Introduction
In the midst of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, a Qatari official admitted that the number of migrant workers who had been killed due to poor working conditions in the process of building the tournament stadium was not, as FIFA and Doha had previously insisted, three people, but approximately 400–500.Footnote 1 At the London 2012 Olympics, the oil company BP, responsible for 1.53% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions between 1988 and 2015, was one of the Games’s key ‘sustainability partners’.Footnote 2 In the lead-up to the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest in Baku, Human Rights Watch reported that Azerbaijan had forcibly evicted several hundred families from their homes in order to make way for the brand-new Crystal Hall arena,Footnote 3 a practice that parallels similar reports of forced evictions and displacement at the Beijing, London, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Paris Olympics.Footnote 4 And while Russia was excluded from Eurovision following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022,Footnote 5 Azerbaijan, which has displaced 13,000 ethnic Armenians through its seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023,Footnote 6 and Israel, which has killed at least 70,000–186,000 Palestinians in its genocide against Palestine since October 2023,Footnote 7 continue to participate in the annual song contest as normal.
From labour exploitation to forced displacement to environmental destruction to artwashing war and genocide, global mega-events enable and provide cover for extreme human suffering by normalizing the perpetrating states’ actions on the international stage. Yet the number of people who watch and enjoy these events has never been higher. The International Olympic Committee estimates that approximately 5 billion people – or 84 per cent of the potential global audience – tuned in to the Paris Olympics in 2024.Footnote 8 The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) reports that the 2024 Eurovision in Malmö was watched by approximately 163 million people – an increase of around 1 million viewers compared to the 2023 contest.Footnote 9
The duality of spectacle and atrocity at mega-events means that the events’ organizers, participants, and audiences are, to varying degrees, complicit in obscuring, normalizing, facilitating, or otherwise indirectly enabling the harms caused by or associated with the events. The entertainment provided by these spectacles is integral to maintaining our complicity as audiences and fans, as stories of national triumph, international cooperation, and musical and athletic heroism enthral us and keep us watching, encouraging us to turn a blind eye in the name of not spoiling the fun. Yet the dynamics of this form of enjoyment have received relatively little attention from scholars of complicity. Their focus has been on the violent and economic structures that coerce people into complicity in situations of limited agency, from collaborating with occupying and authoritarian regimes under threat of violence to having limited ethical alternatives to consumer goods under capitalism. What is still needed is an account of the ways in which we willingly engage with forms of entertainment that we know are implicated in harm, not because we are coerced, but because we enjoy them. Understanding how we are enticed into relations of complicity matters because it draws attention to the political power implicit in claims that certain activities or cultural objects are ‘just harmless fun’, and to the roles enjoyment plays in obscuring and enabling harm across local and transnational contexts.
International Relations scholars often point to the various ways people, institutions, cultural texts, and the discipline itself can be complicit in perpetuating various harms, although they almost always do so in passing, taking the explanatory power of labelling something complicit for granted.Footnote 10 There has been less interest in theorizing how complicity works in world politics – how people are pulled into, kept in, or try to resist relations of complicity, and what those negotiations might mean for how we make sense of what we consider to be political in the context of popular culture. Sorana Jude’s study of representations of complicity in the television series Fauda is one valuable exception to this trend, with its focus both on how producers and consumers of popular culture become complicit in ‘shaping public knowledge of war, violence and military occupation’, and how portrayals of complicity in the series itself spotlight the emotional politics of navigating identity and agency under the Israeli occupation of Palestine.Footnote 11 But where Jude focuses on overt depictions of violently coerced complicity, I am interested in how audiences navigate complicity in relation to entertainment that denies any connection to violence at all. Doing so makes it possible to examine how people navigate complicity in relation to popular culture that brands itself as a force for good, and the roles enjoyment can play in maintaining and obscuring that complicity.
To this end, this article examines the role of enjoyment in enticing people into complicity in the context of global mega-events. How do people navigate the consumption of something they know or believe to be complicit in harm but nonetheless enjoy anyway? How does enjoyment obscure the idea that consuming popular culture implicates audiences in harm at all? Using the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest as a case study, I argue that the forms of what I call ‘liberal enjoyment’ frequently cultivated at international mega-events work to obscure complicity by maintaining the fiction that the contest is ‘non-political’, and by encouraging fans to ignore the violent politics the contest is inexorably implicated in as a contest between states, specifically Israel’s genocide of Palestine.Footnote 12 To make this argument, I present novel focus group and interview data with fans of the contest, analysing how fans conceive of and navigate their own complicities and decisions about whether and how to engage with Eurovision in light of Israel’s participation.
