Welcome to the website for Steve Redhead, Professor of Cultural Studies in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University in Adelaide in South Australia. Steve is a well known international author and Professor and has worked at numerous universities around the world. Steve lives in Adelaide in South Australia with his wife Professor Tara Brabazon. This website showcases Steve’s output to date – books, chapters in books, articles, podcasts, vodcasts, reviews, social media, all freely downloadable – and rolling reviews of all his eighteen books. It features a regular blog on what he has called ‘Theoretical Times’, his label for the contemporary post-crash cultural condition we live in today. Steve’s new book, also called Theoretical Times, is published in paperback by Emerald Publishing. It is distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Footprint Books. Steve is currently working on two new books: Three Coups, a socio-legal/criminology study of the JFK Assassination, Watergate and Trump Election victory, and New Realisms and New Materialisms, a critical look at how new realisms in methodology and philosophy complement the new materialisms in contemporary theory.
Reviews
This savagely entertaining book…has the feel of catching shifts in style and attitudes as the shifts occur – whether the styles and attitudes are those of the Casuals, who, armed with increasingly sophisticated clothes and weapons, are now, says Redhead, taking not only “ends” but seats in the stands as well (the seats make useful missiles); or whether the attitudes are those of the managers who used to tell their hard men to go in the first 25 seconds for clever wingers, and who now tell them to go for clever blacks. Redhead has a sharp eye for the realities behind the vapid moralisings of TV pundits, sports pages hacks and Thatcher talkalikes.
The changes in international football fan culture and the wider shifts in society that they mirror form the basis for this innovative book, mixing academic research with current happenings on and off the pitch
Redhead’s gentle interviewing technique proves to be a winner: he manages to unearth information more aggressive hacks could not. It is engrossing to read Warner and Welsh’s confessions…and it is amusing to discover that Roddy Doyle is supporting a Belgian opera based on The Commitments.
Redhead’s state-of-the-art exploration of contemporary football culture is bursting with fresh ideas, which he applies with both imagination and precision to his object of study. This trenchant mixture of raw realism and high theory is exactly what is needed to break the study of football culture out of its current ailing paradigms and reset the coordinates for a new trajectory. A genuine pathfinder.
