Speaker: Dr Carrie Dunn, Journalist and Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University

Carrie is a journalist and academic who has been combining research, teaching and professional practice since 2005. She teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University, delivering modules on cultural studies, media, and sociology. Her research interests include fandom, sport, feminism and the consumption of popular culture, and her PhD, which she was awarded by SHU in 2012, examined the experience of the female football supporter in the English professional game.

Her book ‘Female Football Fans: Community, Identity and Sexism’ is published by Palgrave Pivot.

As a journalist she divides her time between writing about sport and writing about popular culture, for publications including the Times and the Guardian.

Title: Feminism, fandom, soccer and sexism – an overview of female football fandom

This seminar highlights the experience of female football fans in England – a group which has been marginalised and ignored in most previous studies of the support. It highlights some practices and behaviours reported by women, including the significance of fan communities, and how women begin, develop and maintain their football fandom. It also shows that football clubs and authorities in England are failing in their efforts to promote the game to women as fans due to their lack of understanding of female fan experiences and practices, and I argue that this failure is because the sport is pervaded by a covert current of institutionalised sexism.

Please email Rachel Finch to book your place.