Examining how fans navigate the relations between complicity and enjoyment makes three main contributions. First, it expands our understanding of the political power of enjoyment beyond IR’s current focus on the transgressive and reactionary forms of enjoyment associated with racism and the far right.Footnote 13 Second, it offers a new conceptualization of the role of enjoyment in enabling complicity in supposedly ‘non-political’ and ‘progressive’ spaces, pushing popular culture and world politics (PCWP) scholarship to consider the connections between popular culture and structural and relational violence beyond cultural texts that are centred on more overt portrayals of harm, such as military video games, or film, television, and novels about war, occupation, and terrorism.Footnote 14 Finally, the article answers the PCWP agenda’s call to pay closer attention to audience interpretations and engagements with the politics of popular culture by centring fans as agents of international politics.Footnote 15 Audiences in general provide valuable insight into how politics ‘circulate and take effect’ through the consumption and interpretation of popular culture.Footnote 16 Yet it is fans in particular - with their powerful emotional and social attachments to their fannish objects, and modes of political agency that are frequently channelled through what fan studies scholars call ‘consumer citizenship’ - that can help us to understand enjoyment as a mechanism of complicity.Footnote 17 As Melissa Brough and Sangita Shresthova put it, ‘fan participation in and through commercial entertainment spaces is not predetermined to be resistant or complicit – in fact, it is often both – but its political significance lies in part in the changes in relations of power that may occur through such participation’.Footnote 18 It is through an examination of fans’ practices, justifications, and emotional attachments to the contest that we can better understand how enjoyment keeps people in relations of complicity.
Mechanisms of complicity: Coercion, convenience … fun?
Critical perspectives on complicity recognise humans as collectively and structurally implicated in each other’s suffering. Complicity in this view is an ongoing, relational condition; what Mark Sanders calls a ‘folded-together-ness’ in ‘the being of being human’.Footnote 19 Where the individualist accounts of complicity commonly found in criminal law and moral philosophy are concerned with identifying ‘what individual, or group of individuals, was complicit with whom in the violation of which rule’Footnote 20 in order to apportion blame or culpability,Footnote 21 critical perspectives suggest that complicity cannot be avoided simply by not violating legal and moral rules, because the rules themselves and the societies that produce them are sources of harm.Footnote 22 Instead, drawing on Arendtian distinctions between guilt as directly causing harm, and responsibility as accountability for being part of a community that has enabled harm,Footnote 23 they take a broader view to interrogate the structural conditions that render all of us complicit regardless of our knowledge or consent, as well as the sociopolitical dynamics and relations that shape how we understand the degrees and forms complicity takes.Footnote 24 The aim is to ‘recognise the “little perpetrator” in each of us’ so that we might work towards resisting and ultimately changing the cultural-political conditions that make us complicit in global suffering.Footnote 25
Within shifting structures of power and material contexts, the factors that compel or facilitate complicit behaviour vary considerably. In totalitarian regimes, colonial occupation, and war, the primary coercive force tends to be violence. Faced with threats to life and livelihood, collaboration with one’s oppressors often becomes a matter of survival.Footnote 26 Beyond immediate threats of violence, people are also made complicit in contributing to and benefitting from the suffering of others through their participation in global structures of imperialism, racial-capitalism, and patriarchy. The coercive mechanisms at play here involve structures so large, opaque, and normalized that people either cannot trace the full extent of the harms embedded within their practices, or cannot easily resist them. But as feminist, anti-colonial, and critical whiteness scholars point out, complicity is also driven here by convenience and comfort, so that even when we are aware of the harms involved in certain choices, their ready availability and the discomfort of self-reflection make them difficult to (want to) resist.Footnote 27
Similarly, capitalist modes of isolation, urgency, and what Marx called the ‘fetishisation of commodities’Footnote 28 create impressions that harmful consumption practices are nonetheless essential, while eliminating (or appearing to eliminate) more ethical alternatives by constructing them as inefficient, unaffordable, and undesirable – a dynamic illustrated, for example, by arguments that Global North consumers must buy fast fashion produced in sweatshops by Global South workers because clothing produced in non-exploitative conditions is too expensive.Footnote 29 The structural conditions that obscure, distance, and normalise the harms produced through life in racial-capitalist society intersect with individual consumer convenience and preference to complicate how we understand structure and agency, and the dynamics that coerce, facilitate, and encourage complicitous practices and systems. To paraphrase Sartre, our choices are not fully our own, and yet we are still responsible for them.Footnote 30
Among the range of forces driving complicit behaviour, one factor has been paid considerably less attention: enjoyment. Where it has been considered, it has almost exclusively been conceptualized in a negative relation, that is, as spoiling the enjoyment of others by pointing out its harms.Footnote 31 Sara Ahmed’s figure of the feminist killjoy is the quintessential example here: those who refuse to be complicit or to go along with a particular cause of harm – or ‘refuse to convene over happiness’ in Ahmed’s original formulation – are cast as ‘the ones who ruin the atmosphere … often as a way of protecting the right to certain forms of social bonding or of holding onto whatever is perceived to be under threat’.Footnote 32 This view highlights the powerful influence enjoyment – particularly the threat of ‘spoiling’ it – can have in maintaining complicit relations to harmful objects or systems, but this is only one part of how enjoyment works as a mechanism of complicity. When it comes to popular culture and entertainment in particular, the mechanisms keeping us in relations of complicity can also be ones of attraction: cultural institutions and creators deploy marketing, spectacle, and the promise of a good time to entice people to tune in.Footnote 33
Enjoyment frequently intersects with other mechanisms of complicity, especially racial-capitalist mechanisms of convenience, perceived scarcity of consumer alternatives, and the normalization of white privilege and supremacy as a ‘right to enjoy’.Footnote 34 Jodie Dean, for example, argues that capitalism conditions how we experience enjoyment; it urges us to constantly throw ourselves into new, consumable forms of enjoyment, lest we miss out on, or fail to take full advantage of, the chance to enjoy.Footnote 35 These intersecting structures can make it harder to resist or recognize the ways we are implicated in suffering, meaning the entanglements between structure and agency that shape how people act within broader structural conditions persist in spaces and moments of enjoyment too.
