A Revista Ponto Urbe (ISSN 1981-3341) é um periódico acadêmico, online, plurilíngue, anual e gratuito organizado pelo Laboratório do Núcleo de Antropologia Urbana (LAbNAU-USP) e vinculado ao Departamento de Antropologia da Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil. Criado em 2007, o periódico objetiva incentivar a circulação do conhecimento científico no campo da Antropologia Urbana em diálogo com os debates antropológicos mais amplos. A Ponto Urbe tem como missão editorial proporcionar um espaço de difusão da produção acadêmica inédita realizada por pesquisadores(as) de diferentes graus de formação, regiões e instituições do país e do exterior. A Ponto Urbe dispõe das seguintes seções: Artigos, Dossiês Temáticos, Cir-kula (voltada a artigos de outras disciplinas que dialogam com a Antropologia Urbana), Traduções (de textos raros ou atuais, não disponíveis em português), Entrevistas (com pesquisadores(as) referência na Antropologia Brasileira) e Etnográficas (relatos de campo resultados de pesquisas em andamento). As submissões são recebidas e publicadas em fluxo contínuo após a revisão por pares do tipo duplo-cego.
Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas
Between fields, streets, and parties: ethnographies of contemporary urban life
Volume 33 of Ponto Urbe magazine brings together contributions to anthropological debates on cities, circulation, arts and festivities, sports, politics, and everyday life. This edition features nine texts in the Articles section, which address important topics on the contemporary public agenda. In addition, there is an article in the Cir-Kula section; four Photo Essays; an Interview; four articles in the Ethnographic section; two Translations; and two beautiful Dossiers. The first of these, “Soccer as a sociocultural phenomenon: ethnographic analyses and contemporary reflections,” is organized by Mariane Pisani and Caroline Soares de Almeida. The second dossier was organized by Giancarlo Machado and Enrico Spaggiari and is entitled “Ethnographies of the August Festivals: a collective research experiment in Montes Claros/MG.” This is our first single annual volume, published in continuous flow, a new publication format for Ponto Urbe magazine.
Copyright (c) 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Urban Pedagogy of the Festas de Agosto: Between the Sky of Ribbons and the Ground of Fences
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the 2024 Festas de Agosto in Montes Claros, Brazil, this paper examines how the city center becomes an educational space, revealing the urban pedagogies that emerge from festive practices. Between the shimmer of ribbons and the steel of fences, Praça da Matriz turns into a laboratory for learning coexistence, belonging, and exclusion. By contrasting José Guilherme Magnani’s observations with recent field notes, the study highlights the shift from a precarious square inhabited by the vulnerable to a revitalized, beautified, and surveilled urban landscape. This new configuration, shaped by an aesthetic of control, reflects what Adela Cortina calls aporophobia, while the festival temporarily reclaims the right to stay and to share the commons. The city thus appears as a symbolic field where both discipline and resistance are learned.
Dossiê "Etnografias das Festas de Agosto: experimento de pesquisa coletiva em Montes Claros/MG"
Copyright (c) 2025 Nayara Alvim Machado https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Spectacularization of Culture and Heritage in the Festas de Agosto of Montes Claros, Minas Gerais
This ethnographic report examines the activities of one of the nights of the August Festivities in Montes Claros (MG), focusing mainly on those concentrated in Praça Dr. Chaves and Corredor Cultural Padre Dudu. Its aim is to highlight different facets of the city’s main cultural event and the contradictions surrounding its tangible and intangible heritage. In the interplay that unfolds during the festivities—where influence and power are unequally distributed—the spectacle of culture prevails, selectively manipulating heritage to favor consumption and the promotion of the city’s image. What is lost are the traditional knowledge and practices, painstakingly maintained and sustained by the willpower and passion of the members of the Catopês, Marujos, Caboclinhos, and folkloric groups.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mariana Fernandes Teixeira, Renan Lucas de Oliveira Sá https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
From the city to networks, sociabilities and urban virtualities: a digital ethnographic journey through the Festas de Agosto
The Festas de Agosto in Montes Claros, Minas Gerais, hold a central place in the city’s popular imagination and foundational history, continually renewing—through folklore and popular celebration—the symbols that shape the identity and sense of belonging of its people. This festivity allows tradition and modernity to intertwine across generations in a celebration that is at once religious, profane, popular, and convergent. This text proposes a reflection on social networks as pivotal modes of presence—that is, as records of participation, catharsis, and circumscription that are physically encoded and virtually decoded. To this end, it follows the observational path of the 2023 edition of the festivities during their opening night on Friday, highlighting the investigative procedures and the movements of reflection, analysis, and engagement of the Festas de Agosto within, of, and through the network.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gustavo Souza Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Under the Mast of the Holy Spirit: A Night of Colors and Rhythms in the Santa Lúcia Neighborhood
This text is a narrative synthesis of the perspectives, interests, and writing styles—both individual and complementary—of three researchers who, during the 2023 August Festivities in Montes Claros, sought to grasp the multiple layers and meanings of an event marked by different temporalities, forms of sociability, and experiences of urban life. More than a mere backdrop, the city—understood here also through its small multiplicities—is a constitutive dimension of the festivity, as revealed by the fieldwork that followed, over the course of one night, a specific ethnographic context: the Mastro do Divino Espírito Santo in the Santa Lúcia neighborhood (Montes Claros, MG).
