People
Brendan O’Connor
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Brendan O’Connor is a PhD candidate in Geography and the author of Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right. His dissertation focuses on how the shifting political economy of world football (soccer) is changing the way the game is played in Ireland and Brazil. A wave of new owners and investors has swept across the beautiful game, each seeking to remake it to their own ends. Brendan is a 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
There are (at least) two words in Portuguese for the verb “to play,” jogar and brincar. Both have several different meanings, usages, and connotations, which, for beginners, might be boiled down to something like this: jogaris the more structured play of organized sports, while brincar is the informal play of children.
This summer, studying at the Middlebury Language School for Portuguese as an ERI/PS2 fellow, I thought a lot about the difference between these forms of play, as well as the relationship between them. Famously, Middlebury Language School students take a pledge at the start of the program not to speak, write, read, or listen to English for the duration of the summer. I can’t claim to have been a perfect adherent to The Pledge, but I stuck to it closely enough that by the end of the second week I was having dreams (nightmares?) in which people were speaking Portuguese which I did not understand.
Monday through Friday, students spent mornings in the classroom, studying grammar and Lusophone (mostly Brazilian) culture and history; in the afternoons, we participated in extracurricular activities: singing Brazilian music, learning capoeira, playing volleyball or futevôlei, a combination of futebol and vôlei. And we talked. Constantly. These conversations, whether idle or serious, provided ample opportunity to practice what we’d learned in class and what we picked up on from hearing others speak. Often, when encountering the edge of my capacity to speak, I would back up and find another way around, using what I knew I could say to describe what I was trying but unable to say;eventually, whoever I was talking to would figure it out, and together we’d assemble a better manner of articulating the thought that I had been unable to verbalize. Or, it would be beyond both of us, and we’d give up.
Still, practice and experimentation within the rules as I learned them—given overarching structure by the Pledge: whatever you do,don’t speak inEnglish—allowed me to get somewhere I couldn’t have reached when I began and develop capacities that would otherwise have been beyond me.