To draw out some of these dynamics in relation to popular culture, I follow Jude in making a distinction between complicity as production and complicity as consumption.Footnote 36 The former refers to ‘the creation of cultural artefacts that reproduce limited understanding of … actors and identities’, while the latter concerns popular culture audiences’ ‘complicity with the violence that they consume through visual means’.Footnote 37 The distinction between the ways producers create environments that enable harm and the ways consumers navigate those environments is crucial for understanding the relations between structure and agency that might better equip us to resist the structures that cause harm and keep us complicit. But the coercive mechanism that underpins Jude’s analysis, and indeed the majority of complicity scholarship – violence – rarely figures in Global North audiences’ entertainment consumption choices. As compelling and hard to turn away from as Eurovision or the Olympics are, no one is being forced to watch them down the barrel of a gun.
Enticing complicity: The politics of liberal enjoyment
Enjoyment is integral to understanding how mega-events encourage fans to tune out knowledge of the ways the events and their audiences might be complicit in harm. Elsewhere in IR, scholars have been paying attention to enjoyment in the context of reactionary politics and deviance, particularly in relation to racism and the far right. These works draw on Lacanian understandings of jouissance to conceptualize political enjoyment as transgressive: either getting kicks from crossing boundaries of normative acceptability in polite society, or as being under threat from racialized ‘others’, so that an ethnonational or other exclusionary group’s ability to enjoy things is hindered by political correctness and killjoys.Footnote 38
The enjoyment infrastructure of cultural and sporting mega-events is different. There certainly are elements of the intensity and agony of jouissance for fans who live and die by the success or failure of their team, band, or nation.Footnote 39 But the producers of mega-events seek to provide forms of entertainment that they present as neither reactionary nor transgressive. Rather, as major international competitions pitched as being suitable for all audiences, and supported by governments, public broadcasters, and corporate sponsorship, they are decidedly liberal and mainstream.
The specific forms of fun people experience while attending or watching mega-events vary, but mega-event organizers generally aim to elicit emotions such as passion (love of the game), inspiration (seeing sporting and musical heroes perform at the highest levels), belonging (being part of the same experience as millions of others around the world), and excitement and suspense structured by the rules of competition and tropes of broadcasting. The liberal narratives of inclusion, diversity, cosmopolitanism, and merit espoused by these events – exemplified in Eurovision’s slogan ‘United by Music’ or the Olympic ethos of ‘excellence, respect and friendship’ – create seemingly ‘welcoming’ atmospheres (while surreptitiously governing who is made to feel welcome in what ways).Footnote 40 Claims of cross-cultural cooperation, and particularly the harnessing of queer-friendly messaging and representation by host cities, event organizers, and the artists and athletes themselves mean that, for many fans, engaging with the contest is not only considered harmless fun, but signals a positive, even progressive political orientation.Footnote 41 This is, as Phoenix Andrews puts it, fun with ‘a sense of purpose’.Footnote 42
Olympics scholar Jules Boykoff calls this form of organized, liberal enjoyment ‘celebration capitalism’; a mode in which commercialization, marketing, securitization, and ‘feel-good claims of environmental and social sustainability’ are mobilized ‘to create a celebratory space’ where enjoyment serves and is structured by a broader economic and social purpose.Footnote 43 Angharad Closs Stephens similarly points to the ‘party atmosphere’ surrounding the London 2012 Olympics to show how nationalism takes hold through the circulation of positive affective atmospheres.Footnote 44 At cultural mega-events like Eurovision, these celebratory and party atmospheres are produced through fantasies of a (musically) united Europe,Footnote 45 increasingly high-budget aesthetics and performances that generate feelings of ‘community and abundance’,Footnote 46 and practices of ‘playful nationalism’, wherein fans and artists adorn themselves in the trappings of nationalism – waving flags, dressing up in national colours or costume – to ironically or earnestly express support for their home country or favourite act.Footnote 47
The liberal narratives and celebratory affects produced by mega-events are further complicated by organizers’ insistence that they are ‘non-political’. In practice, as the now vast body of scholarship on sport-, art-, music-, and pinkwashing shows, the organizers of mega-events lean on neutrality to shield themselves from criticism.Footnote 48 Discursive claims to neutrality work to ‘disappear’ any politics that might seep through the non-political shield by recasting them as ‘values’ – a move that implicates mega-events in liberalism’s broader ideological aim to position itself as the only ‘real’ alternative to fascism and racism while sanitizing liberalism’s own exclusionary practices.Footnote 49 Patrick J. Vernon, for instance, highlights how the United Kingdom’s strategic use of LGBTIQ + inclusivity narratives in the 2022 Commonwealth Games perpetuated homo-colonial governance by subtly chastising Commonwealth states whose LGBTIQ + rights records ‘didn’t match [the Commonwealth Games Federation]’s values’, while distracting from both ‘ongoing expressions of British colonial violence’ and the British Government’s own domestic transphobic agenda.Footnote 50 Other scholars have shown how Eurovision’s liberal enjoyment structures water down and appropriate performances with overtly radical content from anti-slavery to climate action,Footnote 51 meaning that no matter how explicit the performances are, the environment they are performed in turns them into ‘Western-turned-global-style amusement and work for the benefit of pacifying the politics of inclusion and representation that obscure the underlying racism and persistent inequalities’.Footnote 52 The ‘neutrality’ stances of mega-events are thus essential to maintaining enjoyment because they provide cover to avoid uncomfortable, vibe-killing political discussions, especially those regarding colonialism and race. Simultaneously, the enjoyment itself is expressly mobilized to promote and naturalize a specific set of ‘post-political’ liberal values that erase or appropriate any challenges to the carefully curated narrative of liberal harmony.Footnote 53 At these events, narratives of diversity, inclusion, and peace are appropriate themes for ‘family entertainment’ as long as they have been thoroughly cleansed of their underlying political content, but acknowledging the global political conditions that reveal how that peace is only enjoyed by audiences in the Global North – and often at the direct expense of Global South audiences – is not.
