Michael Skey
Biographic Data
| ID | 145654 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Skey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Skey |
| SIGNATURE | SKEY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loughborough University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6138-6021 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 550 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Nation branding from below
Nation branding has become increasingly important as countries seek to compete for investment, tourism, exports, and political alliances. While most research focuses on official activities led by states or corporations, this paper examines the role of social media users who engage in nation branding ‘from below’. We introduce the concept of ‘user-generated nation branding’, which refers to the creation and public distribution of nation branding m…
From impartial commentator to emotional choirmaster – using the concept of liminality to theorize the departure from journalistic ‘norms’ during moments of national sporting euphoria
This paper seeks to offer a fresh perspective on the role of sports journalists during moments of euphoria linked to high-profile national sporting victories. Using a novel theoretical framework that is primarily informed by Victor Turner ́s work on liminality, it argues that these temporary moments of euphoria open a semantic space and meaning horizon that justifies a move beyond journalistic norms around objectivity, impartiality and balance. H…
Representing nations as ‘things’
This article offers two key contributions. First, it provides a novel approach to theorising the relationship between media and nationalism by drawing on the concept of entitativity to explore the ways in which mainstream media represent individual nations as ‘entities’ operating in a largely taken-for-granted inter national system. In doing so, it also addresses a largely overlooked question within the wider psychological literature on entitativ…
‘Forgive me for saying, but rugby is not a game for women
While sport has traditionally been seen, and represented, as a male domain, some sports, such as rugby, have been particularly ‘gender-typed’ as masculine. However, in recent years, this narrative has been challenged by the rising profile, and popularity, of women’s rugby. \n In response to these shifts, this paper uses a survey to explore rugby fans’ attitudes towards women’s rugby and employs a revised version of Pope et al’s (2022) framework f…
“We’ve … had to Make Ourselves more Visible Because … the Media hasn’t Done it for us”
Women have been traditionally excluded from sport, and recent work has argued for the need to increase the visibility of both women’s sport and female athletes in order to secure public attention and commercial opportunities and encourage the next generation to participate. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the visibility bind to offer a more nuanced understanding of these debates. Here, we note that growing visibility may often operate …
Using performative participatory research to explore the meanings of sport, celebrity and community in young people’s lives
Banal Nationalism, 30 Years On—A Review
Inhabitants of a National 'Walled Garden
Digital media have played a significant role in the rise of nationalism in recent years. Existing research, however, tends to focus on more explicit or passionate expressions of nationalist feelings online. In contrast, there has been very little work on the relationship between everyday digital practices and the (re)production of national frameworks among 'ordinary' citizens. To address this lacuna, this study develops a novel theoretical framew…
‘I produce songs for her …. In this way, I gradually know her more. The more I know her, the more I like her’
In the last decade, virtual idols have become increasingly popular among young people in China with news reports estimating a fan-base of around 300 million and total industry revenues of over $35 billion in 2020 (Bloomberg, 2021). Despite these startling figures, there have been few empirical studies of virtual idol fandom. To address this lacuna, this paper explores the ways in which fans engage with the Chinese virtual idol Luo Tianyi and uses…
‘You feel a need to inspire and be active on these sites otherwise . . . people won’t remember your name’
Although some scholars have argued that social media provide opportunities for sportswomen to bypass mainstream media reporting, there is little existing research on how female athletes use, and experience, digital platforms. This article uses insights from studies of ‘gendered visibility’ alongside work on ‘closeness and distance’ in journalism studies to put forward the concept of ‘appropriate distance’ when trying to understand how these athle…
Sportswashing
Sportswashing is a neologism that has begun to appear with increasing regularity in the English-language media over the past few years. However, there has been limited academic discussion of the term and certainly no sustained analysis of what it might or might not offer to sports scholars. This lacuna is particularly curious given the rapid rise in interest in related issues, such as the links between sport and soft power, sporting mega events a…
Nationalism and Media
