Football hooligans: old bottle,new whines?

This paper reviews the claims about the explanation of violence around football put forward by Armstrong and Harris in the light of more widespread faults in the analysis of ‘hooliganism’. It argues that conceptual, definitional and methodological problems mean that the data Armstrong and Harris supply should not cause anyone to abandon either of the two theoretical positions they think they criticize. In particular their dismissal of the moral panic type of approach to the study of football hooliganism is rebutted. Evidence concerning Scottish football is supplied to support this and to indicate that all English researchers into this issue require to revise their arguments.     

Anthropological versus sociological approaches to the study of soccer hooliganism: some critical notes

It is argued that the anthropological approach, as used by Armstrong and Harris, has not generated any breakthrough in the study of soccer hooliganism. In particular, it is suggested that their use of a commonsense rather than a sociological concept of violence vitiates their analysis in several ways, contributing above all to substantial inconsistencies between some of their own empirical data and their general conclusions concerning levels of soccer-related violence. It is also contended that their critique of the ‘figurational’ or ‘process-sociological’ approach followed by the Leicester researchers is based on a confused misrepresentation of that approach. Specifically it is argued (i) that Armstrong and Harris fail to recognize the wide range of methods, including extensive participant observation, used by the Leicester group, (ii) that their attempt to cast doubt on the Leicester group's contention that the core football hooligans come predominantly from the ‘rougher’ sections of the working class is based on nothing more than a priori speculation. In this connection, Armstrong and Harris themselves provide no reliable data on the social class of soccer hooligans in Sheffield, and they seem unaware of the fact that several different sources of data appear to confirm the finding of the Leicester group, (iii) they have misunderstood both the terminology and the reasoning of the Leicester group concerning the ‘rougher’ sections of the working class and their relationship to football hooliganism.     

Reading European football,critiquing China: Chinese urban middle class fans as reflexive audience

ABSTRACT

This essay explores European football’s cross-cultural appeals in China by focusing on Chinese fans’ active readings of this globalized cultural text. Using analytical tools from both sport sociology and transnational reception studies, I understand Chinese urban middle-class supporters as a reflexive audience whose meaning-making of European football is contextualized in their local urban experience. The in-depth interviewing reveals that these fans’ interpretations of their favourite European football teams as symbols of ‘collective cooperation’ and ‘beautiful football’ produce critical reflections on the discourses of ‘competitive individualism’ and ‘utilitarian commercialism’ which are part of the rising ideology during China’s neoliberal reform. Through the comparison among European football, Chinese football, and popular ‘national’ sports in China, the participants further contest the prevalence of these discourses in China’s broader economic and social arrangements over which they are engaged in constant material struggles. I further discuss how the transnational consumption of European football offers the Chinese urban middle-class a symbolic space to project their reflexivity on the reforming process.     

The boy done good: football violence, changes and continuities

As football related disorders remain stubbornly impervious to ‘solutions’, so the study of football hooliganism has become almost a minor branch of the social sciences. This paper looks critically at the main academic approaches to the problem in the UK and Europe. The shortcomings of much of this work are revealed, both theoretically and in terms of the evidence employed about the nature of hooliganism. The meagre amount of data about hooliganism contained in the plethora of Government reports that have so far been commissioned is striking. This may well be the reason why ‘official’ remedies so often prove inadequate. One way of gaining an understanding of this phenomenon is by making contact with, talking to, and observing at first hand the behaviour of those people most centrally involved, the hooligans themselves. This paper concludes with a series of portraits of ‘the boys’, some of it based on their own published writing. This will illustrate different forms of hooligan involvements. It will also provide an understanding of its origins as well as the true scale and scope of hooligan activity, about which many myths prevail. Something of the changes as well as the continuities on the football scene over the past 25 years will be indicated. Finally we will attempt to locate the whole phenomenon in its true place within British youth culture. Clarence Rook Hooligan Nights (1899)     

Professional football and working class culture: English theories and Scottish evidence

This paper reviews certain theories outlined by Taylor, Clarke, Critcher, Dunning et al which try to set out the relations between professional football and working class culture and which, as part of this, seek to explain football hooliganism as resulting from changes in these relationships. Such theories draw on English evidence and English forms and this paper provides some historical and contemporary evidence, concerning hooliganism and community tics, about a major Scottish club – Rangers FC – to indicate that the parallels and causal trajectories these theories suggest do not seem to hold good north of the border. In conclusion, some additional points are made about English theories and Scottish football in order to argue that a good deal more research is required if we want to understand either the symbolic significance of football in working class culture or football hooliganism.     

