UW NEWS

While soccer is the most popular sport globally, it wasn’t high on the list in Ron Krabill’s home state of Indiana. As a high schooler, Krabill’s soccer team often had to travel an hour and a half to find the nearest school with a team. Krabill still became a lifelong fan.

Now a professor in UW Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences and director of the Global Sport Lab in the UW Jackson School of International Studies, Krabill never imagined soccer would become part of his academic work until he found himself conducting research in South Africa in 2010 when the country hosted the World Cup. He’s been intertwining sport and academics ever since.

With Seattle scheduled to host World Cup games from June 15 to July 6, Krabill is gearing up to co-lead this year’s UW Summer Institute in the Arts & Humanities with Caley Cook, UW teaching professor of communication, and Yasir Zaidan, doctoral student in the UW Jackson School of International Studies. This year’s theme, Seattle’s World Cup: Storytelling Through Community Mapping, will combine community mapping with other methodologies, including photo and video essays and journalistic reporting, to tell stories about Seattle’s experience with the World Cup. 

The mapping technology was developed by Matthew Kelley, associate professor of Urban Studies at UW Tacoma. Kelley is the director of the Action Mapping Project, which works to engage issues of livability, equity, and voice in marginalized neighborhoods through the use of participatory data collection, spatial data analysis, mapping and data visualization.

UW News talked with Krabill about his plans for participating students, his background in sports scholarship, what he’ll be watching during Seattle’s tournament games and more.

When did your love of soccer and your academic work first intersect and how have you continued that work?

Ron Krabill: I lived and worked in South Africa on and off between 1996 and 2010 doing research on South African media, the late Apartheid Era and the media’s impact on anti-Apartheid politics. And then South Africa hosted the World Cup. I had been to two Women’s World Cups, but never before to a Men’s World Cup and I thought, “I can’t be in South Africa when this happens and not go.” It just felt too big and too important. It was a momentous thing for South Africa as a nation. 

A lot of debates were happening from the time South Africa was awarded the World Cup about whether it was going to be a good thing or a bad thing and what it meant. My academic work was concerned with a state putting a lot of money into feel-good projects when  it’s struggling to provide basic resources for its people. I wrote a piece around 2010 for Social Text, which is an academic journal that covers a wide range of social and cultural phenomena. The piece talked about the challenge for people who love soccer but also see all the problems with soccer, mega-events, the industry, and so on. In that piece, I also talked about loving South Africa, being deeply connected to South Africa and worrying about what the impact of the World Cup would be.

In 2010, I helped lead a UW study abroad program called My World Cup, which was funded in part by the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the UW, the Seattle Sounders and Cape Town Community Television. We paired our UW students with University of Cape Town film students and media activists from the Media Workers Alliance to put together short segments on the impact of the World Cup locally. We then aired those during the World Cup on Cape Town Community Television. 

After that, the UW León Center in Spain approached me and I proposed a class about the politics of soccer in Spain and beyond that addresses questions of gender, race, nationalism and migration. For this year’s World Cup, I wanted to create an immersive course much like the study abroad program — something that students can really sink their teeth into.

How will your students study the World Cup and Seattle as a host city?

RK: Matt Kelley developed the Action Mapping Project, a community mapping tool that we’re excited to use in the World Cup context. This tool will allow us to do both large and geographical analysis alongside more qualitative and traditional arts and humanities methods. We’ll be asking people outside the stadium, at fan zones and at watch parties to reflect on what stories Seattle tells about itself. How do their experiences in Seattle during the Cup — whether they’re from the area, elsewhere in the United States or an international visitor — relate to what they imagine Seattle to be? In other words, does their experience of World Cup Seattle match their expectations?

The first two weeks are going to be very intense. The games are only in town for three weeks and unfortunately, the first of those weeks is the break in between academic terms. So those first weeks, we’ll be introducing students to critical sport studies as a field and what it means to think about sports as a site of power and politics, at the same time as training them in research methods and fieldwork. 

Hopefully we’ll gather a lot of material to work with, and then we’ll have the rest of the summer to figure out what to do with it. The students will be working in collaborative research teams, looking at different angles of what it means for Seattle to host. They’ll work off whatever material they find really compelling. 

It will be tricky, because they’ll have to collect the data before they’ve decided exactly what they’re going to do with it. They won’t have had the theoretical background to really think about the meaning. That means the teaching team is going to have to be a little more direct about what kinds of research gathering we do on our field days. The first two weeks, we’ll have four pretty long field work days with students. We’re expecting to send teams of students out into different parts of the city and the region to see what the World Cup experience is like.

What are you most interested to observe in Seattle during those three weeks? 

RK: When South Africa hosted the World Cup in 2010, the vibe was incredible. It’s not really clear how much Seattle is going to embrace that vibe. Is the whole city going to be all about the World Cup? Because it was definitely like that in Cape Town. The Women’s World Cup in Paris wasn’t like that. You could have easily been in Paris and not had any idea what was going on. I don’t know where Seattle will land. There have also been a lot of stories about the hotel industry downgrading their expectations. The thing about the economic impact is that it’s often named as one big number, but it’s not always very clear where that money’s going and if it’s staying in the city.

People like to say that we should keep politics out of sports. But when we start talking about where the money is going to flow to, who’s going to be able to afford games,  or the pressures FIFA and the federal government is putting on local organizing committees, it’s not as hard for people to understand. We should be thinking about: What are the implications of this, and what are the actions that people can take to make it as beneficial as possible for the city and for the people who live in the city? How do you mitigate against the potential harms, and how do you take advantage of the potential benefits?

There is also a lot of evidence that the fan base is going to be more domestic and less international than expected from a World Cup, particularly because President Donald Trump’s stance on immigration will discourage a lot of people from traveling. I do think that’s going to impact Seattle more than most places because of our proximity to Canada. I think we would have had a lot of visitors, both from Canada and from other countries, because they could have gone to Vancouver and Seattle to see matches in both countries.

I’m also super interested in what the Pride Match will look like. The local organizing committee is super committed to having it. The Seattle committee is also taking really seriously their responsibility to think about what it means to have the U.S. play on Juneteenth. That’s an opportunity to educate a worldwide audience about what Juneteenth is and why it’s necessary as a holiday. 

I’m following Iran very closely, too. And not just because they’re coming to Seattle. I’m looking at what it means for modern society that two nations can be at war, and yet there is an expectation that one of them will travel to play in the other’s country in a tournament. The idea that that’s even a conversation says something about how detached we are in the United States from the idea of warfare. 

For more information, contact Krabill at rkrabill@uw.edu or globalsportlab@uw.edu.