The study of media nationalism has had a curious history. Some of the “classic” studies of nationalism have placed the media at the heart of their work but say very little about media theory or research. More recently, studies of populism and nationalist parties have talked quite a lot about the impact of digital technologies but have very little to say about nationalism. This piece first provides a brief overview of some of these classic studies…
Cultures of Authenticity
This collection explores the complex and controversial idea of authenticity. Addressing the concept from an interdisciplinary perspective and offering a diverse range of topical cases
The spaces and politics of affective nationalism
Over the last decade, affect has emerged as one of the most prominent concepts within human geography. More recently, scholars engaging with the nation have also drawn on insights from studies of affect to interrogate the ways in which relations between people and materially heterogeneous assemblages underpin national forms of identification, organisation and expression. This symposium aims to interrogate affective nationalism both as an analytic…
W(h)ither Media Events? Building a Typology for Theorizing Exceptional Events that Break with the Norm in a Complex Media Landscape
This article proposes a new typology for understanding events or programs that represent exceptions to the norm in that they interrupt media schedules and/or monopolize coverage across numerous platforms and capture public attention for short periods of time. First the master category of exceptional mediated event is introduced and four main categories identified, media events, media disasters, news events and pseudo-events. Then, a primary disti…
Who Can Represent the Nation? Elite Athletes, Global Mega Events and the Contested Boundaries of National Belonging
For those studying national belonging, elite athletes competing in international mega events offer particularly compelling case studies as they represent the nation during periods of sustained media attention and heightened emotional registers. But when compared with other types of representatives - such as heads of state, ambassadors, political leaders - they have received much less scholarly attention. This article analyses reporting of the 'Pl…
If a citizen from the homeland runs quicker or jumps higher than foreigners, I feel pleasure. Why, I do not know’
There are times when I feel like a bit of an alien
When I Feel Like a Bit of an Alien': Middling Migrants and the National Order of
Conclusion
The conclusion reflects on the current status of debates around nationalism and suggests avenues for future research. In particular, it argues that more attention should be paid to incorporating insights from the study of everyday life, across a range of disciplines, and notes the importance of adopting mixed-methods approaches. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updat…
Introduction
The introduction puts the work of Billig’s Banal Nationalism into context. It briefly traces its origins and discusses its key argument: nationalism is a dominant discursive register because it pervasively‚ but unconsciously populates our everyday space and time. The introduction also discusses the multifarious ways in which banal nationalism has been operationalized in various settings and disciplinary contexts and it offers a short overview of …
Mediatization and Sport
The concept of mediatization has proved remarkably popular in the past decade, although recent critiques have challenged its media-centrism, ahistoricism, and conceptual clarity. In this article, we draw on the work of those who suggest that mediatization is best deployed as a means of understanding particular social domains and the ways in which institutions and actors orientate their activities towards media. Using association football, or socc…
Media events and cosmopolitan fandom
Academic literature on media events is increasingly concerned with their global dimensions and the applicability of Dayan and Katz’s theoretical concept in a post-national context. This article contributes to this debate by exploring the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) as a global media event. In particular, we employ a perspective from ‘inside the media event’, drawing upon empirical material collected during the 2014 Eurovision final in Copenhage…
Mindless Markers of the Nation
The visual environment has increasingly been used as a lens with which to understand wider processes of social and economic change, with studies employing in-depth qualitative approaches to focus on, for example, gentrification or trans-national networks. This exploratory article offers an alternative perspective by using a novel method, quantitative photo mapping, to examine the extent to which a particular socio-cultural marker, the nation, is …
Everyday Nationhood
This is an edited collection. It is closed access for copyright reasons
Affective nationalism
This commentary was published in the journal, Progress in Human Geography [SAGE © The Author(s)] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132516665279
The National in Everyday Life
This paper is designed to provide a critical engagement with Michael Billig's seminal thesis of Banal Nationalism (1995), perhaps the most influential study of everyday forms of nationhood. With an increasing number now focusing on the (re) production, dissemination and negotiation of the national through routine texts and practices (cf Foster, 2002 ; Edensor, 2002 ; Madianou, 2005 ; Brubaker et al., 2006 ; Bratsis, 2006 ) and others employing th…