Copyright (c) 2025 Priscila Dias Alkimim, Fabio Luiz Pimentel, Enrico Spaggiari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Between Ribbons and Mirrored Sunglasses: the Presence of Young Black Men in the Catopês Procession in Montes Claros/MG
This ethnographic account describes an activity of the 2023 Festas de Agosto in Montes Claros, MG: the procession of the Catopês, Marujos, and Caboclinhos groups, which departed from Praça Dr. João Alves, proceeded through the city center, and culminated at the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. The analysis focuses on urban and festive dynamics through the temporality of the groups, with particular emphasis on the corporeality of the young Black men who make up the marujada. The text is accompanied by an ethnophotographic essay by the author, illustrating elements observed in the field and opening space for reflections on race, identity, and culture.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alice Ferreira dos Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Behind the Colorful Ribbons: the Festas de Agosto in Montes Claros/MG
This ethnographic report, the result of fieldwork conducted during the 2023 August Festivities in Montes Claros (MG), explores the cultural and religious aspects of celebrations rooted in African, European, and Indigenous heritage, expressed by the Catopês, Marujos, and Caboclinhos groups, and complemented by a Folk Festival featuring local art, music, and cuisine. The report focuses primarily on a dissident and unofficial group, the Second Terno of São Benedito, highlighting the dynamic interaction between tradition and modernity, as the urban space is transformed into a vibrant stage for cultural expression. The August Festivities thus emerge as a microcosm of the city’s social, economic, and political struggles, reflecting the capacity of cultural traditions to shape and be shaped by the contemporary urban environment.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Letícia Chaves Santos, Adna Tayane Rocha Gusmão, Priscila Dias Alkimim https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Urban dynamics in a city of ribbons: the Thursday of the Festas de Agosto
The text presents ethnographic reports from the first day of the August Festivities in Montes Claros (MG), an important cultural event in the city that mobilizes a wide range of symbols and meanings to be observed. Although the urban dynamics on this day appeared less intense and effervescent, it proved to be an enriching moment for observing the cultural practices of a city that, during the festivities, dances to the rhythm of its traditions, creating a symphony of ribbons, colors, and flavors. The coexistence of the contemporary and the ancestral emerges as a vital link for the survival and continual renewal of the cultural richness of the August celebrations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Júnio Matheus da Silva Cruz, Lucas Iglesias Teixeira, Vitória Dreide Xavier Araújo Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Circuit of tradition: the Festas de Agosto from the perspective of the Morrinhos neighborhood in Montes Claros, Brazil
This text, based on the articulation of several ethnographic reports, describes observations made during an evening in the Morrinhos neighborhood, where the “Mastro de São Benedito” festival took place as part of the August Festivities of Montes Claros, Minas Gerais. Morrinhos has a direct and organic connection with the Catopês Movement, as it is the home neighborhood of many members and hosts the headquarters of the Association of Catopês, Marujos, and Caboclinhos. Therefore, the fieldwork aimed to understand how the cultural manifestations of the festival occur in areas farther from the city center, particularly at the neighborhood scale and within its daily life, examining the spatial dynamics, routes, and social relations that shape a celebration integrated into the broader circuit of the August Festivities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcelo Brito, Isabela Veloso Lopes Versiani, Mariana Fernandes Teixeira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Ethnographies of the Festas de Agosto: A Collective Research Experiment in Montes Claros, Brazil
The dossier “Ethnographies of the Festas de Agosto: A Collective Research Experiment in Montes Claros, Brazil” presents the results of a collective ethnography conducted by Citadino – the Interdisciplinary Center for Urban Themes at the State University of Montes Claros (Unimontes) during the Festas de Agosto and the Folkloric Festival in this northern Minas Gerais municipality. The aim was to understand how citadinidade—urban ways of living—manifests itself in celebratory contexts in which religious and cultural traditions—processions, masses, artistic performances, and gastronomic activities—reconfigure spaces and sociabilities. The reports highlight the interaction between tradition and modernity, showing that the Festas de Agosto not only preserve cultural heritage but also generate creative ways of inhabiting and contesting the city.