The enjoyment that arises from these celebratory atmospheres matters for understanding complicity in three key ways. First, organizers of mega-events go to great lengths to set up affective environments that prioritize liberal enjoyment in order to draw as wide an audience and consumer base as possible into the festivities. Mega-events entice audiences to tune in, buy expensive tickets and merchandise, contribute to the celebratory atmospheres, tolerate enhanced securitization measures around the host location, and set aside political concerns or everyday inconveniences precisely because, for many, the spectacle and scale of these events offer genuinely fun experiences. Membership in fandoms and participation in online discourses during the events further provide feelings of community on a global scale.Footnote 54 Complicity here is enabled by the fact that the enjoyment offered by these events is difficult to replicate elsewhere, and is alluring enough that even as fans are aware of the events’ problems, they nonetheless cannot pull themselves away.
Second, in order to maintain these atmospheres of celebration and enjoyment, event organizers and host states downplay political action that might negatively affect audiences’ experience of enjoyment while naturalizing politics that serve that enjoyment, making it harder to recognize the politics surrounding the events at all. Their dual claims of political neutrality and uniting the world through music or sport construct a distinction between ‘politics’ as controversial geopolitical disputes that threaten the events’ carefully curated liberal narratives, and ‘values’ that reify and naturalize those narratives.Footnote 55 Audiences, too, often strive to separate culture and politics in order to protect their own enjoyment. By presenting themselves as creating communities of consumers united by an assumed common world view or identity, Eurovision and other international mega-events operate as what Lauren Berlant calls ‘juxtapolitical’ spaces,Footnote 56 ‘thriving precisely because the joy and comfort they produce are made more appealing through their contrast to the depravity of politics’.Footnote 57 It is precisely because audiences enjoy and have intimate attachments to cultural objects that we seek to separate them from the forms of politics that might dampen enjoyment of the things we love. Complicit attachments are enabled here by the fact that organizers and audiences alike bracket their object of enjoyment off from threats to that enjoyment: by maintaining fantasies of keeping politics ‘separate’ from ‘non-political’ mega-events, organizers and audiences can acknowledge that terrible political matters are occurring elsewhere in the world, while skirting any sense of responsibility for responding to or trying to change them.
Finally, liberal enjoyment organizes and disciplines dissent by casting even the mildest criticisms of mega-events as spoiling the fun. As playful nationalist, cosmopolitan, and capitalist sentiments are mobilized and consolidated on global scales through the circulation of good vibes, it becomes increasingly difficult to criticize or stand apart from the event around which celebratory atmospheres have been built.Footnote 58 Membership in the community that mega-events claim to produce is therefore contingent on endorsing – or at the very least not disrupting – the liberal narratives of celebration, and the punishment for failing to do so is (the threat of) social exile and being branded a killjoy.Footnote 59 As Boykoff puts it, ‘interlopers who are not there to revel in the merrymaking – political activists, social critics, and those allegedly engaging in “anti-social behaviour” – must be ejected’.Footnote 60 In this case, complicity takes the forms of silence and going along with the crowd, but also kicking people who refuse to stay silent out of the party.
Enjoyment and complicity at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest
The remainder of this article focuses on Israel’s participation in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest to examine how fans of the contest understand, navigate, or contest their complicity in supporting an event that provides an international platform for a genocidal state, and to demonstrate how enjoyment shapes the choices and justifications fans make. I focus on Israel’s participation in Eurovision because questions of whether Israel should participate, and how fans, artists, and broadcasters should respond to the EBU’s decision to let the state participate, dominated fan discourses leading up to the contest in May 2024 (and have continued to do so throughout the 2025 and 2026 seasons). Of course, Israel’s occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians persist prior to and throughout Israel’s participation in Eurovision since 1973, as does its use of the contest to whitewash settler colonialism and perform a liberal Zionist identity narrative that keeps Israel culturally connected to the European states that enabled its creation.Footnote 61 Nonetheless, the escalation of its genocide in Palestine from October 2023 onwards sparked an unprecedented level of debate about the state’s participation, including about what responsibility fans might have, if any, to resist (or support) Israel’s involvement, both within and beyond the fan community.