A sense of where you belong in the world’
The significance of national forms of imagination and organisation has been increasingly questioned in an era of rapid globalisation. While theoretically stimulating, those who stress the importance of global mobility and sociability sometimes overlook what well-established, “thick” attachments to the nation offer to disparate individuals, notably in terms of anchoring subjectivity. This first part of this paper explores how debates around belong…
Everyday Nationhood
This is an edited collection. It is closed access for copyright reasons
Why do nations matter? The struggle for belonging and security in an uncertain world
This paper explores the reasons why national forms of identification and organization (might) matter in the contemporary era. In contrast to the majority of macro-sociological work dealing with this topic, I develop an analytical framework that draws together recent research on everyday nationalism with micro-sociological and psychological studies pointing to the importance of routine practices, institutional arrangements and symbolic systems in …
Affective nationalism
This commentary was published in the journal, Progress in Human Geography [SAGE © The Author(s)] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132516665279
Carnivals of Surplus Emotion?1’ Towards an Understanding of the Significance of Ecstatic Nationalism in a Globalising World
This paper focuses on public events that celebrate the nation and how they may offer important insights into the study of wider discourses of (national) identity and belonging. Drawing on theories from both anthropology and media studies, it argues that these events should not be simply dismissed as sudden outbursts of patriotic emotion but instead can be used to extend Billig's work on Banal Nationalism (1995) by analysing in more detail the rel…
What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? An examination of the varying meaningfulness and commensurability of everyday 'cosmopolitan' practices
The literature on cosmopolitanism has mushroomed in the past decade or more as attempts are made to theorise new patterns of mobility, interactions between previously distant social groups and the emergence of institutions to manage these processes. In this paper, I build on the arguments of those who have emphasised the strategic aspects and temporal dimensions of cosmopolitan expressions and practices, by focusing on the resources and constrain…
We Need to Talk about Cosmopolitanism
The cosmopolitan has re-emerged as a popular figure within the social sciences, primarily as a means of addressing (the potential for) new forms of experience and sociability in an increasingly mobile and interconnected world. Investigations into practical or everyday cosmopolitanism have been useful in grounding some of the more theoretical of these debates but problems remain in terms of both defining and operationalizing the concept. The first…
Thank god, I'm back!’
Growing individual mobility has been a key element in the re-evaluation of the links between (national) place and identity in what has been labelled a'borderless world'. In this paper, an alternative perspective is provided by exploring the ways in which discussions around travel are used to redefine the nation as a bounded, familiar and homely place. In the first section, a number of key themes in the wider literature on ‘home’ are identified an…
Sod them, I'm English
As well as prompting an urgent reassessment of constitutional and legislative matters, processes of devolution have also contributed to a series of wide-ranging debates on identity in Britain. Yet, outside of survey data and a growing body of work looking to assess the status of minorities in Britain, relatively little has been heard from the wider population. This is particularly true for those who constitute the majority group within Britain, t…
Mediatization and Sport
The concept of mediatization has proved remarkably popular in the past decade, although recent critiques have challenged its media-centrism, ahistoricism, and conceptual clarity. In this article, we draw on the work of those who suggest that mediatization is best deployed as a means of understanding particular social domains and the ways in which institutions and actors orientate their activities towards media. Using association football, or socc…
What nationality he is doesn't matter a damn!’ International football, mediated identities and conditional cosmopolitanism
Sport, and, in particular, football, has become an important lens for examining processes of globalisation and, increasingly, cosmopolitanism. In this paper, I explore the ways in which competing national and cosmopolitan discourses are articulated by and through the media's reporting of football. Analysing coverage of the appointment of three recent managers of the English national team, two foreign, one English, I show how ideas about (national…
The Mediation of Nationhood
This article provides an alternative perspective on the relationship between media and nation by theorizing the significance of media institutions, representations, and practices in routinely articulating the world, as a world of nations. The first part builds a more dynamic framework for understanding these cumulative processes, arguing that an analytical distinction should be made between the mediation of individual nations and the mediation of…
