference was organised by two leading researchers on race/ethnicity issues in sport, Dr Daniel Kilvington and Dr John Price. Dr Kilvington had also visited UCFB in March to lecture students on research methods and racial bias. Dr Mahon-Daly of UCFB chaired parallel sessions during the conference too.
Presentations were delivered throughout the day by academics from all over the world and covered a broad range of topics including, racism, disability discrimination, sexual harassment and antisemitism. Each presentation contained eye-opening and ground-breaking research which had evidently been the sole concentration of the presenter for several years, showing to me the dedication and hard work necessary to be successful in the academic world.
Personally, I found the presentations about antisemitism the most interesting as I did not realise that this form of discrimination was so prevalent in modern sport. Social media seemed to be the epicentre of most of the discriminatory language used as examples. As a Multimedia Sports Journalism student who is taught how to utilise social media as a platform, this highlighted the need to stay vigilant towards abuse online.
After experiencing this conference and having just finished my first year at UCFB, I am now thinking about potential topics for my dissertation focused around the Paralympics or those with a disability access to sport, so this conference was hugely beneficial for my academic future in this area.
The networking that was available after the talks was also incredibly helpful as useful contacts and connections were formed as everybody shared a keen interest on the topics of the day and were eager to help each other to progress in their field of research.
This conference proved itself to be an unmissable opportunity to me as the presentations were from leading experts, the open and friendly personality of the day made everybody approachable, and I left feeling really fortunate that I was able to attend, thanks to UCFB.
