Making Football English, Part I

Being a fan of both soccer and Downton Abbey, I decided to check out one of Julian Fellowes’s recent productions, The English Game. The Netflix miniseries, which aired in March 2020, is about the birth of football (or what we here in the US call soccer). The feel-good, wholesome show is set in 1879 and tells the story (with some embellishments, of course) of how a working-class team challenged and disrupted a gentlemen’s game. Take a look at the trailer…

The show opens with the historic 1879 Football Association (FA) Cup quarter-finals between the Old Etonians and Darwen FC. The Old Etonians are an amateur team of gentlemen, captained by Arthur Kinnaird (Edward Holcroft), the 11th Lord of Kinnaird. Darwen FC, on the other hand, are a working-class mill team in Lancashire who have just (illegally) hired Fergus Suter (Kevin Guthrie) and Jimmy Love (James Harkness), two players from Partick, a football club in Scotland. Continue reading “Making Football English, Part I”

Guys Like Us

Still from the opening of the TV show All in the Family

If you’re of a certain generation then you likely recall the theme song to “All in the Family,” a once-popular TV show that aired in the US for 9 seasons, all throughout the 1970s. Sung before a live audience by Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, the stars of the show, it spoke of a nostalgia for the good old days — a past constantly in tension with the present of the series.

In early 2019 the show was recreated for a special live broadcast, this time with Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomei in the lead roles of Archie and Edith — the latter the eternally optimistic and long-suffering wife of the grumpy (and yes, openly racist and sexist) former. That Archie and his now outdated views were often the butt of each episode’s joke, as they say, was what made the series so popular for many, for it was broadcast at a time when race, gender, class and even generation relationships in the US were very under the microscope. Continue reading “Guys Like Us”

Am I Middle-Aged?

An image of a cat lady

A few weeks ago, after being dismayed at finding my rain gauge broken after a particularly bad snowstorm, my teenaged daughter asked me when I became interested in stuff like rainfall amounts. The question was not snarky; it was a genuine interest in what happens to certain adults who do not grow their own food that they begin to have conversations about the amount of moisture falling from the sky.  And I get it.  I can remember as a teen hearing adults talk about absolutely boring things (Insurance! Advanced dentistry!  Mortgages!  Their joints!) and wondering why everyone seemed so intrigued.  Was adulthood, after all, merely an extended stage of pain, weather-watching, and paper-shuffling? (I’ll leave it to you to answer that). Continue reading “Am I Middle-Aged?”

When You Don’t Look the Part

An image of workers in Oldsmobile Parts and Accessories

I brought my car to the dealership recently to have some work done. While the service department — interesting they’re called “service” and not “mechanics,” signaling (or suggesting?) perhaps a higher level of expertise — was working on my car, I started checking out some of the cars in the showroom. As I started eyeing the car I hope to get in a few years, I expected to be interrupted by a salesperson who would come running over to try and sell me on the car. Continue reading “When You Don’t Look the Part”

It’s All About Us

A heart and The deadly attacks in Paris last Friday have generated sincere expressions of shock, solidarity, mourning, and anger from around the world, yet that response also generated critical hashtags such as #selectivemourning. As many have discussed in social media and articles, bombings in Beirut the previous evening received only limited coverage in the US media and few mentions on social media. We can blame the media, but that is a little simplistic, as the media not only directs our interests but also reflects them. If sufficient numbers in the audience clamored for more information about the attacks in Beirut or previous attacks on civilians over the past twelve months in Nigeria, Kenya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, perpetrated by a range of forces, then the media coverage would increase. In fact, most who have pointed out the imbalance in the coverage are only doing so in the light of the Paris attacks. Few changed their Facebook profile photos for solidarity with Lebanon, despite it appearing in the news. Continue reading “It’s All About Us”

This Job Would Be Great If It Weren’t For The Students

Two people wearing graduation gowns

As a person who works at a small, Catholic liberal arts university that has a mission to serve underprivileged students, I am often intrigued by the manner in which discussions about the educational rights of the underprivileged weave their way through the academy.  I’m interested precisely because it seems that almost every scholar I know can talk about how enraged they are about the barriers that exist for underprivileged students, but few seem to openly connect this to the fact that the ways we are groomed to think about our own jobs simply reproduce these very same inequities. Continue reading “This Job Would Be Great If It Weren’t For The Students”

Who Are You? I’m a Leg Crosser

madmensittingWho Are You?” asks members of Culture on the Edge to reflect
on one of their own many identities (whether national, gendered,
racial, familial, etc.), theorizing at the same time the self-
identification that they each chose to discuss.

Sometimes when students are in my office and I’m trying to draw their attention to the sometimes subtle ways in which we act ourselves into certain sorts of identities I’ll ask them to take a quick look at how we’re both sitting. There’s a good chance that I’m behind my desk, reclining a bit in my office chair, and seated like those guys above, and there’s an equally good chance that the student I’m talking to is not seated like this. And so drawing attention to how we’re both sitting — something that we’ve each done quite unselfconsciously, I’m sure — gives us a chance to think through identity as an empirically observable thing, as something we persuade ourselves and others that we have by repeatedly acting ourselves into it. Continue reading “Who Are You? I’m a Leg Crosser”