An ethnography of voting queues in Cape Town: memory, frustration, and hope in 30 years of democracy
This article presents an ethnographic account of fieldwork conducted in voting queues during the 2024 national elections in Cape Town, South Africa, the year in which the country’s democracy marked its 30th anniversary. Since the first democratic election, in 1994, the African National Congress (ANC), Nelson Mandela’s party, had secured the majority of votes. This time, the possible loss of this hegemony circulated widely in public debate. Interviews with people standing in voting queues reveal different points of view, forming a mosaic of local impressions about this election and, more broadly, about the country’s democracy. Memory, frustration, and hope run through the narratives of people from different generations and with diverse racial and gender affiliations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luana Piveta de Moura Luz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
"I had to humble myself and cry to get it! To them, it seems like you don't want to see your child": managing presence in incarcerated motherhood
Many women who experience the prison system—inmates, survivors of incarceration, or family members—negotiate the presence of their children on a daily basis. In this process, they articulate relationships with various actors: the State; the family, often responsible for the child's custody; and the prison environment's own actors. Motherhood in prison exemplifies how mothering is reconfigured before, during, and after incarceration, exposing fissures in the prison structure that allow for the production of presence. Janete's (interlocutor) story illustrates these rearrangements: by "entering crime," she transfers the care of her daughter to her mother; imprisoned, she faces barriers to maintaining the bond, such as the mother's resistance to taking the girl to see her. Through "elements of co-presence"—such as video calls and visitation room—and (im)possible arrangements, she demonstrates that, despite the prison system's impositions of control, punishment, and surveillance, the articulations made "on the margins" are subversive and powerful.
Copyright (c) 2025 Milena Novais Oliveira Silva, José Miguel Nieto Olivar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Apresentação do dossiê. O futebol como um fenômeno sociocultural: análises etnográficas e reflexões contemporâneas
O dossiê "O futebol como um fenômeno sociocultural: análises etnográficas e reflexões contemporâneas", publicado na Ponto Urbe, reúne 14 artigos e uma entrevista que tratam o futebol para além da dimensão esportiva, enfatizando seu caráter simbólico, político e afetivo. Ancoradas em abordagens etnográficas, as contribuições exploram experiências de jogadores(as), torcedores(as), coletivos, clubes e comunidades diversas. O dossiê se organiza em sete eixos: Memória, Identidade e Torcida; Gênero e Sexualidades; Política, Resistência e Ativismo nas Arquibancadas; Tecnologias, Sons e Mediações no Futebol; Formação e Dinâmicas Internas do Futebol Profissional; Reflexões Conceituais e Teóricas sobre Futebol e Sociedade; e uma Entrevista final. A diversidade de perspectivas reflete o compromisso do INCT Estudos do Futebol Brasileiro com a ampliação e circulação de pesquisas interdisciplinares. O dossiê, fruto de expressiva adesão acadêmica, destaca o crescimento da participação das mulhers na produção científica sobre o tema e reafirma o futebol como campo fértil para a antropologia e para debates críticos na América Latina.
Dossiê "O futebol como um fenômeno sociocultural: análises etnográficas e reflexões contemporâneas"
Field mode and Zen mode – a get together with José Guilherme Magnani
Interview with José Guilherme Magnani, conducted by his former advisees Luiz Henrique de Toledo, Silvana de Souza Nascimento and Ana Letícia de Fiori. The group chatted about Magnani’s formative and professional trajectory, former and current projects with his colleagues and advisees and his relation with religiosity and Zen.
