Marcus Free
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674262 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marcus Free |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marcus |
| FAMILY NAME | Free |
| SIGNATURE | FREE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Limerick |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9758-9426 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Sport, migration and national identity in contemporary Irish media
Taking a "cultural studies" approach that focuses on the ways in which media negotiate the intersections of nation, race and ethnicity, this article examines Irish print and broadcast media discourses of migration surrounding the Irish national soccer team and Gaelic games following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. It argues that the focus on the Irish soccer team's "home-grown" diversity has superficially celebrated a developing national co…
Getting up to mischief
Best known as co-writer of Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted (1995–98), Irish writer Arthur Mathews is among the most versatile in recent British and Irish television comedy. Mathews’s other British work includes sketch show Big Train (1998–2002), Toast of London (2013–15) and Toast of Tinseltown (2022–present), while his work for Irish television includes the sitcom Val Falvey TD (2009). Drawing on interviews with Mathews concerning his formation and …
Sport and Media in Ireland
Introduction to the Special Issue
This special issue examines aspects of Irish television at the current political, economic and cultural conjuncture in Ireland, and against the backdrop of two major crises since the 1990s: the first deriving from the Catholic Church’s institutional abuse scandals, which progressively weakened its power and influence; the second from the 2008 collapse of the Celtic Tiger economic boom, following which years of austerity have deepened social inequ…
Smart, clued-in guys’
Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom ended with the 2008 global financial crisis. There followed a series of severe ‘austerity’ budgets and public service pay deals involving cuts in public service provision and employment reform. These were accompanied by approving Irish media narratives of atonement for Celtic Tiger ‘excess’ and, more recently, of corresponding ‘recovery’ through collective and individual discipline and entrepreneurial endeav…
From there to here
Irish media representation of rugby union in the post-1995 professional era has become a vehicle for the rehearsal of fantasies and anxieties concerning national identity in the context of the Republic of Ireland as a neoliberal state. Irish rugby’s reorganization and competitive successes have generated comforting images and discourses of centralized management, national cohesion and continuity while successive Irish governments’ neoliberal poli…
The run of ourselves
This article examines the emergence of the themes of shame and guilt in Irish print and broadcast media in the wake of Ireland’s 2008 economic collapse. It considers how the potential search for explanation of the crisis as a manifestation of unregulated banking and development sectors was displaced onto a confessional discursive pattern in which emphasis was placed on rampant borrowing and consumption as reflective of collective narcissism and a…
Don't Tell Me I'm Still on That Feckin' Island
The article examines how, through such means as interviews and DVD commentaries, television situation comedy writer Graham Linehan has discursively elaborated a distinctly migrant masculine identity as an Irish writer in London. It highlights his stress on how the working environment of British broadcasting and the tutelage of senior British broadcasters facilitated the satirical vision of Ireland in Father Ted. It focuses on the gendering of his…
Consuming Football in late modern life
Diego Maradona and the psychodynamics of football fandom in international cinema
Taking a psychoanalytic approach, the article examines and compares how three films explore the psychodynamic processes of fan investment in Argentine former football star Diego Maradona. These films illustrate how his meaning as an international cultural icon is refracted by specific fan experiences and fantasies, and are variously informed by, and critically explore, the myths of virtual death, resurrection, redemption and geopolitical oppositi…
Sport and Film
On the edge
Irish-born characters and characters whose names indicate Irish descent recur in the television and film work of Liverpool writers Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale. Their frequently troublesome dramatic presence often marks them as alien or marginal but problematic elements within British society, or suggests a troubled past and characteristic psychic dysfunction. Bleasdale's have been depicted somewhat stereotypically as economically parasitic …
Football's 'Coming Out
This article examines the current contradictory discourses on homosexuality and soccer within the British (specifically English) newspaper media. While support ostensibly is given in the press to the eradication of homophobia in relation to soccer, the continuing promotion of traditional masculine football stereotypes, such as the 'hard man', imagines an ongoing heterosexual normativity. Furthermore, the media fascination with professional soccer…
