Feminist Economics Football: A Cooperative Game, Glasgow 2021 and Sheffield 2022

Feminist Economic Football was first played at Cathkin Park, Glasgow in June 2021, devised in response to shifts in social and collaborative arts practice through the Covid pandemic. As the ways we had worked together began to feel impossible, we simultaneously saw profit making ventures and competitive sport prioritised as essential activity. I began to think about how we might reorganise our work in the form of a football match, and the idea for Feminist Economic Football was born. Developed with activist Sapna Agarwal, the work was then realised as a collaboration with artist and prop maker Mandy Roberts for Feminist Exchange Network in 2021 and commissioned for Sheffield DocFest 2022

A hexagonal pitch was marked out and three teams recruited but the rules of cooperative football collectively re-written. Our first cooperative feminist football match played between three teams: Degrowth, Decolonisation and Climate Action, was a playful way of looking at how a truly feminist approach to economics is intersectional. Team coaches worked with the players to look at the intersection of their struggles, strategising together to achieve common goals. As the teams collectively rewrote the rules, finding shared goals, they decided to get rid of team goalies and introduced a second ball into the final third of the match.

A further development of the work was commissioned by Sheffield DocFest 2022 and shown at Site gallery for their Alternate Realities programme. Feminist Economic Football presented the adjacent possibility of a world founded on cooperation. Team names were revised for the Sheffield match, this time being Decolonisation, Ecofeminism and The Caring Economy. In the final third of the match at Sheffield amphitheatre the three teams removed their team colours to play a wide game with three footballs, sharing skills and techniques.

Juliet Ellis film of Feminist Economics Football: A Co-operative Game for Sheffield was screened at Site Gallery, Sheffield and Glasgow Artists Moving Image Studio in 2022

Emma Bowen's short film of Feminist Economics Football: A Co-operative Game for Glasgow was screened at Glasgow Artists Moving Image Studio and CCA Glasgow in 2021 and can be watched in full here

More information on the work of Feminist Exchange Network is here
Feminist Exchange Network is a women-led* collective based in Glasgow, Scotland. We use social and activist art practices to explore ideas of feminist economics at local and inter-local levels
*inclusive of transgender and intersex women and other marginalised genders

Read more about Feminist Economics Football in Rewriting The Rules of The Game by Kate Samuels for Greater Govanhill magazine