How Do You Think I Feel? It's My Country’
Current debates around immigration are informed by hierarchies of belonging, with some groups seen to belong more, and therefore deserve more, than others. This link between belonging and entitlement has been predominantly analysed in relation to struggles over access to key material benefits, such as jobs, housing, healthcare and so on. This paper will argue that these struggles also point to the continuing relevance of nationhood to many people…
Sportswashing
Sportswashing is a neologism that has begun to appear with increasing regularity in the English-language media over the past few years. However, there has been limited academic discussion of the term and certainly no sustained analysis of what it might or might not offer to sports scholars. This lacuna is particularly curious given the rapid rise in interest in related issues, such as the links between sport and soft power, sporting mega events a…
Nationalism and Media
The study of media nationalism has had a curious history. Some of the “classic” studies of nationalism have placed the media at the heart of their work but say very little about media theory or research. More recently, studies of populism and nationalist parties have talked quite a lot about the impact of digital technologies but have very little to say about nationalism. This piece first provides a brief overview of some of these classic studies…
There are times when I feel like a bit of an alien
When I Feel Like a Bit of an Alien': Middling Migrants and the National Order of
The spaces and politics of affective nationalism
Over the last decade, affect has emerged as one of the most prominent concepts within human geography. More recently, scholars engaging with the nation have also drawn on insights from studies of affect to interrogate the ways in which relations between people and materially heterogeneous assemblages underpin national forms of identification, organisation and expression. This symposium aims to interrogate affective nationalism both as an analytic…
Mindless Markers of the Nation
The visual environment has increasingly been used as a lens with which to understand wider processes of social and economic change, with studies employing in-depth qualitative approaches to focus on, for example, gentrification or trans-national networks. This exploratory article offers an alternative perspective by using a novel method, quantitative photo mapping, to examine the extent to which a particular socio-cultural marker, the nation, is …
Media events and cosmopolitan fandom
Academic literature on media events is increasingly concerned with their global dimensions and the applicability of Dayan and Katz’s theoretical concept in a post-national context. This article contributes to this debate by exploring the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) as a global media event. In particular, we employ a perspective from ‘inside the media event’, drawing upon empirical material collected during the 2014 Eurovision final in Copenhage…
Who Can Represent the Nation? Elite Athletes, Global Mega Events and the Contested Boundaries of National Belonging
For those studying national belonging, elite athletes competing in international mega events offer particularly compelling case studies as they represent the nation during periods of sustained media attention and heightened emotional registers. But when compared with other types of representatives - such as heads of state, ambassadors, political leaders - they have received much less scholarly attention. This article analyses reporting of the 'Pl…
The politics of trans-national belonging
Building on insights from recent research on ‘return mobilities’ among the second generation, this paper addresses the trans-national practices of young British- and American-born people of Egyptian ancestry and, in particular, their experiences in Egypt during a time of great social and political upheaval. In observing the ways in which many of these individuals effectively operate in their parent’s homelands by drawing on Western credentials or…
Inhabitants of a National 'Walled Garden
Digital media have played a significant role in the rise of nationalism in recent years. Existing research, however, tends to focus on more explicit or passionate expressions of nationalist feelings online. In contrast, there has been very little work on the relationship between everyday digital practices and the (re)production of national frameworks among 'ordinary' citizens. To address this lacuna, this study develops a novel theoretical framew…
W(h)ither Media Events? Building a Typology for Theorizing Exceptional Events that Break with the Norm in a Complex Media Landscape
This article proposes a new typology for understanding events or programs that represent exceptions to the norm in that they interrupt media schedules and/or monopolize coverage across numerous platforms and capture public attention for short periods of time. First the master category of exceptional mediated event is introduced and four main categories identified, media events, media disasters, news events and pseudo-events. Then, a primary disti…
Media, imagination and representation – Time to move beyond the ‘Holy Trinity’? Television and the Moral Imaginary
The ways in which media frame existing and possible social worlds, and thereby contribute to moral debates, has been the subject of renewed interest in the social sciences over the past decade. Often tied to the increasingly global circulation of texts, images and ideas, much of the focus has been on the ability of media to represent the ‘other’ in ways that generate understanding and empathy, rather than fear and distrust. The two books under di…
Identity as Ideology
Carnivals of Surplus Emotion?1’ Towards an Understanding of the Significance of Ecstatic Nationalism in a Globalising World
This paper focuses on public events that celebrate the nation and how they may offer important insights into the study of wider discourses of (national) identity and belonging. Drawing on theories from both anthropology and media studies, it argues that these events should not be simply dismissed as sudden outbursts of patriotic emotion but instead can be used to extend Billig's work on Banal Nationalism (1995) by analysing in more detail the rel…
‘We wanna show ’em who we are’
Like national identity, national days involve a process of 'othering', saying who you are, as much as who you are not. If some countries (such as Scotland and Ireland) celebrate them far more strongly than their neighbour, England, why is that? Why is there no British day? Why should near-neighbours, Sweden, Norway and Finland, have such different traditions of national remembering? What if a national day and its associations are so tied into a p…
The National in Everyday Life
This paper is designed to provide a critical engagement with Michael Billig's seminal thesis of Banal Nationalism (1995), perhaps the most influential study of everyday forms of nationhood. With an increasing number now focusing on the (re) production, dissemination and negotiation of the national through routine texts and practices (cf Foster, 2002 ; Edensor, 2002 ; Madianou, 2005 ; Brubaker et al., 2006 ; Bratsis, 2006 ) and others employing th…
A sense of where you belong in the world’
The significance of national forms of imagination and organisation has been increasingly questioned in an era of rapid globalisation. While theoretically stimulating, those who stress the importance of global mobility and sociability sometimes overlook what well-established, “thick” attachments to the nation offer to disparate individuals, notably in terms of anchoring subjectivity. This first part of this paper explores how debates around belong…
National Belonging and Everyday Life
This book analyses the current debates around national identity and multiculturalism by addressing three key questions; why do so many people treat as common sense the idea that they live in and belon
Thank god, I'm back!’
Growing individual mobility has been a key element in the re-evaluation of the links between (national) place and identity in what has been labelled a'borderless world'. In this paper, an alternative perspective is provided by exploring the ways in which discussions around travel are used to redefine the nation as a bounded, familiar and homely place. In the first section, a number of key themes in the wider literature on ‘home’ are identified an…
The Politics of Multiculturalism
Media Nations
Sod them, I'm English
As well as prompting an urgent reassessment of constitutional and legislative matters, processes of devolution have also contributed to a series of wide-ranging debates on identity in Britain. Yet, outside of survey data and a growing body of work looking to assess the status of minorities in Britain, relatively little has been heard from the wider population. This is particularly true for those who constitute the majority group within Britain, t…
We Need to Talk about Cosmopolitanism
The cosmopolitan has re-emerged as a popular figure within the social sciences, primarily as a means of addressing (the potential for) new forms of experience and sociability in an increasingly mobile and interconnected world. Investigations into practical or everyday cosmopolitanism have been useful in grounding some of the more theoretical of these debates but problems remain in terms of both defining and operationalizing the concept. The first…
Why do nations matter? The struggle for belonging and security in an uncertain world
This paper explores the reasons why national forms of identification and organization (might) matter in the contemporary era. In contrast to the majority of macro-sociological work dealing with this topic, I develop an analytical framework that draws together recent research on everyday nationalism with micro-sociological and psychological studies pointing to the importance of routine practices, institutional arrangements and symbolic systems in …
What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? An examination of the varying meaningfulness and commensurability of everyday 'cosmopolitan' practices
The literature on cosmopolitanism has mushroomed in the past decade or more as attempts are made to theorise new patterns of mobility, interactions between previously distant social groups and the emergence of institutions to manage these processes. In this paper, I build on the arguments of those who have emphasised the strategic aspects and temporal dimensions of cosmopolitan expressions and practices, by focusing on the resources and constrain…
Nationalism, Ethnicity and Boundaries