At the same time, Eurovision’s organizers went to great lengths to justify their decision to allow Israel to participate and to (attempt to) prevent dissent from undermining the atmosphere of enjoyment. Among other things, they enhanced security around the Malmö Arena and auxiliary venues, and played pre-recorded cheers over audience booing to minimize the visibility and audibility of protests during the shows.Footnote 62 The contest’s then-Executive Supervisor, Martin Österdahl, explicitly cited Eurovision’s status as entertainment to distance the contest from responsibility:
We understand that people are concerned, but ultimately this is a music show, this is a family entertainment show, and we should focus on that. We are not the arena to solve a Middle East conflict.Footnote 63
The 2024 Eurovision therefore provides a particular opportunity to examine how atmospheres and discourses of liberal enjoyment cultivated by mega-events are mobilized to maintain relations of complicity, and how that enjoyment shapes how fans and audiences understand, justify, or resist their complicit entanglements. Fans understand, contest, and navigate their implication in Israel’s genocide through the contest in diverse ways. The structural conditions of enjoyment and the downplaying of politics entice fans to stay tied to the contest in powerful and compelling ways, yet the variation in how fans navigate complicity show that they still have considerable agency in terms of the choices they make and the factors that influence their decisions.
The results presented in the following sections come from online focus groups and interviews conducted in English with Eurovision fans in June–July 2024, shortly after the conclusion of the 2024 Eurovision in Malmö, Sweden. They are part of a larger project about fans’ vernacular understandings and articulations of the politics surrounding Eurovision. Vernacular approaches are useful for studying politics among fan communities because of their focus on ordinary discourses and their recognition that political concepts – in the case of this study, complicity and enjoyment – are conceptualized and practised ‘differently in different places and at different times’.Footnote 64 Focusing on vernacular practices therefore helps to capture variation in how fans think about and experience politics, and thus, variation in how they exercise their agency as consumers and political subjects within structural constraints. This approach also complements other audience studies and PCWP scholarship which, building on the work of Stuart Hall, is interested in how consumer-audiences construct the meanings of texts independently from and in relation to producers.Footnote 65 To this end, focus groups open up possibilities to examine how fans articulate and contest conceptions of enjoyment and complicity in Eurovision’s cultural-political context by making space for ‘openness, spontaneity, and reflexivity among researchers and participants’.Footnote 66 The decision to conduct the sessions online was also an attempt to navigate my own complicity as a Eurovision researcher; online focus groups made it possible to speak with fans without being physically present at or financially contributing to the event.
I conducted six focus groups of between three and six people – a total cohort of 28 Eurovision fans. Thirteen fans also agreed to individual follow-up interviews, in which they were able to elaborate on themes raised in the focus groups or bring up additional topics not covered in them. I recruited participants through Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky, as well as word of mouth among the Eurovision communities I have been part of through my own engagement with the contest. The cohort includes Eurovision fans from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Spain, Sweden, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All participants have been given pseudonyms. Of the total 28 participants, seven attended the contest in person in Malmö; 15 watched from home; and six boycotted. Most relevant for this article, most of the participants expressed at least some criticism of the state of Israel’s recent actions and/or at least some frustration over how the EBU had handled Israel’s participation, although they had different views on what these matters meant for Eurovision and their own engagement with it.
Using thematic analysis to identify key themes, I parsed the transcripts for references to complicity. The article works from the theoretical position that complicity is a structural condition, meaning that all consumers of popular culture are, in practice if not intention, complicit in the suffering those cultural objects and texts enable in varying ways. However, not all the fans in the study (or in general) use this language specifically, and not all of them view their personal consumption practices through a lens of complicity. Nevertheless, the fact that the fans each spoke about grappling with how to engage with the contest and how Israel’s participation was affecting their experience of the contest means that they were aware of the situation surrounding Israel’s participation, and had in practice engaged to greater or lesser degrees in wrestling with how Israel’s participation might affect their relationship with the contest. Thus, rather than categorizing specific actions as ‘complicit’ or ‘non-complicit’, or coding for specific uses of the term ‘complicity’, I focused instead on how my interlocutors articulated their decision-making processes and justifications regarding whether and how they engaged with the 2024 event. This included focusing on what decisions they made, why they made them, what reasons they gave for their decisions, how they felt while making the decisions and afterwards, and whether they described their decisions as (more or less) straightforward or challenging.
I then read these quotes for references to enjoyment. The vernacular approach also informs how enjoyment is conceptualized and coded here. Rather than offering a definitive account of what constitutes enjoyment from a particular theoretical approach, I am interested in the ways fans themselves articulate enjoyment and the ways it features in their decision-making. This means enjoyment here serves as a broad umbrella term for a range of related everyday affects and experiences, which may be experienced to varying degrees of intensity or mundanity, including fun, amusement, entertainment, joy, excitement, and love. It also includes enjoyment’s negative relations, including not having fun, or using enjoyment as a distraction or escape from other troubles – as cultural theorist Ien Ang notes, audiences’ experiences of enjoying ‘something as complex as a long-running television serial’ are inherently ‘ambivalent and contradictory’.Footnote 67 From this reading, I coded the results according to the differing ways enjoyment figured in their decision-making, particularly the ways fans weigh enjoyment relative to other considerations. The results below are thus organized around three groups of fans: fans who bracket politics in order to prioritize enjoyment; fans who struggle to make decisions as they wrestle with tensions between enjoyment and politics; and fans who forgo or alter their enjoyment in order to uphold their politics.