Sexy and sovereign? Aboriginal models hit the ‘multicultural mainstream’

Long argued by post-colonial scholarship, Indigenous sexualities have been variously cast as pathological and abject, or fetishized and exotiziced. In the Australian context, Aboriginal sexualities have never been granted a normalized, agentic visibility in the white Australian imaginary. Since the 1990s, however, there has been an increase of ‘sexy’ Aboriginal ‘stars’ in the Australian media. This newfound visibility invites fresh questions about race, beauty, appropriation and resistance, most particularly in ways that centres Aboriginal narratives: What does it mean to be visible and ‘mainstreamed’ in a media that ‘values diversity’, whilst denying sovereignty for Indigenous people? This question is significant in the Australian context, but also has relevance for rethinking race, sexuality and media representations in colonial contexts internationally. The paper explores this newfound exposure through the voices of two Australian Aboriginal women, Samantha Harris and Magnolia Maymaru. These women have come to national and international fame as celebrated models in a fashion industry priding itself on becoming more inclusive and multicultural. It focuses on their responses to journalists over the course of their careers, as well as how the stories construct beauty and Aboriginality. I draw on Indigenous feminist scholars, particularly the work of Irene Watson, who foreground the subject of sovereignty and remind us that discourses of multiculturalism have a charged meaning for Indigenous people. I also draw on the insights of Elizabeth Povinelli who considers how sexuality intersects with discourses of empire, and how Indigenous people employ ‘creative engagements’ with liberal multiculturalism. Positioning sovereignty and multiculturalism side by side, I reflect on how Samantha and Magnolia enact a sovereign sexuality, and what this might look like. Rather than fix colonial alterity or reproduce multicultural ‘inclusions’, their narratives skirt, sidestep and ‘dance’ with the discourses constructing their lives, attending to race while transcending its colonial limits.     

Violent pasts: collective memory and football hooliganism

Since the 1970s, the sociological analysis of football hooliganism has focused on the processes which lead to violence between fans. This has been a reasonable research strategy since the incidence of violence is a striking phenomenon and violent fans themselves look upon violence as the objective. However, this focus on the causes of violence has cast other important aspects of football violence into the shade. In particular, there has been a lack of consideration of the way in which violence has been used as a resource by violent fans for the creation and re‐creation of their hooligan gangs. In particular, there has been no discussion of the way in which the collective memory of violence, established in discussions between group members, affirms the solidarity of these groups. In exploring the way that shared memory is employed by violent fans to sustain their relations with each other, this article widens the focus of the sociological study of hooliganism but also makes a contribution to the understanding of how social groups are constituted more generally through the empirical example of hooliganism.     

Putting women back in their place. Reflections on slut-shaming,the case Asia Argento and Twitter in Italy

ABSTRACT

Compared to racist and ethnicist discourses, literature on sexist discourses – both off and on-line – as hate speech is relatively underinvestigated. This is partly due to the tendency to minimise accusations of sexism and to reframe misogyny as ‘acceptable’ by constructing it as a form of humour. We decided to focus on slut-shaming, one of the most virulent forms of hate speech, which has always existed but was boosted by social media, becoming a stable low-cost ingredient of today’s rape culture. We propose to consider online slut-shaming as a form of ‘technology-facilitated sexual violence’, where digital technologies are used to facilitate both virtual and face-to-face sexually based harms. According to feminist analysis of sexual violence, this would be a matter of power rather than sex: sex would be the weapon, not the motive. We have tested this research hypothesis by focusing on the Italian reception of the MeToo campaign, triggered by Asia Argento’s denunciation. More specifically, two Different Twitter corpora produced within the same five months period were examined by means of a quantitative and a qualitative methodology.     

