Search results
96 Ultras 4 Social media as a space of continuous performance Throughout the season fans everywhere are filled with excitement and anticipation as their teams battle and compete for glory and to avoid disappointment. The success and failure of football clubs becomes a symbolic representation of individuals, cities, regions and nations across the globe. Yet the competition is not limited to what takes place on the field. For ultras, status and solidarity is reflected in their spectacular choreographies, and the new season provides more opportunities for
Since their emergence in Italy in 1968, ultras have become the most dominant style of football fandom in the world. Since its inception, the ultras style has spread from Southern Europe across North Africa to Northern and Eastern Europe, South East Asia and North America. This book argues that ultras are an important site of enquiry into understanding contemporary society. They are a passionate, politically engaged collective that base their identity around a form of consumption (football) that links to modern notions of identity like masculinity and nationalism. The book seeks to make a clear theoretical shift in studies of football fandom. While it sits in the body of literature focused on political mobilisations, social movements and hooliganism, it emphasises more fundamental sociological questions about group formation, notably collective performances and emotional relationships. By focusing on the common form of expression through the performance of choreographies, chants and sustained support throughout the match, this book shows how members build an emotional attachment to their club that valorises the colours and symbols of that team, whilst mobilising members against opponents. It does this through recognising the importance of gender, politics and violence to the expression of ultras fandom, as well as how this is presented on social media and within the stadium through specular choreographies.
aspect of drag further by deliberately dressing as the stereotype of post-unification East Germans (Ziesche, 2018). As Ziesche (2018: 889) highlights, ‘these costumes also resemble and imitate the looks of people in the 1990s, arguably the most violent years in Dynamo’s history. Thus, the appearance could also be used to reinforce the fan scene’s violent image.’ Greater connectivity across the globe is helping expand these cultural cues. Social media, blogs, fanzines, films and other forms of media help present and re-present significant aspects of ultras culture
data-intensive methods, infrastructures and tools – cloud computing services such as Google Compute, data analytic and visualisation tools such as R, Python and IPython notebooks, large data stores such as BigQuery, streaming data from social media platform APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces), predictive models, especially in the form of machinelearning classifiers (support vector machines, Naive Bayes classifiers, random forests) – in making sense of what happens on Github en masse. Somewhat recursively (although I don’t want to make too much of this recursion
she moves through and knows the world she is in, how she engages with the world she has left behind by using social media as a prolongation of her space and time of ‘freedom’. This Italian ‘life in the present’ is contrasted to the long-term economic, financial, and moral ties implicit in being part of a particular household and extended kin group in Romania. Methods The protagonist of this story is Ana (a pseudonym), a Romanian domestic careworker, aged 45. Ana came to work in Italy in 2005 when she was 36 years old. She had
openly racist and nationalistic. Many are apolitical in an ideological sense, but will engage with football politics that affect their activities. What unites all ultras is an emotional, passionate support for their local club. This fandom extends well beyond the ninety minutes of a football match and comes through social media posts, planning choreographies and conversations in the pub. The ultras have a fairly common form of expression through the performance of choreographies, chants and sustained support throughout the game. Through the rituals of the performance
willing to embody the collective by removing traces of their individuality, as the individual and group become one organic body. They represent an important analysis of how groups identify, mobilise and sustain their activities over time. The regularity of the football season and the growth of social media technology ensures that these groups remain in constant contact both temporally and geographically. And most importantly, they represent an important space for the formation of social relationships and belonging. For the uninitiated, ultras are an organised style of
and his gang made: the bunkers that occupied freedom of thought, the bunkers that hid the billions that they stole in the last ten years. They dictated grayness; we give them back color. They forced uniformity; we give back variety. (Interview with a protesters, 23 April 2016) The Colorful Revolution went viral on social media and in real life. The “Warrior on a Horse” fountain on Macedonia Square was red for a day, as the protestors dumped red paint in the water. The liquid
capable of creating and using methods. Indeed, when it comes to digitally collected data, techniques for knowing the social through ‘transactional’ data – that is, data that occurs as the result of everyday exchanges like clicking or using social media, as opposed to data collected for social research – have been elaborated far more rapidly and extensively outside of scholarship (Savage and Burrows 2007). For Savage and Burrows, these developments constitute a challenge to sociological authority, putting sociologists in the uncomfortable role of methods adopter, rather
tattoos and available as golden medallions), expensive cars and other ways of ‘flaunting’ their wealth uninhibitedly on social media through Instagram and Facebook as well as through rap videos on YouTube. The group has gained popular notoriety in the UK media as cocaine traders and running county-lines across the country. They also seem to have gained considerable traction as rap