‘This is just entertainment’: bracketing politics and enjoyment
One of the most common explanations fans provide for their engagement with Eurovision despite awareness of its more troubling politics is that they can separate politics from culture. This framing is perhaps unsurprising given that it mirrors the official ‘non-political’ line proffered by the EBU, although fans give more nuanced and candid explanations for why they make this separation:
I guess maybe I did not intend to, to go in a political way, like I really just love Eurovision, and I love the idea of it being, you know, uniting by music, and not necessarily, you know, being a place of politics, but again like, when it comes to humanitarianism, there’s that inherent link … in my opinion it does make it political, and so I went’ cause I wanted to go, I did not want to say like ‘I support the EBU’s decision-making’, but I went because I wanted to go.Footnote 68
I’ve always felt like I could separate what they were doing politically with the culture of Israel, like I love songs from Israel, I had one of my favourite songs was from Israel, I have some of Israeli artists on my playlists, and it was like, yeah I’m enjoying this.Footnote 69
I understand a lot more now than I did back then, but I justified [attending Eurovision in Tel Aviv in 2019] back then being like ‘listen … I’m not going to support Israel in what they’re doing. I’m going to enjoy something I like.’Footnote 70
The above quotes highlight some of the ways in which fans who are aware that Israel’s participation is inherently political nevertheless frame those politics as separate from culture and music. Enjoyment is central to this distinction: it is because they like the songs or enjoy the specific liberal atmosphere of Eurovision – ‘the idea of it being, you know, uniting by music’ – that fans have to consider what their enjoyment means when it comes into contact with discourses about potential complicities, particularly conversations about whether attending, watching, or voting necessarily means condoning the EBU’s stance. As Shauna puts it, ‘I did not want to say like “I support the EBU’s decision-making”, but I went because I wanted to go.’
The discursive separation of fans’ engagement with the contest from the actions of the contest’s organizers highlights the differences in the forms and degrees of complicity within Jude’s separation between producers and consumers.Footnote 71 In terms of complicity as production, the EBU, as well as the Executive Supervisor and Reference Group for Eurovision, undeniably hold greater structural responsibility as the actors with the authority to make the final decision about which states can participate in the contest. Fans, artists, and national broadcasters have rightly pointed to the EBU as having the primary responsibility for the harms caused by Israel’s participation (although whether the EBU’s critics consider those harms to be enabling the normalization of genocide or damaging the event itself varies).Footnote 72 However, emphasizing the EBU’s responsibility also provides a means for fans to distance themselves from recognizing their own complicities as consumers - including generating income for the EBU and contributing to voting results that are used by the state of Israel as evidence of support, whether individuals voted for Israel or not - in order to preserve their ability to enjoy the contest. Several fans noted that acknowledging any aspect of the contest that is ‘even slightly politically or socially charged’Footnote 73 can result in difficult or uncomfortable conversations that might necessitate changing how they relate to both the contest and the political issue:
I guess I see why people say like, ‘this is just entertainment, it’s not supposed to be political’… because the idea of politics involves like, responsibility … so they’re like, okay, at least Eurovision this is fun, it’s pop music, we don’t have to think about everything horrible happening in the world.Footnote 74
I think maybe the majority of people who just want to enjoy a fun competition, they might be given the opportunity to learn something but they’d actually much rather not because then they have to follow the string, and then the whole thing unravels, and then what do you do? ….Then you really have to sit with it and think about how you’re gonna approach it. And then maybe you have to take action. Oh god!Footnote 75
Discourses separating entertainment and politics, and separating audiences’ enjoyment from producers’ decision-making, thus provide a means for fans to attempt to minimize their own feelings of complicity or responsibility by expressing criticism of the EBU and/or Israel without necessarily having to alter how they interact with the contest. This is Eurovision’s juxtapolitics in action: fans wade into political debate precisely to preserve their enjoyment from the politics that are currently threatening it.Footnote 76
One fan takes the separation of politics and enjoyment a step further by framing the entertainment provided by Eurovision as sufficient to justify a conscious prioritizing of enjoyment over politics. Mark is critical of the state of Israel, a stance he attributes partly to a previously held job relating to trade relations with Palestine making him ‘definitely not in any way expert in the region but hav[ing] some understanding of some of the situation’.Footnote 77 Despite his political opposition to Israel’s actions in Palestine, he explains in his interview:
It may have come across, I would not be a natural supporter of Israel, in terms of the geopolitical situation, but I voted for [Israel’s 2018 winning song] ‘Toy’, I wanted ‘Toy’ to win, and I actually did eventually go to Tel Aviv for that Eurovision, like I really wanted that song to win, again it was like that quirky, different, interesting, and it just ticked all the boxes, so would I normally vote for Israel? No. That’s my, I guess, political bias level, but there was an amazing song and it was fantastic and I loved it and it ticked all the boxes, so I overcame that bias.
By describing his political stance as a ‘bias level’ that can be ‘overcome’, Mark not only separates enjoyment and politics, but positions them hierarchically. The aesthetic features of the performance – ‘quirky, different, interesting’ – are central to his enjoyment in terms of making the performance stand out to Mark, but also in terms of understanding how his enjoyment drew him into a closer relation of complicity by voting for and eventually travelling to Israel: if he had not enjoyed the song so much, it would not have been worth setting aside his political convictions.