Migration, Masculinity and the Fugitive State of Mind in the Irish Emigrant Footballer Autobiography
In recent years the ‘confessional’ autobiography has varied the hitherto notoriously banal professional football biography in Britain (Whannel 2002). Co- or ‘ghost-written’ ‘autobiographies’ of such former emigrant Irish or Irish descended international footballers as Roy Keane, Tony Cascarino, Niall Quinn, Paul McGrath and George Best have featured in this sub-genre. Their ‘confessions’ of alcoholism, gambling
From Barrytown to Ballymun
Common culture, commodity fetishism and the cultural contradictions of sport
This article examines the implications of Paul Willis’s conceptualizations of ‘common culture’ and the cultural commodity for understanding sport as a popular cultural form. It argues that Willis's Ethnographic Imagination(2000) successfully addresses accusations of ‘cultural populism’ against his earlier Common Culture(1990) by acknowledging the tensions between creative cultural consumption and the political economy of cultural production. Henc…
Paul Willis, Cultural Commodities, and Collective Sport Fandom
In sociology of sport, a considerable amount of scholarship concentrates on sport as an arena of social resistance. Fundamental to understanding resistance within practices of sport following and fandom is an underlying knowledge of the nature of sport as a cultural commodity in which fandom and following are invested. This article draws on Paul Willis’s theoretical work as a means of examining contemporary cultural commodities and the commodity …
The Uses of Sport
1. Sport, Culture and Civilisation 2. Sport, Community and the Common Culture 3. Sport, Public Culture and Community: Letters from America 4. Sport and Popular Culture 5. Sport, Postmodernism and Culture 6. Sport, Power and the Material Relations of Culture 7. Sport, Culture and Embodied Experience 8. Sport, Culture and the Ethnographic Imagination Conclusion: Sport and the 'City of Culture'
Keeping Them Under Pressure
Since 1988 the Republic of Ireland soccer team has been cast, in Irish media, as both symbol and material example of social, economic and cultural regeneration in Ireland. This paper argues that such claims are narrative discursive constructions, ways of collectively imagining national identity and interpreting recent social change by elevating individuals within the national team to the status of heroic national representatives and conjunctural …
The Uses of Sport
This textbook puts sport in the spotlight of cultural inquiry for the first time. The authors provide the essential resources for the study of sport within culture and popular culture. Sport is an important part of cultural life, yet until recently it has tended to remain on the margins of academic cultural studies. Beginning by considering sport in relation to the pre-cultural studies tradition of cultural commentary, The Uses of Sport then move…
Settling Accounts with Hooligans
Recent ethnographies of male football supporters have provided in-depth, highly engaged accounts from the supporters' subcultural perspectives. Although they are commendable for their ethnographic detail, this article's authors take issue with their theorization of the data, particularly their inadequate interrogations of gender construction and gender relations. The authors argue that McRobbie's critique of earlier male youth subcultural ethnogr…
From the 'Other' Island to the One with 'No West Side
From the 'Other' Island to the One with 'No West Side
Settling Accounts with Hooligans
Recent ethnographies of male football supporters have provided in-depth, highly engaged accounts from the supporters' subcultural perspectives. Although they are commendable for their ethnographic detail, this article's authors take issue with their theorization of the data, particularly their inadequate interrogations of gender construction and gender relations. The authors argue that McRobbie's critique of earlier male youth subcultural ethnogr…
The run of ourselves
This article examines the emergence of the themes of shame and guilt in Irish print and broadcast media in the wake of Ireland’s 2008 economic collapse. It considers how the potential search for explanation of the crisis as a manifestation of unregulated banking and development sectors was displaced onto a confessional discursive pattern in which emphasis was placed on rampant borrowing and consumption as reflective of collective narcissism and a…
Football's 'Coming Out
This article examines the current contradictory discourses on homosexuality and soccer within the British (specifically English) newspaper media. While support ostensibly is given in the press to the eradication of homophobia in relation to soccer, the continuing promotion of traditional masculine football stereotypes, such as the 'hard man', imagines an ongoing heterosexual normativity. Furthermore, the media fascination with professional soccer…
Paul Willis, Cultural Commodities, and Collective Sport Fandom
