Roxanne Bottomley
Write to play, play to write: Experimental writing and design activism in football contexts
Summary
Football is not just a game, to many it is their community and identity. Being a fan of a club provides a sense of belonging and shared cultural values. As such the sport creates a fantastic lens through which to investigate imbalance and injustice within our society. The pandemic has had a very public impact upon football and as such has further exposed intersectional inequalities affecting the players, fans and institutions. This practice based research aimed to show the way in which experimental writing, and its design, can interrogate and communicate these inequalities.
Additional info
The study is human-centred. It aims to provide ways in which to write underrepresented football fans and players into the sport. With this in mind it is important to collect rich qualitative data that tells these stories. Due to Covid-19 it was not possible for participatory methods to be carried out in person. Therefore the methods this study concentrated on were Autoethnography (Ettorre, 2016), in the form of diary writing as I write from the perspective of a fan and female amature football player, and Reflective Practice to reflect whilst designing ‘in action’ as a way of conversing with design and writing practices (Schön, 2017).
A key text which contributed to the feminist framing of this project is Fandom as Methodology (Grant and Love, 2019) which demonstrates, through a broad range of case studies, the power that fan practices have for social change - specifically from queer and feminist perspectives. I positioned myself within this research not only as instigator, creator and driver of the project but also as a fan. The dual position of design researcher and Football fan provides an original and productive research position.
