Performance Ethnography. Cultural Geography. Everyday Resistance.
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This Means More: Branded Solidarity at Liverpool’s Soccer Clubs (2022)
Co-authored with Thomas P. Oates Liverpool’s elite soccer clubs are at once carefully managed global brands and local institutions infused with community values. As billion-dollar companies, Liverpool FC and Everton FC deploy a tactic we call “branded solidarity”: leveraging the historical enactment of leftist politics in the city to appeal to a broader, global audience…
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“From Death to Spectacle: Football’s Neoliberal Revolution” (2019)
Co-authored with Thomas P. Oates & Travis Vogan. Building on the context outlined in Stuart Hall’s “The Neoliberal Revolution (2011),” we show how transformations in commodified football in 1980s and 1990s England did not merely reflect larger trends, but were a central site of political innovation constitutive of the country’s larger cultural shifts. Addressing the…
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Two balls is too many: stadium performance and queerness among Portland’s Rose City Riveters supporters club (2018)
Portland, Oregon’s Rose City Riveters is the largest independent organized supporters group for a women’s soccer team in the world. They support Portland Thorns with an organized, expressive and organic performance of songs, musical instruments and displays that envelopes the entire stadium. Utilizing ethnographic subject-centred methods, this empirical study argues that the group’s performance reflects…
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Chris W. Henderson 