Mark also draws attention to the interconnection between fans’ agency and the structural environment of enjoyment constructed by producers. Following from his point about ‘Toy’ ‘ticking all the boxes’, he also notes Russia’s past success in producing performances that are deliberately designed to entice supporters to look past the state’s actions:
I would not vote for Russia, because … I think that everything that’s happening there at the moment is a disgrace, and yet, you know, you see the year where Polina [Gagarina] went to Eurovision [in 2014], and everyone was booing, and the year after … they brought Sergey [Lazarev] back, and everyone’s cheering. I mean, Russia didn’t all of a sudden get amazing, but they put, you know, a hot gay boy up there – apparently he isn’t gay but whatever – and with an amazingly staged thing and everyone’s cheering and going mad for it. I mean, they knew their audience and they knew the things that you need to do to get people over that political bias.
Together, Mark’s comments highlight the double-edged role of enjoyment in facilitating complicity. On one hand, the producers of Eurovision and of national delegations’ performances strive to ‘get people over that political bias’ by creating fun, exciting, affective environments in which people cannot help but cheer for the act. As Nicolai Gellwitzki argues, ‘positive moods do not merely feel good, they change subjects’ experience of themselves in their bodies, their relationships, time, and “reality” itself’.Footnote 78 Participation in ‘euphoric atmospheres’ can potentially alter how someone weighs the balance between enjoyment and political commitments by ‘increas[ing] the capacity for agency that is experienced as meaningful’.Footnote 79 In other words, echoing Closs Stephens’s argument that ‘party atmospheres’ become increasingly difficult to resist from within, enjoyment produces a pull sufficiently enticing to keep fans attached to the event. That pull works despite their political opposition to the actions of its organizers and participating states because the experience of enjoying ourselves can shift how we evaluate our political priorities.Footnote 80 On the other hand, the point that producers ‘know their audience’ demonstrates that celebratory environments are often perceived as compelling by audiences because they resonate with audiences’ existing aesthetic judgements about what makes for an enjoyable Eurovision performance – in this case, high-quality and high-budget staging, innovative musical composition, attractive artists, and camp aesthetics alluding to queerness, in keeping with Eurovision’s reputation for queer representation.Footnote 81 This illustrates the symbiotic relationship between producers and consumers in maintaining complicity through enjoyment: producers use the affective and aesthetic features of Eurovision to entice fans into complicity, while fans expecting the show to provide a good time allow themselves to be enticed.
‘That was like, a crisis for me’: Wrestling with enjoyment and complicity
While some fans make the decision to bracket politics in order to enjoy Eurovision with relative ease, for others the choice was much harder, and complicated by various emotional attachments to the contest and the community it represents. ‘That was a crisis for me’, Dante tells me, as he explains how he grappled with whether to watch the 2024 contest:
I remember at some point you had to take a stand, and I remember all my friends boycotting, you know not watching it, but for me, Eurovision was an integral part of my life, so I couldn’t just say like oh I’m not watching, but at the same time I did not want to watch.Footnote 82
Dante is critical of both Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the state’s participation in Eurovision. Despite believing prior to 2024 that he could separate Israeli music from politics (see above), he admits early in our interview that he may have been ‘quite naïve to think about it’ as separate because ‘like, more rationally, you can’t separate politics from a contest that is based on participating countries’. He situates his knowledge and views in the context of his country’s large Palestinian diaspora and the fact that he has ‘many friends, relatives, that have Palestinian background’. At the same time, personal connections, including meeting his partner through Eurovision and organizing annual viewing parties with friends, make Eurovision ‘an integral part’ of Dante’s life. Dante’s competing attachments mean he struggles to navigate the choice. In the end, he stops publicly talking about the contest and declines to attend the large viewing party with his friends, and goes back and forth over whether to keep watching at home, turning the television on and off throughout the show: ‘I tried to remove myself from that but it’s quite difficult because it’s one of the things that you love at the end.’
Among the fans who struggle with the tensions between opposition to Israel’s participation and their desire to watch Eurovision, the tug of enjoyment rears its head in multiple ways. Like Dante, many refer to the personal connections that make it difficult for them to turn away: they associate the contest with family tradition and celebratory ritual, met friends or partners through the fandom, or find community in the online fandom during periods of isolation. Others refer to Eurovision’s liberal narratives of community, inclusion, and European identity: ‘it was hard because I love … the idea of a European contest in which we feel more European at least for a day’.Footnote 83 Others still refer to the atmosphere of the live shows and surrounding cultural events in the host city. Nora, for example, ‘flipflopped a few times’ on whether to go to Malmö or to boycott, citing the fun atmospheres she had experienced at previous Eurovisions as tipping her eventual decision: ‘Sweden normally does Eurovision so well … so we were like, we’ll go and we’ll see what it is and even if we don’t go to the shows there’s loads of fun at the Eurovision Village and the atmosphere’s amazing … and of course in the end it was none of that.’Footnote 84 Nora also cites a social cost of having already bought tickets through her fan club – ‘you get excommunicated if you don’t go’Footnote 85 – highlighting how the allure of enjoyment intersects with other mechanisms of complicity including economic coercion and the potential social isolation of being labelled a killjoy – or, worse, being excluded from the fan community altogether. Finally, Eurovision’s atmospheres of enjoyment keep fans in relations of complicity by making them worry about missing out. As the city of Malmö tightened security in the months and days leading to up to the grand final,Footnote 86 and with the knowledge that the EBU has previously edited protest actions out of the live broadcast, many fans across the focus groups reported feeling a need to watch as the only way to find out if there would be any protests or shock incidents.