Copyright (c) 2025 José Guilherme Cantor Magnani, Ana Letícia de Fiori, Silvana de Souza Nascimento, Luiz Henrique de Toledo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
To Be and to Exist on the Streets: between Visibility and the Denial of Rights
This visual essay emerges from walks and observations carried out in the central region of São Paulo during the first part of 2025, revealing the socio-spatial tensions that permeate the city center, marked by real estate speculation and the exhaustion of residents in situations of vulnerability. The city, which should welcome, connect, and protect, instead produces exclusions and invisibilities. The street, transformed into a stage of dispute and resistance, unveils an unequal choreography of being and existing.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucas Pamio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Ethnography of Slams in São Paulo: performing bodies in the diaspora from the edge to the centre
This ethnographic report aims to follow the author's trajectory as she follows the São Paulo poetry slam circuit during the years 2023 and 2024, as well as the World Poetry Slam Championship event held in October 2023 in Rio de Janeiro. This ethnography mixes analyses of Urban Anthropology and Expressive Forms in an attempt to elucidate how the performances of the different poetic bodies are marked by the city(ies) and create a literary movement focused on orality. There is also an effort to demonstrate the need to use concepts by researcher Leda Maria Martins, such as encruzilhada and oralitura, to understand the complexity of the constantly growing field in São Paulo and around the world.
Copyright (c) 2025 Victoria Gebara https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Profile of black directors in Brazilian audiovisual industry
This paper constructs a profile of Black directors in contemporary Brazilian audiovisual production based on an exploratory methodology. The text is based on several sources, such as websites and festival catalogs, to identify professionals who were active between 2009 and 2020. We chose Audiovisual production because it is a field of social representation that privileges white people over black people, according to scholarship on the field. After compiling the profiles, we investigated which group attributes influence the likelihood of directing a feature film, the most valued format in the cinematographic field. To this end, we developed a logistic regression model to test the effect of independent variables on the dependent variable “directed a feature film.” Based on the analysis of the results, we infer that increased experience improves the chances of directing a feature. Additionally, men are more likely than women to direct a feature film.
Copyright (c) 2025 Arthur Arantes Souza, Cláudio Santiago Dias Júnior, Lucas Caetano Pereira de Oliveira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“A City Within the City": socio-spatial relations at the Plano Piloto Bus Station
This work proposes an ethnographic reflection on Brasília's Plano Piloto Bus Station, articulating the social and symbolic dynamics present in this central urban space. Based on field observations and visual recordings, the research shows how the Bus Station functions as a point of convergence and transit for multiple territorialities, crossing socio-economic inequalities and diverse uses of public space. The study problematizes Brasília's modernist urban project, which sought to segregate flows and functions, contrasting it with the daily social vitality that reframes the Bus Station as a space for coexistence, resistance and the informal economy. The conclusion is that, more than just a crossing point, the Rodoviária is a living urban territory, crossed by disputes and reinventions that tension the rationality of official planning.
Copyright (c) 2025 Francisca Raquel de Oliveira Temoteo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Dance and urban space: salsa in Rio de Janeiro
The Caribbean rhythm of salsa is widespread in Rio de Janeiro, through various events organized in dança de salãoacademies, nightclubs, along the beach, and cultural centers. Thus, examining the intense sociability around salsa helps us understand the heterogeneity and hierarchies of urban life. This text aims to identify connections between spaces dedicated to salsa dancing in Rio de Janeiro, based on ethnographic extracts from two distinct moments in a region that has been the object of repeated preservationist narratives. I describe itineraries and interactions, showing how the multiple meanings of dance are linked to the production of urban spaces. I also reflect on how the social markers inscribed on the researcher's body shape these interactions. The text assumes that attention to perceptive and sensitive modalities such as dance provides contextualized knowledge about interventions in urban spaces.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Pilar Cabanzo-Chaparro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Flâneuse in the neighborhood: moralities, negotiations, and conflicts in the public squares of Viçosa/MG
This paper views public squares as spaces of both coexistence and conflict, where the hierarchies present express their ambiguity. It analyzes the usage of four squares in Viçosa, Minas Gerais, located between the center and the periphery, understanding that although these spaces are permeated by implicit rules that define who can occupy them and under what circumstances, although they are designed for democratic experiences. These rules express symbolic boundaries, which, also constructed by gender, age, race, and class, make the squares segregated spaces. Through a reflection on the right to the city, the article analyzes rules and subversions in public spaces. In this process, it concludes that reimagining uses and challenging rules is also a way of producing the city, promoting new forms of sociability and collaboration, especially through resistance techniques such as the flâneuse’s path.
