The final event in this year's Footnotes series of seminars takes place on Thursday 3 April 2025...
In a joint-project between the University of Cambridge and Cambridge United FC, Footnotes: The Writing of Football seminar series, has brought four speakers to the city in 2025 to explore, examine and dissect the writing behind the beautiful game.
Adam Hurrey of Football Cliches, Professor Joseph Webster of the University of Cambridge and award-winning football journalist, Henry Winter have all already taken to the stage, and next up is Dr Pete Watson, Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Leeds.
Dr Watson has written and researched on football in South America for over a decade with a focus on the Colombian context. He joins us for this event to discuss womens football in Colombia as a nation building tool.
Over the last dozen years, Colombia has turned to football as a potent source of unifying narratives for the nation. Domestically, the aim has been to construct a greater sense of a collective, integrative national identity built around sporting success; internationally, the objective is to reinvent Colombia’s negative image though ‘positive’ appearances and performances in global sporting events.
This talk focuses on how Colombian women footballers, through their sporting exploits and struggles up to and including the Women’s World Cup 2023, managed to fill a void of sporting narratives of nation, created due to the men’s failure to qualify for the 2022 World.
In doing so, they have uncovered feminist concerns that go beyond purely sporting interests, and are changing imaginaries around gender in Colombia. Additionally, the unprecedented national visibility of the Selección Femenina (the so-called Superpoderosas, or Superpowerful ones) has allowed new meanings to be attached to the game through the construction and framing of the team and its star player, Linda Caicedo.
The event takes place on Thursday 3 April (6pm) at the Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, Pheonix Building, New Museums Site, CB2 3RF.
Tickets are free and can be secured by clicking here.