Feminist Economics Football: A Cooperative Game
Feminist Economics Football: A Cooperative Game, Glasgow 2021 and Sheffield 2022
The first match of Feminist Economic Football: A Cooperative Game was played in June 2021 in Glasgow, created by Ailie Rutherford, Mandy Roberts and Sapna Agarwal for Feminist Exchange Network
This participatory artwork was created quickly and spontaneously 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, throughout the pandemic we quickly saw profit making ventures and competitive sport prioritised as essential activity. We began to think about how we might reorganise our work in the form of a football match, and the idea for Feminist Economic Football: A Cooperative Game was born. A hexagonal pitch was marked out and three teams recruited but the rules collectively re-written. This 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 can’t function without all of these aspects intersecting.
A further development of the work was commissioned by Sheffield DocFest 2022 for their Alternate Realities programme. Feminist Economic Football presented the adjacent possibility of a world founded on cooperation, where we work together to create a socially and environmentally just society founded on the core principles of feminist economics: a process centred on the love of people not profit. Team names were revised for the Sheffield match, this time being Decolonisation, Ecofeminism and The Caring Economy. Team coaches worked with their teams to look at the intersection of these struggles and how we might work together to acheive common goals.
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
Mandy Roberts 
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