In sociology of sport, a considerable amount of scholarship concentrates on sport as an arena of social resistance. Fundamental to understanding resistance within practices of sport following and fandom is an underlying knowledge of the nature of sport as a cultural commodity in which fandom and following are invested. This article draws on Paul Willis’s theoretical work as a means of examining contemporary cultural commodities and the commodity …
Common culture, commodity fetishism and the cultural contradictions of sport
This article examines the implications of Paul Willis’s conceptualizations of ‘common culture’ and the cultural commodity for understanding sport as a popular cultural form. It argues that Willis's Ethnographic Imagination(2000) successfully addresses accusations of ‘cultural populism’ against his earlier Common Culture(1990) by acknowledging the tensions between creative cultural consumption and the political economy of cultural production. Henc…
Consuming Football in late modern life
Diego Maradona and the psychodynamics of football fandom in international cinema
Taking a psychoanalytic approach, the article examines and compares how three films explore the psychodynamic processes of fan investment in Argentine former football star Diego Maradona. These films illustrate how his meaning as an international cultural icon is refracted by specific fan experiences and fantasies, and are variously informed by, and critically explore, the myths of virtual death, resurrection, redemption and geopolitical oppositi…
Sport, migration and national identity in contemporary Irish media
Taking a "cultural studies" approach that focuses on the ways in which media negotiate the intersections of nation, race and ethnicity, this article examines Irish print and broadcast media discourses of migration surrounding the Irish national soccer team and Gaelic games following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. It argues that the focus on the Irish soccer team's "home-grown" diversity has superficially celebrated a developing national co…
From Barrytown to Ballymun
From the 'Other' Island to the One with 'No West Side
From the 'Other' Island to the One with 'No West Side
Settling Accounts with Hooligans
Recent ethnographies of male football supporters have provided in-depth, highly engaged accounts from the supporters' subcultural perspectives. Although they are commendable for their ethnographic detail, this article's authors take issue with their theorization of the data, particularly their inadequate interrogations of gender construction and gender relations. The authors argue that McRobbie's critique of earlier male youth subcultural ethnogr…
The Uses of Sport
This textbook puts sport in the spotlight of cultural inquiry for the first time. The authors provide the essential resources for the study of sport within culture and popular culture. Sport is an important part of cultural life, yet until recently it has tended to remain on the margins of academic cultural studies. Beginning by considering sport in relation to the pre-cultural studies tradition of cultural commentary, The Uses of Sport then move…
The Uses of Sport
1. Sport, Culture and Civilisation 2. Sport, Community and the Common Culture 3. Sport, Public Culture and Community: Letters from America 4. Sport and Popular Culture 5. Sport, Postmodernism and Culture 6. Sport, Power and the Material Relations of Culture 7. Sport, Culture and Embodied Experience 8. Sport, Culture and the Ethnographic Imagination Conclusion: Sport and the 'City of Culture'
Keeping Them Under Pressure
Since 1988 the Republic of Ireland soccer team has been cast, in Irish media, as both symbol and material example of social, economic and cultural regeneration in Ireland. This paper argues that such claims are narrative discursive constructions, ways of collectively imagining national identity and interpreting recent social change by elevating individuals within the national team to the status of heroic national representatives and conjunctural …
Common culture, commodity fetishism and the cultural contradictions of sport
This article examines the implications of Paul Willis’s conceptualizations of ‘common culture’ and the cultural commodity for understanding sport as a popular cultural form. It argues that Willis's Ethnographic Imagination(2000) successfully addresses accusations of ‘cultural populism’ against his earlier Common Culture(1990) by acknowledging the tensions between creative cultural consumption and the political economy of cultural production. Henc…
Paul Willis, Cultural Commodities, and Collective Sport Fandom
In sociology of sport, a considerable amount of scholarship concentrates on sport as an arena of social resistance. Fundamental to understanding resistance within practices of sport following and fandom is an underlying knowledge of the nature of sport as a cultural commodity in which fandom and following are invested. This article draws on Paul Willis’s theoretical work as a means of examining contemporary cultural commodities and the commodity …
From Barrytown to Ballymun
Migration, Masculinity and the Fugitive State of Mind in the Irish Emigrant Footballer Autobiography
In recent years the ‘confessional’ autobiography has varied the hitherto notoriously banal professional football biography in Britain (Whannel 2002). Co- or ‘ghost-written’ ‘autobiographies’ of such former emigrant Irish or Irish descended international footballers as Roy Keane, Tony Cascarino, Niall Quinn, Paul McGrath and George Best have featured in this sub-genre. Their ‘confessions’ of alcoholism, gambling
