FOOTBALL SCHOLARS FORUM

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  • Fall Season Ends with Soccer Empire

    DuboisSoccerEmpireThe first year of FSF ended today in inspiring fashion with a discussion of Laurent Dubois’ Soccer Empire.

    Participants: Laurent Dubois, Peter Alegi, Alex Galarza, Andrew Guest, Steven Apostolov, and David Roberts.

    The audio of the discussion is available here. (For educational/personal use only.)

    Stay tuned for updates on the Spring lineup! We have had an excellent discussion over email about a session on the women’s game and will decide soon on materials and a date. We will also be doing our first FSF session en español when we discuss Frydenberg and Daskal’s Fútbol, Historia, y Política.

  • Halloween and Dubois

    Happy Halloween! This means that November is upon us and with it, Laurent Dubois’s Soccer Empire. Last month’s meeting was a spectacular success so I am looking forward to closing the Fall season with Laurent’s excellent book. The meeting is now Tuesday November 16th at 2pm, it was moved so that I can attend THATCamp in Chicago.

    THATCamp is a digital humanities ‘unconference’ where I will be discussing our  group and how to best foster its growing presence to aid our own research and provide a place to share ideas. I am happy to share that I received a $500 fellowship from the organizers to attend as well as participate in several ‘Bootcamps’ where I will learn a few new ‘hard tech skills’ in web design and coding.

    Be sure to acquire Laurent’s book ASAP as the third week of November is not too far away!

  • Packed House for Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round

    cover)BallIsRoundDavid Goldblatt—the Garrincha of Fútbology—attracted the largest crowd yet at the Football Scholars Forum.

    The event, the first of two dedicated to Goldblatt’s encyclopedic The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer, included discussion on globalization, politics and capital, and the role of the working class in football’s history. [Episode two is here.]

    Thanks are in order to David Goldblatt for sharing his insights and to everyone who participated, including Ben Dettmar, Gordon Stewart, Alejandro Gonzalez, Andrew Guest, Tom McCabe, Tim Vickery, Steven Apostolov, Laurent Dubois, Peter Alegi, and Alex Galarza.

    Listen to an audio recording of the conversation below (for educational/personal use only):

  • The Ball is Round!

    Our second session is on Wednesday October 20th,  at 2:15pm East Coast time. We are splitting The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer in two halves so in this meeting we are reading and discussing parts 1-3 (pp. 3-479).

    Part one: “Ancients and Moderns: Football and the Invention of Modern Sport, from the beginning to 1914”

    Part two: “The People’s Game: Football, Empire, and Industry 1870-1934”

    Part three: “The Beautiful Game: Football’s Short Twentieth Century, 1934-1974”

    Be sure to RSVP to participate via Skype.

    I also wanted to share that I have been accepted at THATCamp in Chicago next month, a conference on the digital humanities that brings together academics, librarians, and technology specialists to work collaboratively on individual projects. The Football Scholars Forum will be the ‘paper’ I give at the conference so I look forward to sharing the results after we end the Fall season with Laurent Dubois.

  • David Goldblatt podcasts – London School of Economics & BBC

    Check out October’s author over at the London School of Economics delivering a talk entitled: “This Sporting Planet: global sport and global capitalism”

    “Globalisation has seen sport achieve a hitherto unequalled global cultural significance, but it has also left it in thrall to capitalism. Will economic forces continue to shape sport?” Listen or download here

    Also check out his four part series on derbies for the BBC World Service Monday Documentary titled “The Power and the Passion”

  • Cape Town Stadium: Socializing Debt, Privatizing Profits

    Peter Alegi has written a follow-up to his 2007 and 2008 articles on South African stadium construction over on his blog. “Since PSL matches in Cape Town rarely draw more than a few thousand spectators, and rugby already has an excellent stadium at Newlands, local taxpayers must now shoulder the World Cup debt burden long into the future.”

    Full text: http://www.footballiscominghome.info/the-hosts/cape-town-stadium/

  • South American Stadiums with Chris Gaffney

    Chris Gaffney’s TemplesTemples 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).

  • Time and Stadium Stats

    September’s Football Scholars Forum will be held Wednesday the 22nd at 1pm US Eastern Time.

    Two links to pass on via Peter Alegi:

    http://www.worldstadiums.com/south_america/countries/brazil/rio_de_janeiro.shtml

    http://www.worldstadiums.com/south_america/countries/argentina.shtml

    Make sure you have emailed your skype name if you plan to participate on Wednesday!

  • Temples Materials

    A number of links to share as we warm-up for Chris Gaffney’s Temples of the Earthbound Gods on September 22nd:

  • Gaffney’s Temples Sept 22

    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.

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