Lassana Diarra issued a statement about the Paris attacks today. Here is the original. Below is a translation of the statement. “In the wake of the dramatic events that took place yesterday in Paris and Saint-Denis, it is with a heavy hard that I speak today. As you have perhaps read, I was personally touched… Read More »
Guest post by DeVon Thompson My name is DeVon, I am a soccer fan, a player and a hip-hop writer and blogger. I grew up in suburban America, a black girl who turned soccer at recess into a full-fledged childhood career with a local rec team. I was the quintessential suburban American soccer story, and… Read More »
I had the opportunity to help set up and edit and also contribute to a blog called “Upfront/Onside” set up at Sports Illustrated to cover the Women’s World Cup this summer in Canada. The blog brought together authors who had earlier gathered at the “Futures of Women’s Soccer” conference here at Duke in April. Here… Read More »
In 1978, Argentina hosted the World Cup in the midst of a period of tremendous political repression. Grant Farred’s book Long Distance Love tells this story, and reflects on what it means for the way we think about politics and football. More recently, this 2014 piece by Wright Thompson offers a remarkable account of the… Read More »
Christopher Gaffney’s book Temples of the Earthbound Gods offers us a rich geographical, culture, and ethnographic look at the way lives in Brazil and Argentina intersect with and our transformed by the space of stadia. What do you see as the most interesting contributions of this work? What kinds of theoretical approaches does he use… Read More »
Peter Alegi’s book African Soccerscapes offers a careful account of the place of football in colonial Africa and the important role in played in the process of decolonization. Alegi, a Professor at Michigan State University, also maintains a blog called Football is Coming Home, and recently wrote about the first African Nations Cup. This post… Read More »
That is the question posed in an excellent essay by Shireen Ahmen, whose blog Tales of a Hijabi Footballer is a must-read for those interested in the global politics of global football. It is published at Football is a Country, part of the Africa is a Country blog. The piece focuses on a recent incident… Read More »
A humorous reminder that there is something very strange about this game. Though, more recently, a series of philosophers have also shown that there are many ways to use soccer to think of what it is to be human.
This week I began teaching “Soccer Politics” here at Duke University for the third time. This blog will host the writings of students in the course in four different languages: English, French, German and Spanish. You can see the class readings here. On the first day of class we analyzed three bits of the visual… Read More »
This was my concluding piece, part of a series I wrote for the New Republic “Goal Posts” blog, on the World Cup: “… This World Cup—however we have lived it—has just taught us once again what it always does. Though we watch from many locations, separated from one another by distance, we are brought together… Read More »
