Details

At: 18/01/2023 5:00pm, in cooperation with:

Speakers:

Olga Ruzhelnyk
Mahfoud Amara
Dario Brentin

Football, War and Memory, hosted by: Jelena Đureinović

The panel explores the relationship between football and the politics of war memory and commemoration. Looking at the examples of the sport during and after the war in Algeria, the 1942 Death Match between FC Start and Nazi German military team “Flakelf“ and football fans‘ articulations of memory in the post-Yugoslav space, the speakers discuss the ways in which war and memory are enacted and performed in the football context.

Panellists

Olga Ruzhelnyk is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of Politics (Institute des sciences sociales du politique -ISP), Nanterre, France.  A native Ukrainian, she received a master’s degree in sociology from V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (2012). Defended in June 2021, her PhD thesis is entitled: “Ukrainian football ultras and political reconfigurations around the Maidan: genesis and transformations of a collective political figure in post-Soviet Ukraine” (Paris Nanterre University). Main research topics: football fanaticism, collective practices, politicization, nationalism, mobilization, post-Soviet space, Ukraine, Maidan, Donbass War.

Mahfoud Amara is currently Associate Professor in Sport Management and Social Sciences, Physical Education Department, College of Education. Before joining Qatar University he worked at the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University (2003-2015). Dr Amara has a number of publications on sport, business, culture,  politics and society in the Arab region. He has undertaken research for a range national and international bodies (e.g. British Academy, European Commission, UNESCO, BBC, ICSS). He was invited as speaker to a number of international conferences, workshops and symposia for his research on sport in the Middle East and North African region. In 2012 he published a book with Palgrave and Macmillan on “Sport Politics and Society in the Arab World”. He co-edited with Alberto Testa a book on “Sport in Islam and in Muslim Communities” (Routledge, 2015); with John Nauright “Sport in the African World” (Routledge, 2018). He was editor of “the Olympic Movement and the Middle East and North Africa Region” (Routledge, 2020).

Dario Brentin is currently working at the University of Applied Sciences Vienna in Austria. Prior to that, he was at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz working on the topic of sport and national identity in post-Yugoslav Croatia. He obtained his Mag. Phil. in Political Science and Eastern European History at the University of Vienna and has since been a Visiting Lecturer at CEU Budapest, the University of Copenhagen, and KU Leuven.

Moderator

Jelena Đureinović is a postdoctoral researcher and scientific coordinator of the Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Giessen. Her current research project combines the approaches of transnational history and memory studies. It explores the role of memory in the context of networks of solidarity in the global Cold War and decolonisation, focusing on the agency of Yugoslav war veterans. She is also interested in the memory work of the far-right and the specificities of memory politics in contemporary authoritarian democracies. Her book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution (Routledge, 2020) centres on the question of how memory politics works, investigating the radical revision of the Second World War in post-Yugoslav Serbia. She is a member of the MSA Executive Committee.