Max Jack is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development at the Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin. He has conducted field research in Ireland and Germany on hardcore football fans and their cultivation of atmosphere through coordinated crowd action. His ongoing research projects focus on the affects of radical social movements and the politics of scene-making in public spaces.
"""In an age characterized by the global proliferation of televised sports events and indistinct boundaries between passion and profit, Max Jack's thought-provoking ethnography unveils ultras' hardcore fandom as a bastion of resistance to passive consumerism and the accelerated neoliberal commercialization of sports. With intriguing forays into football and hockey, Jack's compelling analysis reveals a radical form of active and collective spectatorship rooted in ultras' remarkable work orchestrating atmosphere as the quintessential multisensory public experience of fervor and passion."" * Eduardo Herrera, Indiana University * ""Insurgent Fandom is an extraordinary book, deeply embedded in fan scenes seeking collectivity in the alienating environs of late capitalism. Max Jack is a beautiful listener, a poet of fandoms. He renders their politics, their sonic atmospheres, their hopes, and their ironies with both nuance and theoretical depth. This is a sound studies book as much as it is a landmark anthropology of precarity."" * Benjamin Tausig, author of Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint *"