Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Allez Les Bleus/Cherchez Les Femmes: A Cool Interview with Lilian Thuram

Check out this interview with Lilian Thuram, conducted by Pierce Freelon via Blackademics. I stumbled onto this exploring the website generated by Professor Lauren Dubois's course on World Cup politics. Amazingly, Thuram was in residence at Duke as a part of this course. 



Cheers to Blackademics.  And Dubois's course site is really neat, but it looks like the class could have done a lot more vis a vis women.

Given the smart, politically engaged interviews Thuram offers, I wish someone would ask him about recent campaigns regarding homophobia, or, even better, I wish someone would raise the issue of Eudy Simelane's murder to ask if male footballers had thought about working with FIFA around the South Africa World Cup to make some sort of statement against the sexist and homophobic violence directed against black lesbians there.  But, hey, that's moi, asking for la lune.

3 comments:

  1. JenDecember 31, 2009 at 7:45 PM

    wow. dream class. i wrote a paper on the 2010 world cup for a global development seminar and tried sneaking some sort of soccer discussion into class one day. lucky for me my professor was a huge real madrid fan and let me go on and on while no one else knew what the hell i was going on about.

    if only i could have had every class meeting like that.

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  2. AnonymousJanuary 2, 2010 at 2:37 PM

    Dear Jennifer: This is a great blog; thanks for this link to our site! I'll put up a perma-link on ours as the material here is great.

    In the class we did actually have a fair amount on women's soccer, though probably not enough. Carla Overbeck and Cindy Parlow came to class, along with Duke women's coach Robbie Church, and we also watched the film Offside.

    Some of the students produced a web page on women's soccer in the U.S., and another did a very detailed one on women's soccer in the Muslim world:

    http://blogs-dev.oit.duke.edu/wcwp/research-projects/middle-east/muslim-women-in-sport/

    Regarding the end of your post, one of our students also posted a nice post a few months back about homophobia and sport:

    http://blogs-dev.oit.duke.edu/wcwp/2009/10/21/soccer-and-homophobia/

    Thanks again,

    -- Laurent Dubois

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  3. Jennifer DoyleJanuary 2, 2010 at 10:14 PM

    Fantastic Laurent - I super glad to be in touch with you - I can't wait to read your book.

    I love that interview, and all that it suggests about your students' energy. The course website is inspiring, I've been meditating on a course on "soccer at home and abroad" - hope to get that off the ground in the next year or two!

    Let's keep in touch - do let me know if you are ever in the LA area.

    ReplyDelete

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