AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE AT THE INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES VIENNA UNIVERSITY, 21-23 MARCH, 2002

FINAL PROGRAM now available at http://www.univie.ac.at/Japanologie/eafb/kickoff.htm !

2002 is the year of the first Football World Cup Finals taking place in Asia. For the first time in the history of this event, all three of the major powers in East Asia, China, Japan and South Korea are participating in what has been called the “greatest shared mass experience of human history”. Since the 1990s association football has truly become the "world game". As the most prominent of world sports, football has been identified as the "dominant cultural form" of the 1990s. Its mobilising power of global mass television audiences regardless of cultural and social background is unparalleled and remarkable in its own terms, and it’s also ground-laying for football’s economic power. Considering the recent history of world football and the bidding war of broadcasting rights, we may expect an ever increasing global audience keeping a watchful eye at the Football tournament in Japan and Korea 2002.

This conference is designed to heighten awareness of the historical event. In order to adjust to the growing need of grounded knowledge about the dimensions of football in the East Asian region, more than 20 participants from five continents and even more academic fields will provide a body of sophisticated information on football in contemporary China, Japan and Korea. Due to its particular qualities, modern football serves well to analyse numerous processes and constructions of social, political and economic dimensions, e.g. the relationship between centres and peripheries, global labour migration, multinational corporations and transnational media industries, regionalism and nationalism, commercialism etc., characterising the globalising world of the 21st century. Yet what kind of football is emerging out of the interaction of native traditions, local preferences and homogeneising effects is a key question to the participants at the conference on Soccer Nations and Football Cultures in East Asia.

The conference will be hold at the Plenary Hall of the AAKH Campus, Vienna University, starting on 21 March 2002, 9 am. The conference has been sponsored by the Japan Foundation, among others, and is open to the public. Registration is free but space is limited. So please pre-register with either the Conference Office or the Program Director: