This book is about the loud and noisy subculture of wider football fandom who attend matches home and away, who spend a huge amount of their time and money following their team, who help to create the chants that form the 'atmosphere' at matches but who provide a constant challenge to the football authorities and police through their attendance and modes of expression. It aims to provide a deep ethnographic account of these supporters, their interpretations, attitudes, motivations and behaviour. The increasing number of fans travelling to away matches from the 1960s onwards certainly provided more regular opportunity for confrontation between rival fan groups. Most importantly for the purposes of the book, it is likely that many of those labelled 'hooligans' at the time were merely part of travelling groups of fans, some of whose members were engaged in the 'hooligan' activity. The book touches upon the seismic changes that have transformed football fandom since the mid-1990s. It considers the changes that have swept through football and details how the fans responded to these changes. The book provides a longitudinal and thickly descriptive ethnographic account of the carnival fan, based on observations with fans of three different football clubs. It also argues that recent technological developments have been playing a huge part in defining and shaping fan culture.
The most relevant definitions of 'football hooligan' and 'hooliganism' were those of the carnival fans themselves. Indeed, carnival fans suggested that differentiating a fan from a hooligan was not always possible: the hooligans were all fans of the team and not all hooligans engaged in hooliganism all the time. The blurring of the boundaries between hooligans and carnival fans was especially prominent during observations with fans of the England national team, where those with no apparent intention of becoming involved in violence were involved in widespread disorder on a number of observed occasions. This chapter shows that those responsible for policing football crowds are faced with serious problems when it comes to identifying those fans who attend matches with the intention of becoming involved in disorder and those who merely want to be involved in a carnival of fandom, usually entailing drinking, humour and song.
This chapter considers the ways in which female Quake players and female Quake clans have developed and enunciated a particular gaming identity and technical competence within a gaming culture that is heavily coded as masculine. It draws from a case study focusing on the consumption and production practices of individual female Quake players, female Quake-playing clans, and the ways in which they have separately and collectively represented themselves to the rest of the online game-playing community that has formed around Quake. Female Quake players, their creative practices and the community they have developed should be understood to be relevant to a technofeminist agenda that seeks to offer both new images of technologised embodiment and to foster an active engagement with technology amongst women. The female Quake playing community demonstrates a playful use of names to demarcate a specifically oppositional female identity within the online community.
For many English football supporters, matches provide an opportunity for expressions of the 'carnivalesque'. The primary motivation for the hardcore of travelling football fan groups was a recreation of the type of behaviour and release. The creation of a successful football carnival, one that was enjoyed at the time and frequently recounted, it was not necessary for authorities to 'carve out' spaces, for marches to take place, for displays of colour to be shown, or even for large numbers of fans to gather together. For the carnival fan, the most important aspect of a successful carnival was the ability to escape into a 'second life'. A consistent finding across the author's research with fans of Blackpool, Manchester United and England national team was the importance of using the match and the time around it to 'get away from' the norms of everyday working and family life.
This chapter uses data from key informant interviews and resident diaries and interviews to examine the varied governance structures shaping the peripheries in both South Africa and Ethiopia. It opens with a discussion of key conceptual framings relevant to understanding governance trends in urban peripheries and moves to review the multiscalar institutional bodies, administrative structures, local committees and key figures including ward leaders and ‘strongmen’ operating in, and responsible for, the peripheral spaces in city-regions. Within this review the chapter offers brief reflections on hybridity, the limitations of the state and the role of the private sector shaping decision-making. It turns to an analysis of borders and boundaries as central to particular governance contestations and analyses state–citizen relations using the insights drawn from the book’s overarching ‘lived experiences’ approach. Throughout the chapter, conceptualisations of the periphery, developed in the Introduction, are drawn on to analyse particular governance arrangements and practices, including new structures within vanguard peripheries, ‘transitioning peripheries’ possessing hybrid governance structures and auto-constructed peripheries where informalised mechanisms of leadership are evident, alongside weakened state structures which are obligated to serve ‘inherited peripheries’.
This chapter examines the physical condition of dwellings occupied by the migrants interviewed for this book and how it shapes their perceptions of home. It opens with an analysis of migrants' perception of their living conditions. The chapter focuses on the role played by landlords and local authorities in determining the quality of accommodation available to migrants. This analysis casts light on the effectiveness of housing regulations in Ireland intended to govern the living conditions of private renters. The chapter assesses the links that migrants made between their physical and psychological health as related to the standard of accommodation available to them. It discusses migrants' sense of confidence in their self-identities, their capacity for self-expression, and how their accommodation can impair or facilitate the resultant meaning of housing. Finally, migrants' future housing strategies are outlined to provide an insight into how migrants' meaning of home is related to lifestyle choices.
This chapter locates diverse forms of housing found in seven South African case study sites on the urban edges of Gauteng and eThekwini relative to a historical view of urban policy. It contextualises the origins and contemporary dynamics of inherited as well as more recent peripheral settlements. Experiences and perceptions from residents’ interviews and diaries explain their links to these areas and include expressions of hope and optimism as well as dejection with life there. The long shadow of apartheid colours but does not define people’s continued occupation of areas that were intentionally dislocated from urban centralities, while post-apartheid state housing, often peripherally located, surfaces complex relationships with speculative development and economic activity or its absence. The chapter discusses also the differing roles played by informal settlements and other forms of auto-construction in our study sites. The lens of peripheral logics illuminates people’s housing experiences and motivations, the pull of state and other housing-related investment, sometimes in contradictory ways, and the dynamism as well as sedimentation in this housing landscape.
This chapter examines the evolution and ‘lived experience’ consequences of housing policy in Ethiopia in recent decades, which was radically transformed by the introduction of the Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP) from 2005. This was a major ‘vanguard’ investment aimed at transforming the economic and social character of the urban periphery. The chapter situates this programme in relation to broader developments in Ethiopian housing policy, including the cooperative housing programme that was initiated in the 1970s but continued into the twenty-first century. It then explores some of the tensions at the heart of the IHDP, which set out to produce ‘affordable’ housing at the same time as being part of an economic growth and homeownership agenda, leading to escalating prices and rents as well as mass displacement. The lived experience of housing of various kinds in our case study areas is then examined. The chapter concludes that ultimately the apparent promise of the ‘vanguard periphery’ in these areas was partly undermined by limitations in infrastructural capacity but also by the simultaneous creation of auto-constructed, speculative and potentially future ‘inherited’ peripheries.
Ireland, as elsewhere, has witnessed an increase in immigration. This book examines the lived housing experiences of recently arrived migrants in Ireland. It relies on migrants' first-hand accounts of their housing experiences during the period commonly associated with Ireland's 'Celtic Tiger' economic boom on the basis that increases in immigration coincided with and contributed to increases in house prices and private rents, on the one hand, and rising social housing need on the other. Importantly, the 'housing pathways approach' utilises migrants' subjectivity to assist policy makers to identify how housing policy influences people's behaviour, as housing policy can enable or prevent individuals and households from behaving in particular way. The book also locates the 'housing pathways approach' within debates concerning social research methodologies in a way that adds to the social scientific analytical toolkit.
Creating an 'impression' for the opposition fans, locals and viewers on the television was a fundamental part of being a carnival fan. This 'cultural performance' of fandom was engaged in by fans at various levels and could change from season to season or match to match. 'Banter', 'piss taking' and 'winding up' ruled, with fans constantly coming up with new ways to make fun of others and making football 'a place where societal norms about politeness are suspended'. In addition to the prospects for hedonism, matches were seen as an opportunity for the carnival fan groups to express their identity to outsiders through numbers, noise and colour. A key feature of this expression came from football chants, which carnival fans were expected to know and sing loudly. Observations suggested that it was normally these carnival fan groups who created, reworked and introduced chants to the wider match-going support.