Copyright (c) 2025 Vitória Marcelle Lima Guimarães https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Technoconservatism, political extremism and young people identified as MGTOW who participate in gamer communities in Brazil
The article proposes an investigation about the circulation of technoconservative discourses with masculinist bias that are produced and disseminated in gamer communities in Brazil. Through an analysis of the profile of young contemporaries identified as MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), we sought to understand their relationship with radicalization processes, polarization and political extremism currently operated in several profiles of different digital platforms, fostering hate speech, supported by misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, but driven by an articulation of theoretical references anchored in scholastic thinking, neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology. From the observation of posts in the gamer forum Outer Space, the study identified the production and dissemination of a diversity of discourses with anti-feminist contents, which vehemently reject marriage and family law, relentless criticism of both progressivism and the belief in the existence of a hypergamic human nature associated with women, as well as the female gender. The research was carried out from the adoption of ethnographic procedures applied to digital platforms, also conducted by the lurker (peeping) technique, aiming to understand how young people identified as MGTOW use discursive strategies that reinforce male victimisation and the reversal of gender oppressions, promoting a reactive vision to social changes. Moreover, the gamer culture, historically dominated by a competitive male identity, presents itself as a fertile ground for the dissemination of this type of extremist content, especially in a context of resistance to diversity in the gaming industry. The study shows how digital spaces can catalyze extremist discourses, emphasizing the need to understand the impacts of this technoconservative subjectivation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giovane Matheus Camargo, Marcelo Bordin, Pablo Ornelas Rosa, Maria Cristina Dadalto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Ex-home: voids and ruins of Barcelona's renovation
This visual essay reflects on the process of ruination and infrastructural destruction put into practice in urban renewal projects. Known as the "Barcelona model", the practice of strategic planning promises to "renew" the uses of historical, port and/or industrial neighborhoods considered "degraded" and "empty", however composing a process of "letting die" old properties that are bought and demolished to build new condominiums and shopping centers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Clara Chequetti da Rocha Duarte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Beyond Participant Observation: Collaborative Ethnography asTheoretical Innovation
Portuguese translation of the article RAPPAPORT, Joanne. “Beyond Participant Observation: Collaborative Ethnography as Theoretical Innovation”, University of Nebraska Press: Collaborative Anthropologies, v.1, 2008, p. 1-31. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/367015
Copyright (c) 2025 Joanne Rappaport; Renata Albuquerque https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Entre materialidades, histórias e afetos: a casa de dona “Nanzinha” em Lagoa de Fora, São Raimundo Nonato, Piauí
O ensaio visual sobre a Casa de Dona “Nanzinha” é uma imersão na materialidade e na dimensão afetiva de um espaço que transcende sua função habitacional para se tornar um símbolo de memória local. O recorte teórico/metodológico utilizado pelo estudo arqueológico, realizado em 2023, permite entrever os processos de formação territorial e de ocupação humana na comunidade Lagoa de Fora, zona rural de São Raimundo Nonato, sudeste do estado do Piauí, ao mesmo tempo em que resgata as transformações arquitetônicas da residência e suas implicações sociais.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nailton Negreiros Ribeiro, Vanessa Linke, Tamires Alves de Negreiros , Edna Paula de Negreiros Paes, Henrique Alcantara e Silva, Samara Sandra de Negreiros Paes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Gender of the Ball: football and power in Brazil and Argentina
This article analyzes how power relations in football are shaped by gender and sexuality and how this construction impacts the sport in Brazil and Argentina. The research is based on a theoretical review and ethnographic data collected in two distinct periods: between 2013 and 2018 in Brazil and between 2024 and 2025 in Argentina, with a focus on the La Nuestra Fútbol Feminista collective. The results indicate that women's football has historically been marked by exclusions and disputes, revealing deep intersections between gender, sexuality, and power. The concept of gênero da bola (PISANI, 2018) demonstrates how heteronormativity structures relationships in football, regulating who can play and under what conditions. The article concludes that feminist football emerges as a strategy of resistance and social transformation, reconfiguring the dynamics of the sport and expanding the struggle for recognition, equity, and visibility in the football field.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mariane da Silva Pisani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Hostile Festivity: Music and Emotions in the Popular Crowd
This article contributes to the anthropological studies on sport by presenting a theoretical proposal to understand the aspects that make up the festivities for organised supporters, especially those who define themselves as barras in Southern Brazil. To that end, the proposal recovers the consistent literature on the subject and proposes new developments based on anthropological propositions fostered from the studies of music, emotions and economic anthropology. The case in question involves the Guarda Popular supporters of SC Internacional from Porto Alegre, Southern Brazil. The hypothesis suggested to understand the actions of this and of other fans suggests that their definitions of festivity in football include both support for and criticism of the club. The proposed notion of a ‘hostile festivity’ describes the music/warfare performances that must always be hostile to the opponents and, eventually, also to the club's managers and players.