1. Introduction Jennifer Jackson and Lina Molokotos-Liederman Part I: Theoretical framework and methodological considerations 2. A new model of boundary complexity Richard Jenkins 3. 'Boundary', 'Border', 'Limit' in the Human Sciences: Towards a Conceptual History Jean Terrier 4. Modernity, globalization and nationalism: The age of frenzied boundary-building Daniele Conversi 5. Ethnic boundaries: A critical rationalist perspective Michael Banton …
What nationality he is doesn't matter a damn!’ International football, mediated identities and conditional cosmopolitanism
Sport, and, in particular, football, has become an important lens for examining processes of globalisation and, increasingly, cosmopolitanism. In this paper, I explore the ways in which competing national and cosmopolitan discourses are articulated by and through the media's reporting of football. Analysing coverage of the appointment of three recent managers of the English national team, two foreign, one English, I show how ideas about (national…
The Mediation of Nationhood
This article provides an alternative perspective on the relationship between media and nation by theorizing the significance of media institutions, representations, and practices in routinely articulating the world, as a world of nations. The first part builds a more dynamic framework for understanding these cumulative processes, arguing that an analytical distinction should be made between the mediation of individual nations and the mediation of…
Media, imagination and representation – Time to move beyond the ‘Holy Trinity’? Television and the Moral Imaginary
The ways in which media frame existing and possible social worlds, and thereby contribute to moral debates, has been the subject of renewed interest in the social sciences over the past decade. Often tied to the increasingly global circulation of texts, images and ideas, much of the focus has been on the ability of media to represent the ‘other’ in ways that generate understanding and empathy, rather than fear and distrust. The two books under di…
How Do You Think I Feel? It's My Country’
Current debates around immigration are informed by hierarchies of belonging, with some groups seen to belong more, and therefore deserve more, than others. This link between belonging and entitlement has been predominantly analysed in relation to struggles over access to key material benefits, such as jobs, housing, healthcare and so on. This paper will argue that these struggles also point to the continuing relevance of nationhood to many people…
The politics of trans-national belonging
Building on insights from recent research on ‘return mobilities’ among the second generation, this paper addresses the trans-national practices of young British- and American-born people of Egyptian ancestry and, in particular, their experiences in Egypt during a time of great social and political upheaval. In observing the ways in which many of these individuals effectively operate in their parent’s homelands by drawing on Western credentials or…
Everyday Nationhood
This is an edited collection. It is closed access for copyright reasons
Affective nationalism
This commentary was published in the journal, Progress in Human Geography [SAGE © The Author(s)] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132516665279
Conclusion
The conclusion reflects on the current status of debates around nationalism and suggests avenues for future research. In particular, it argues that more attention should be paid to incorporating insights from the study of everyday life, across a range of disciplines, and notes the importance of adopting mixed-methods approaches. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updat…
Introduction
The introduction puts the work of Billig’s Banal Nationalism into context. It briefly traces its origins and discusses its key argument: nationalism is a dominant discursive register because it pervasively‚ but unconsciously populates our everyday space and time. The introduction also discusses the multifarious ways in which banal nationalism has been operationalized in various settings and disciplinary contexts and it offers a short overview of …
Mediatization and Sport
The concept of mediatization has proved remarkably popular in the past decade, although recent critiques have challenged its media-centrism, ahistoricism, and conceptual clarity. In this article, we draw on the work of those who suggest that mediatization is best deployed as a means of understanding particular social domains and the ways in which institutions and actors orientate their activities towards media. Using association football, or socc…
Media events and cosmopolitan fandom
Academic literature on media events is increasingly concerned with their global dimensions and the applicability of Dayan and Katz’s theoretical concept in a post-national context. This article contributes to this debate by exploring the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) as a global media event. In particular, we employ a perspective from ‘inside the media event’, drawing upon empirical material collected during the 2014 Eurovision final in Copenhage…
Political science (38 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Politics (32 works) · Law (31 works) · Law (22 works) · Media studies (22 works) · Nationalism (18 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Epistemology (14 works)