Chris Gaffney’s Temples of the Earthbound Gods led the FSF fall lineup, introducing a Latin Americanist geographer’s perspective to our group.

His book establishes the stadium as a unique analytical tool for understanding football, the city, and society. Temples is ambitious in its temporal and thematic scope, incorporating analysis on race, masculinity, and class in a comparative perspective.

Gaffney treated us to anecdotes from his experiences in Brazil and Argentina, including attending a particularly violent Sacachispas match in the Argentine fourth division. (See FSF Forum member David Keyes’s review of a documentary made on Sacachispas FC here) Questions touched on the structure of the book, using Chris’s stadium method elsewhere, and Argentine masculinity. Participants: David Keyes, David Roberts, Alex Galarza, Peter Alegi

Listen to an audio recording of the session here (for educational/personal use only).

We will be hosting Chris Gaffney on September 22nd to discuss his book, Temples of the Earthbound Gods.

Feel free to poke around the page as a few changes have been made to the menu and the schedule has been updated.

The 2010/2011 schedule for FSF has been posted on our new schedule page. The current lineup includes David Goldblatt, Laurent Dubois, and Chris Gaffney, we are very pleased to include them for the fall and spring. Over the course of the season we will be making an extra effort to keep everyone involved and contribute to the site. To do so, I would ask everyone to register, you will be sent an email to confirm and then can change your password from the default one to one of your choosing in your dashboard.

This will enable us all to contribute articles, stories, or media associated with the book or topic of the month. Additionally, we will be posting the recordings of past and future sessions in a members-only page. This is so that we can go back to reference the stimulating conversations we have and to avoid furiously scribbling notes when we would rather listen to our contributors.

We will also be asking for volunteers to write the wrap-up posts after every session from now on. This will be a simple 300 word summary of interesting topics or trends that came up in discussion for the frontpage of the website. I would also ask those of you with web expertise to make suggestions about our page, I am a rank amateur and would benefit tremendously from advice. We need your investment to grow our community and have a sustainable way of keeping this group fresh and exciting!

Congratulations to South Africa for hosting a memorable tournament, to Spain for winning it, and to Peter for providing a valuable piece of scholarship that will serve as a touchstone for years to come. Now it’s August, and as the club season begins anew we can all take our foolish hopes that this season will be different and channel them into a productive year!

FSF May was a grand success! We had a 90-minute discussion on Peter Alegi’s new book, African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World’s Game. Incidentally, it seems like Skype may be our connection of choice, as not too much was lost without video and the audio quality was excellent. Unfortunately, the recording failed. So it goes.

Thanks to Peter Alegi, John Turnbull, Andrew Guest, David Keyes, Jill Kelly, and Leslie Hadfield for their participation, and special thanks to Ben Dettmar for facilitating.

Please check back frequently at the website and feel free to send any interesting material you would like to share. I have added a number of new links and hope that this can be as much of a web forum is it is a place for discussing the books we choose.