Course Syllabus
The Beautiful Game:Soccer in Contemporary Society and Culture |
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| Semester & Location: |
Spring 2024 - DIS Copenhagen |
| Type & Credits: |
Elective Course - 3 credits |
| Major Disciplines: |
History, Media Studies, Sociology |
| Prerequisite(s): |
None |
| Faculty Member: |
Andreas Brøgger (please contact via Canvas Inbox) |
| Time & Place: |
Tuesdays & Fridays, 13:15 - 14:35 in classroom N7-B13 |
Course Description
In recent decades soccer has grown into a highly profitable cultural spectacle with billions of followers across the globe. At the same time, the sport is now also emerging as a significant platform for social justice, and even the fight against climate change, breaking with centuries-long notions that sport and politics should not mix.
If soccer is more important than life and death, as one manager once famously claimed, how can we begin to understand the sport in all its complexity, with its historical and contemporary ties to local communities, national, and postcolonial identities? How have questions of gender, class, race, religion, and politics been negotiated in soccer throughout history?
What propelled the sport from an elite phenomenon in English public schools in the mid-1800s to a nearly world-spanning phenomenon already by the early 1900s? How did local play become serious global business?
What lies behind the sport’s ability to attract immense crowds and to bolster strong communities across generations? Wherein lies its seemingly magical ability to penetrate the everyday life of the individual fan? How can a remote soccer game without any direct impact, in a material sense, on the lives of its followers provoke such strong emotional states as joy, compassion, hate, even depression or ecstacy in so many?
In this course we will look at soccer through sociological and historical lenses as a reflection of society, both beautiful and ugly. We will trace its historical development in local communities and across national borders, and zoom in on the particular dynamics of the game to understand its attraction. We will include theories of games and play as they may provide clues as to why we play, why we watch, and the role of play in culture in general.
We will discuss the political dimension of soccer by unpacking how the sport has been used by powerful regimes to promote themselves and to control and please the masses, while present-day governing bodies in the sport in their turn have come under scrutiny for corruption, greed, and historical biases, yet continue to operate outside of much national or international control.
Within academia, the popularity of soccer has recently been reflected in an increasing amount of research and publications within a wide range of disciplines such as history, sociology, media studies, art history, psychology and neuroscience, computer science, economics, and business. These studies provide relevant perspectives on the sport, complementing countless news stories and celebratory auto-biographies of players and coaches, often co-authored or ghostwritten by journalists.
Alongside academic course readings and a variety of individual and group activities, works by artists, filmmakers and other creatives will be included in this course to see how these may contribute to our understanding of the sport.
Note:
There will be an optional Field Study on February 13 in the evening to see the Champions League Round of 16 game between FC Copenhagen and Manchester City at Parken National Stadium. Further information will be provided.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course you will be able to:
- understand how soccer has been shaped throughout history by cultural, political, and economic forces
- discuss the mutual influence of soccer and society today as the sport emerges as an important platform for political debate
- analyze how soccer has been reflected in media and the visual arts throughout its history
- gain an overview of the rules and particular game dynamics of soccer as well as the role and function of play and games in human interaction in general
Approach to Teaching
This course is for everyone, not only fans. You are not required to possess a knowledge of soccer to take this course, but I expect you to be eager to learn why soccer has conquered such a dominant position in the global entertainment landscape and in the cultural life of many societies. This course is for you if you are curious to see what we may find out about society, ourselves, and others, by studying this particular phenomenon.
Our main methods will be the combined lenses of sociology, history, and cultural studies, but you are welcome regardless of academic background. We will take the opportunity to learn from methods and perspectives that you bring as students from different disciplines as we tackle the course topics together in a collective learning experience. Along the way we will engage in creative experiments and simulations. Visual art, film, and current affairs will be introduced to open up discussions. Field studies will take us out of the classroom and into the stadium and into the streets to study soccer and its cultural imprint in various contexts.
Instructor
Andreas Brøgger, Program Director of European Humanities at DIS.
MA in Modern Culture Studies, University of Copenhagen. Executive Master of Public Governance, Copenhagen Business School. Visiting Scholar, Columbia University 1999-2000, and Otis College of Art and Design 2001. Lecturer, University of Copenhagen 2002-2005. Previously Curator and Director of Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center 2009-2018 where he curated the exhibition KICK OFF – Contemporary Art and Football, among many others. With DIS since 2018.
Readings
The following titles are examples of readings, not a complete list. All required and recommended readings will be posted on Canvas.
David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer, Riverhead, 2008
Richard Guilianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game, Polity, 1999
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens - A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Martino Fine Books, 2016 (1949)
Jean Williams, A Beautiful Game: International Perspectives on Women's Football, Berg Publishers, 2007
Gabriel Kuhn, Soccer vs. the State – Tackling Football and Radical Politics, PM Press, 2019 (2018)
Andrei Markovits, Women in American Soccer and European Football, Independently published, 2019
Christoph Biermann, Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution, Blink Publishing, 2019
Tony Collins, How Football Began – A Global History of How the World's Football Codes Were Born, Routledge, 2019
Daniel Haxall (ed.), Picturing the Beautiful Game, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018
Ted Richards, Soccer and Philosophy, Open Court, 2010
Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski, Soccernomics, 2018
Laurent Dubois, The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer, 2018
Academic Regulations
Please make sure to read the Academic Regulations on the DIS website. There you will find regulations on:
DIS - Study Abroad in Scandinavia - www.DISabroad.org
Course Summary:
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