Max Jack (Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Berlin)
"Insurgent Fandom: Atmospherics of the Anti-Social at FC Union Berlin"

Insurgent Fandom offers a behind-the-scenes look at a transnational subculture known to few called ultra. As the most dedicated soccer fans, ultras support their team through collective singing, jumping, flag-waving, and lighting marine flares in the arena. While some characterize ultras as hooligans, Jack argues that ultras' performative style of support is in part a protest informed by their constant friction with the state, the mainstream media, and the commercial priorities of sports' governing bodies. Ultras coordinate crowd atmosphere in the arena to support their respective clubs on the field while at the same time positioning themselves against the German Football Association and the capitalistic interests that structure professional football at large. Because of this conflict with authority, fandom for ultras takes on a collective social life in which the game on the field often becomes a secondary concern. Focusing in this talk on coordinated travel to and from games as a key feature of hardcore fandom at FC Union Berlin, Jack examines the relationship between ultras' activities in transit to games and their congregation in public spaces, in which quotidian ambience is hijacked and repurposed as an estranged form of public engagement.

Max Jack acquired his PhD in Ethnomusicology from UC Santa Barbara in 2019. Currently residing in Germany, he is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development at the Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin. As an ethnomusicologist of sound, affect and social movements, he researches crowds as dynamic social and political actors in public space and their fraught relationship with liberal democratic governments. Previously funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), he conducted three years of field research in Ireland and Germany on hardcore football fans called ultras and their cultivation of atmosphere in the arena as an estranged form of public address and political commentary. His book on this subject, titled Insurgent Fandom, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.