On the edge
Irish-born characters and characters whose names indicate Irish descent recur in the television and film work of Liverpool writers Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale. Their frequently troublesome dramatic presence often marks them as alien or marginal but problematic elements within British society, or suggests a troubled past and characteristic psychic dysfunction. Bleasdale's have been depicted somewhat stereotypically as economically parasitic …
Football's 'Coming Out
This article examines the current contradictory discourses on homosexuality and soccer within the British (specifically English) newspaper media. While support ostensibly is given in the press to the eradication of homophobia in relation to soccer, the continuing promotion of traditional masculine football stereotypes, such as the 'hard man', imagines an ongoing heterosexual normativity. Furthermore, the media fascination with professional soccer…
Sport and Film
Consuming Football in late modern life
Diego Maradona and the psychodynamics of football fandom in international cinema
Taking a psychoanalytic approach, the article examines and compares how three films explore the psychodynamic processes of fan investment in Argentine former football star Diego Maradona. These films illustrate how his meaning as an international cultural icon is refracted by specific fan experiences and fantasies, and are variously informed by, and critically explore, the myths of virtual death, resurrection, redemption and geopolitical oppositi…
Don't Tell Me I'm Still on That Feckin' Island
The article examines how, through such means as interviews and DVD commentaries, television situation comedy writer Graham Linehan has discursively elaborated a distinctly migrant masculine identity as an Irish writer in London. It highlights his stress on how the working environment of British broadcasting and the tutelage of senior British broadcasters facilitated the satirical vision of Ireland in Father Ted. It focuses on the gendering of his…
The run of ourselves
This article examines the emergence of the themes of shame and guilt in Irish print and broadcast media in the wake of Ireland’s 2008 economic collapse. It considers how the potential search for explanation of the crisis as a manifestation of unregulated banking and development sectors was displaced onto a confessional discursive pattern in which emphasis was placed on rampant borrowing and consumption as reflective of collective narcissism and a…
From there to here
Irish media representation of rugby union in the post-1995 professional era has become a vehicle for the rehearsal of fantasies and anxieties concerning national identity in the context of the Republic of Ireland as a neoliberal state. Irish rugby’s reorganization and competitive successes have generated comforting images and discourses of centralized management, national cohesion and continuity while successive Irish governments’ neoliberal poli…
Smart, clued-in guys’
Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom ended with the 2008 global financial crisis. There followed a series of severe ‘austerity’ budgets and public service pay deals involving cuts in public service provision and employment reform. These were accompanied by approving Irish media narratives of atonement for Celtic Tiger ‘excess’ and, more recently, of corresponding ‘recovery’ through collective and individual discipline and entrepreneurial endeav…
Sport and Media in Ireland
Introduction to the Special Issue
This special issue examines aspects of Irish television at the current political, economic and cultural conjuncture in Ireland, and against the backdrop of two major crises since the 1990s: the first deriving from the Catholic Church’s institutional abuse scandals, which progressively weakened its power and influence; the second from the 2008 collapse of the Celtic Tiger economic boom, following which years of austerity have deepened social inequ…
Getting up to mischief
Best known as co-writer of Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted (1995–98), Irish writer Arthur Mathews is among the most versatile in recent British and Irish television comedy. Mathews’s other British work includes sketch show Big Train (1998–2002), Toast of London (2013–15) and Toast of Tinseltown (2022–present), while his work for Irish television includes the sitcom Val Falvey TD (2009). Drawing on interviews with Mathews concerning his formation and …
Sport, migration and national identity in contemporary Irish media
Taking a "cultural studies" approach that focuses on the ways in which media negotiate the intersections of nation, race and ethnicity, this article examines Irish print and broadcast media discourses of migration surrounding the Irish national soccer team and Gaelic games following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. It argues that the focus on the Irish soccer team's "home-grown" diversity has superficially celebrated a developing national co…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (14 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (13 works) · Irish (12 works) · Media studies (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Art (10 works)