Insurgent Fandom offers a behind-the-scenes look at a transnational subculture known to few--ultra. As the most dedicated soccer fans, ultras support their team through collective singing, jumping, flag-waving, and lighting marine flares. While some characterize ultras as hooligans, author Max Jack argues that ultras' performative style of support is in part a protest informed by the ultras' constant friction with the state, the mainstream media, and the commercial priorities of sports' governing bodies. 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. With political implications extending past the realm of sports, ultras have even become key actors in some of the most significant mass protests of the 21st century-including those in Cairo (2011), Istanbul (2013), and Kiev (2013). Insurgent Fandom embraces this politic of dissent at the heart of crowd action and casts a light on stadia as a breeding ground for alternative social and political possibilities.

"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