Copyright (c) 2025 Vinícius Teixeira Pinto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Dykes, socks, and cleats: gender, sexuality, and territoriality in women's futsal in São Raimundo Nonato, PI, BRA
This article ehtnographies women's futsal in São Raimundo Nonato, Piauí, as a space where sociability, dissident gender performances, and negotiations of desire intersect. Using an ethnographic approach, it analyzes how tournaments function as mobile territories of encounter for lesbian and bisexual women, compensating for the lack of LGBTQIAPN+ spaces in the city. The article discusses the territoriality of futsal and its connection to the marginalization of lesbian presence in urban spaces.
Copyright (c) 2025 João Victtor Gomes Varjão, Anderson Eduardo Araújo de Lima https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Notes on Training in the Field: The First Movements of Young Footballers in Professional Club Youth Categories
This article analyzes the different phases of sports training for young footballers in the youth categories of professional clubs, focusing on the initial stages of opportunity, detection, and selection, as well as the subjective criteria used by training agents to identify talents. Based on various documentary sources, systematic observations, and interviews with youth coordinators and coaches from professional clubs, as well as with families of athletes who were part of the youth categories of one of the investigated teams between 2018 and 2019, the study reveals that the training process is not linear, being influenced by relationship networks and formal teaching and training contexts, such as football schools, futsal academies, and social projects. Additionally, it highlights the challenges of professional reconversion for athletes who do not progress through the initial stages, as well as the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on training dynamics and sports management in recent years. Finally, the study emphasizes the importance of family support networks and alternative strategies for the continuity of these young athletes' careers, whether within or beyond the football field.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucas Barreto Klein, Jaison José Bassani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Female and Feminist Associative Movements in Football in Brazil and Argentina: Main Dilemmas and Perspectives of Their Collective Actions
Fan associativism in professional football has undergone significant transformations in the 2000s with the creation of collectives and federations seeking equity and equality. Fan activism has thus entered public arenas, establishing political mediations, formulating demands, and producing documents to guide their actions, while seeking government interlocutors and social recognition for their demands. In Brazil, the Movimento Mulheres de Arquibancada (2017) and the Movimento Feminino de Arquibancada (2019) are unprecedented initiatives in the country addressing harassment and sexism. On the other hand, the Coordinadora sin Fronteras del Fútbol Feminista in Argentina, which emerged in 2018, serves as a space for articulation, visibility, promotion, and denunciation of various obstacles and problems faced by women and LGBTIQ+ individuals. This article aims to present their characteristics, discuss meanings, impacts, dilemmas, and main perspectives of the collective actions of these associations in the public sphere within the debates on the rights of female football fans.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rosana da Câmara Teixeira, Ver´´onica Moreira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Being an athlete is not being a partygoers. Coaches and athletes in women's soccer in São Paulo.
This article aims to discuss the production and training of athletes in women's soccer in São Paulo, based on an ethnography carried out with a soccer coach at a traditional club in the state. I seek to understand how competitiveness becomes an important category for thinking about the production and formation of athletes in professional soccer. Furthermore, as I observed in the field, “being competitive” is something that is often crossed by social markers of difference, be it gender, race or class. The aim is to explore how this production and training is marked by a series of categories that ratify “being a female soccer player” in this space, producing tensions and disputes around what is expected of a soccer player.
Copyright (c) 2025 Débora Caje Yamamoto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0