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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

The (self)management of emotions: the complexities of activist practices between corporeal co-presence and a digital platform in an antifascist football club.

presenters

    LEO ARGOUARC'H

    Nationality: FRANCE

    Residence: FRANCE

    Université Lumière Lyon-II

    Presence:Online

My research is partly a desire to read the social through emotions by looking at the bodily practices of football fandom. The specificity of the group of fans I am interested in though, is, I believe, a hybrid form of collective action, that mixes practices that are rooted both in the football fandom culture, more specifically the ultra culture, and the aesthetics of political demonstrations. This is, I believe, a new political form in itself. However, from this corporeal practice and fieldwork, a first epistemic difficulty has arisen, as a result of a shift, corresponding to a gradual dematerialisation of the fieldwork, following the growing importance that a digital platform has taken on in the organisation of this catharsis. This research is being carried out within an antifascist football club in Paris - MFC 1871. This club is part of a new international trend of protest against modern football - that of secession, which consists of breaking away from modern football, in order to create its own space of protest and resistance through the practice of sport and its modes of assistance. Most of these clubs are based on self-management. The particularity of our fieldwork is that MFC 1871 organises its self-management with the support of a digital tool. It uses a platform to organise its activities and encourages the emergence of self-management practices through the circulation and transparency of information about the actions of the club's various committees, equal access to the digital tool, and self-training on this platform against a backdrop of DIY culture. Our main focus is then to capture emotions in a field where a large proportion of situations begin in digital form, only to be dealt with in corporeal co-presence, and vice versa. How does it affect self-management ?

Keywords:

self-management ; emotions ; digital platform ; antifascism