Football ‘fanzines’ and football culture: a case of successful ‘cultural contestation’*

‘Fanzines’– magazines produced by fans for fans on photocopiers or small presses and circulated by other means than through mainstream commercial channels – provide an alternative to the products of mass publishing and the mass entertainment industry, although often in ‘dialogue’ with these. In England fanzines – like Sniffin’ Glue or When Saturday Comes– have proliferated over the last fifteen years or so, dealing especially with rock and pop music and also, most recently, with football. Fanzines can be seen as enabling a ‘users’ view’ and -sometimes – a radical reinterpretation (or defence) of popular cultural forms to be expressed by people who would otherwise be excluded from any usual means of written expression about, or control over, mainstream institutions in the production of mass culture. This article focuses on the phenomenon of football fanzines (and the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA) – a movement closely associated with fanzines), suggesting (i) that football fanzines and the FSA can be viewed as a particularly potent example of the existence of continued ‘contestation’ over cultural institutions of the kind suggested in relation to sport by Gruneau (1982 and 1983), Donnelly (1988) and others, including ourselves (Jary and Horne 1987 and Horne, Jary and Tomlinson 1987), (ii) that a consideration of football fanzines and the FSA illustrates the value of moving to a wider substantive and theoretical focus in the sociological analysis of football culture than that which has been uppermost in recent years.     

Mental Maps of Eastern Europe: States,Mentalities, Modernisation

Eastern Europe has been the object of orientalising discourses portraying it as a region defined by problematic statehood, underdevelopment, and nationalist-religious warmongering. These discourses have produced 19^th-century mental maps of Europe contrasting a perceived ‘core’ European area ending with the Frankish Empire's eastern border and coinciding with later Enlightenment influence and an indistinct ‘Orient’ or ‘East’, bypassed by “modernising” processes. This contribution focuses on (post-)Cold War discourses in social science and shows how these discourses re-produce 19^th-century layers of orientalising map-making and keep East-West differences alive by tracing deficient, fragile or repressive state institutions back to alleged Eastern European ‘mentalities’.     

‘My anorexia story’: girls constructing narratives of identity on YouTube

The phenomenon of pro-anorexia (‘pro-ana’) communities has attracted extensive academic attention over the last 15 years, with feminist scholars fascinated by the political complexities of such cultures. But the internet has also enabled a range of eating disorder recovery cultures to emerge – whether organized around blogs, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube – and such spaces have been largely ignored by feminist scholarship which has fetishized the apparently more resistant and controversial discourses of pro-ana. As such, this article explores a set of videos posted on YouTube under the title of ‘My anorexia story’ which present narratives of recovery, or efforts to recover, from anorexia. Primarily produced by white, Western, teenage girls, these videos are effectively slide shows made up of written text and photographs, with selfies of the body sitting at their core. The conceptual and political significance of self-representation has been seen as central to the construction of subjectivity within the digital media landscape, with particular attention paid to the ways in which such practices compare, speak back to, or challenge the existing representational discourses of ‘dominant’ media and wider relations of social power. In this regard, this article explores questions of agency in gendered self-representation, examining what kinds of self-narratives the girls are producing about anorexia. In doing so, it examines how the stories seek to ‘author’ and regulate the meanings of the anorexic body; how these constructions intersect with dominant constructions of anorexia (such as those offered by medical discourse and the media); as well as the implications of the aesthetic strategies they employ. In considering how the narratives visualize, display and ‘expose’ the anorexic body, I draw upon a growing area of work which examines the selfie in relation discourses of surveillance, visibility and selfhood.     

Branded Solidarity in Fair Trade Communication on Facebook

The objective of fair trade to achieve economic justice through markets depends on establishing, via moral education, bonds of solidarity between Northern consumers and impoverished Southern producers. Moral education is increasingly realised by commercial brands who take advantage of the opportunities offered by social media. This article analyses the discursive construction of solidarity in the brand communication of Pukka (UK) and Pizca del Mundo (Poland) on Facebook. It identifies 3 discourses of solidarity: ‘solidarity through legitimation’, which presents the rationale for solidarity with Southern producers; ‘solidarity through affinity’, which constructs a moral economy between Southern producers and Northern consumers; and ‘solidarity through lifestyle’, which proposes everyday actions that can be undertaken by consumers to support Southern producers. These discourses are employed by the brands to different extents, with Pizca del Mundo attempting to establish a fair trade market in Poland and Pukka with an aim to increase sales of their fair trade products. The article concludes that primarily the discourses of ‘solidarity through legitimation’ and ‘solidarity through affinity’ serve moral education whose objective is to generate sustained commitment towards Southern producers as distant others.     

The socialogy of football: a research agenda for the 1990s

The paper emphasizes the need for an alternative sociology of football that goes beyond the issue of football hooliganism, which has dominated work in the field. In the light of the Taylor Report and the agenda of modernization of football in the 1990s, research into the football crowd as a whole is required. A positive view of the state of English football in 1990 is presented as a corrective to the negative image of the 1980s. The debate is set in the context of my previous work on the politics of football both in Britain and the new Europe – West and East. In the final section, several topics are placed on the research agenda for the sociology of football in the 1990s. These are the modernization of facilities, the study of fanzines, comparative research and a social demography of the football crowd.     

The enforcement of normalcy in schools and the disablement of families: unpacking master narratives on parental denial

The notion that some parents may be ‘in denial’ is a pervasive theme in dominant discourses on families of children with disabilities. In this analytic essay, I deconstruct cultural and institutional master narratives on parental denial and discuss their role in the marginalization of students with disabilities in schools. I argue that discourses on parental denial privilege the perspectives of those in positions of power and control, leave the practice of ability-based segregation in schools unexamined, and discredit agency among families. Additionally, drawing from existing narrative-based research, I explore alternative interpretations of parents’ responses to their children’s differences, situating these in the framework of critical disability studies.     

Networking across borders: the South Asian Research Network on Gender,Law and Governance

In this article I focus on a subaltern approach to knowledge networks by examining the process of setting up such a network, the South Asia Research Network (SARN) on Gender, Law and Governance. I reflect on the construction of discourses about ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowledge–makers’ and the issues of access that emerge as a result of these discourses and practices. I outline three aspects of a ‘politics of network(s)–ing’: the politics of process; the politics of outcome; and the politics of framing. I conclude that the borders of which we need to be aware are not just national borders but also borders of power. Knowledge networks are politically heterogeneous and for subaltern networks to have sustainable organizations as well as critical politics they need to be self–reflective and deliberative.     

Design Errors and Cross Purposes: Thoughts on Creationism,Intelligent Design and How Scientists Have Responded

Abstract

The ‘Creationism’ controversy has become a largely ritualised exchange between the two camps, both of which implicitly accept that the issue is one of empirical facts. This paper argues that this is a fundamentally mistaken assumption and raises a number of other arguments rarely raised by anti-Creationists which are actually more subversive of their opponents' position. These pertain to the concept of ‘complexity’, the nature of the ‘puzzle’ which Creationism seeks to ‘explain’, the nature of religious texts and the historical social and psychological roots of modern Creationism. Some observations are then offered on the psychological nature of the controversy itself. The scientific anti-Creationist camp's responses to Creationism are inadequate because they too have largely failed to understand these points. Finally the potential relevance of the logos versus mythos distinction as deployed by Karen Armstrong to the controversy is briefly outlined.     

Feminist Readings on Abu Ghraib: Introduction

This article examines feminist responses to mainstream media coverage of female terrorists in West Germany during 1977. Women in left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) and ‘Movement 2. June’ (‘Bewegung 2. Juni’) inspired a gendered discourse reflecting a cultural unease about women participating in political violence, in which the media propagated notions that posited female terrorists as ‘unnatural’ women. This analysis demonstrates how different ‘Alltagstheorien’ (everyday or common sense theories) on female terrorists we find in West German media publications in the 1970s and 1980s served as a springboard for West German feminist activists to examine arguments about violence as legitimate means in their own political communities. This essay begins by briefly outlining key feminist positions on political violence that have made invisible the complex debates taking place in the 1970s. The second part of the essay uses images of female terrorists circulated by the West German media, such as the newsmagazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror), to contextualize the ‘Alltagstheorien’ the magazine propagated in an article covering RAF actions in 1977. The third and main part of the essay then examines the responses this and other articles elicited from contemporaneous feminist movement publications.     

The electronic eye: emerging surveillant practices in social work with children and families

Given the rise of a ‘surveillance society’ or ‘surveillance state’, this article examines the evolution of new surveillant practices which are targeted at children in general, but also particular groups of children who are frequently seen as ‘troublesome’, even threats to the social order. In England for example, there has been an emerging preoccupation with ‘identifying’, ‘profiling’, and ‘tracking’ the potentially criminal young. Furthermore, other major changes are likely to be introduced in the area of child welfare and child protection. Important here is the New Labour administration’s plan to introduce ‘information hubs’ which will electronically log details on children and families. It is argued that social work and the social professions, throughout Europe, need to critically analyse developments such as this and have their responses informed by international discourses founded on civil and human rights.