Storytelling Centered Around the World Cup

This summer, undergraduate students participating in the Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities (SIAH) had the opportunity to experience the World Cup firsthand, from conducting fieldwork in downtown Seattle to playing pickup soccer games. Students used innovative community mapping alongside other arts and humanities methodologies to craft stories surrounding Seattle’s place-based experience of the World Cup, exploring how the World Cup created meaning — personal, cultural, and political — as a once-in-a-lifetime Seattle event.

In this video, Arts & Sciences students Lucas Mejia (senior, Psychology) and Demi Clark (junior, Anthropology and Communication: Journalism and Public Interest) take us through their research projects — what they’ve learned, how they conducted their research, and what the World Cup experience was like for them. They also explain some of the broader political and cultural questions that swirled around the tournament.