Football plays a key role in the experience of Latin America and of Latin Americans, be this as a daily practice, as a means of constructing communities or as a mode of engagement with local initiatives or national narratives. Such issues have received increased amounts of academic attention in recent years, while recent sporting mega-events in Brazil that involved football (2013 Confederations Cup, 2014 men's World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games) ensured unprecedented levels of coverage for the region in the mass media. Overwhelmingly, however, the focus has been on men's football and on football as a male domain. The objective of this project is to explore the ways in which women and girls take part in football, both as players and spectators, as well as the ways in which that participation is mediated via written and visual texts. As a result, it seeks to provide new understandings of the role that football (and sport more widely) plays in development issues for all citizens of Latin America, especially in relation to issues of inequality, inclusion and empowerment.
The relationship between football and international development has blossomed since the United Nations declared 2005 to be the International Year of Sport and Physical Education, the same year seeing a statement from the UK government's Minister for Culture, Media and Sport that affirmed that 'sport can be used to tackle many of the problems afflicting the developing world'. The appointment in 2008 of Wilfried Lemke as Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General on Sport for Development and Peace generated further momentum in this field, and the important role of sport in international development was confirmed at the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly (September 2015), which set forth the outcomes for adoption of the post-2015 development agenda and identified the position of sport as a means to achieving the sustainable development goals. This project will be the first to undertake research into the ways in which this convergence manifests itself in Latin America, with broader implications for other regions.
One of the central aims of the research is to analyse the experience of women and girls as practitioners of football, drawing on expertise in anthropology and ethnography (led by Moreira) and the history of physical exercise (led by Goellner). At the same time, a study of textual and visual representations of their participation, as well as the frameworks within which these are represented to national and international audiences, will draw on expertise in cultural history and textual analysis (led by Goellner and Wood). By combining such interdisciplinary perspectives, this research will drive at questions of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls (SDG 5), the reduction of inequality (SDG 10), as well as good health and well-being (SDG 3). This will be achieved through an international partnership that brings together actors from a range of sectors (SDG 17).
The outcomes of this research will have benefits for women and girls in terms of highlighting obstacles to their equal engagement with football as an important site for personal well-being and for inclusion in (or exclusion from) important national narratives. The research will also benefit communities more widely in reducing inequality. Findings of the research will result in a series of recommendations for local and national sports organisations with a view to improving equality of opportunity and of representation for women and girls. While these will be most immediately applicable to the countries in which the research will be based, they have considerable potential to be more widely applicable in Latin America and beyond.

South America’s public fascination with football, which has over the last century been closely aligned to the development of questions of identity and participation in notions of nationhood, provides unique opportunities to engage broad sectors of society and to question long-standing development issues. Several governments and NGOs across the region have identified this potential and the network’s activities will build on this situation. In a region where intellectual agendas and political matters – broadly understood – are closely entwined, the visibility of fútbol femenino/ futebol femenino in prestigious institutions will make an important contribution towards normalising it as a practice and subject of debate.
In addition to the substantial benefits that academic collaborators will experience as a result of their participation in the network , ensuring that the activities of the network achieve an impact well beyond the university sector is central to this project. Indeed, this principle is embedded in several of the key aims of the network, into the structure of each network event and into the anticipated outputs .