Unable to fully tear themselves away from the contest, fans engage in a range of strategies to navigate or minimize their complicity. Ainsley tried to find a compromise between the emotional pull of her family’s annual ritual and not supporting Israel by turning the television off during Israel’s performance: ‘I couldn’t bring myself not to watch it [the whole show], but I could control what [parts of the show] I watched.’Footnote 87 Rosa decided to watch with a group of friends so they would collectively only count as one household in the EBU’s viewing figures. Others positioned themselves as having limited agency as one individual in an audience of millions in order to downplay the impact of their contributions, although they recognized some of the possible hypocrisy in this approach:
My boycott, coming from the other side of the world, it won’t impact anything, so it doesn’t matter, but at the same time you think like, yeah but it matters to me.Footnote 88
I see my individual contribution as like small enough, that it doesn’t like sway anything right? Which is like probably copping out, but um, in terms of like, you know, where do you draw the line or whatever, … it’s so much bigger than what one viewer can decide.Footnote 89
The adjustments fans make from their regular viewing practices indicate that even as they watch the contest they do not fully buy into or comply with its ‘joyful’ atmospheres and ‘non-political’ messaging. Yet each of these compromises still fundamentally allows the fans to continue engaging with the contest. The enjoyment infrastructures of live television entertainment work here to obscure audiences’ perceptions of their own complicity. Limited knowledge of how viewing figures are calculated makes turning the TV off during a particular performance appear like a decisive action while still enabling people to watch and talk about the contest with friends and family, while the scale of the event creates space for individual audience members to believe their actions have limited impact. At the same time, the fact that fans’ political views are frequently subsumed by their various experiences of enjoyment of the contest echoes Tom Bradstreet’s auto-ethnographic reflection that, in being aware of his complicity as a football fan in the human rights abuses perpetrated in hosting the Qatar World Cup, his ‘joy was certainly dampened – though not, in all honesty, extinguished’.Footnote 90
What is it that makes enjoyment so much more compelling than other political attachments in the context of popular culture? Part of the answer lies in enjoyment’s status as a symbol of fantasies of the good life and good personhood.Footnote 91 By framing their attachments to Eurovision as simultaneously enjoyable and ‘integral’ to their lives, fans can make legible to each other their broader desires for community and sense of purpose.Footnote 92 These desires are encouraged and validated by the ‘good politics’ of Eurovision’s version of liberal enjoyment, where the promise of diversity and inclusion, especially as it pertains to queer representation and European unity, is (claimed to be) directly achieved through entertainment. In other words, watching Eurovision is not only fun; it is, for many fans, tied to supporting a good cause. Being aware of the tension between the values the contest claims to promote and the decisions it actually makes, and especially being aware of their own possible complicity in enabling or not resisting those decisions, destabilizes that sense of purpose. But recognizing the tension also provides a way through it: acknowledging that they struggled with the decision to watch despite their reservations allows fans to disavow the actions of the EBU and of Israel, while also being able to maintain the sense that Eurovision satisfies other, more ‘positive’ political and social desires. This helps to explain why, as Bradstreet ponders, awareness of complicity alone may dampen, but not altogether extinguish, enjoyment. ‘If it makes you happy’, Sheryl Crow tells us, ‘it can’t be that bad.’Footnote 93
‘Eurovision was the joy of my life’: Complicity and/as resistance
Not all fans are won over by the enticements of Eurovision’s promises of non-political enjoyment, however. For many fans, analysing and discussing the political dynamics with other fans is the core reason they prefer Eurovision to other forms of entertainment. Yet the liberal, celebratory environment constructed around Eurovision, with its heavy focus on unity and neutrality, leaves little space for discussion or action that does not endorse the message of totalizing unity, let alone space to interrogate potential complicities. For fans like Afshin who want to ‘get to grips with what we’re supposed to do as fans with a contest that has these contradictions in it’, and who were initially drawn to the contest precisely because of the opportunities it affords to think about politics through a different lens, the fan community and the event itself became increasingly hostile spaces:
[It’s] one thing when there’s a lot of different sort of things going on and you can kind of enjoy certain aspects of the contest while kind of critiquing others … so it’s this kind of real dynamic conversation … But you know, the last year there’s been very little in terms of like, space for that dynamic discussion. People have really been shutting you down.Footnote 94
Similarly, Lydia explains that while she had experienced resistance to conversations about Israel’s participation from other fans at previous Eurovisions, in Malmö ‘there was a real anger behind the “it’s not political” kind of conversation … it was very like “just shut up and stop ruining the fun”’.Footnote 95 Disagreement among fans about whether politics should be discussed in relation to the contest has been a core part of the Eurofandom’s dynamic throughout the contest’s history. Still, multiple fans describe discussions in the wider fan community, especially online, in 2024 as being more intense and heated than previous years, including the 2019 contest in Tel Aviv when there was last a call to boycott.
This dynamic of discussing the contest’s political aspects openly is evident throughout the focus groups, where the tone remained predominantly friendly and cheerful even as people expressed different opinions. Only one moment in one group hinted at the type of tension that Lydia and Afshin describe experiencing in the wider fan community. When Carla tentatively suggested to her group that while boycotting is a ‘valid choice’, it can also be ‘a path of least resistance for some people if they are not doing it with intentionality’, especially in the context of expressing support for the boycott on social media without necessarily following through in practice,Footnote 96 two other participants who had boycotted the event raised their eyebrows slightly. They quickly snapped back to more ‘neutral’ expressions and the group conversation moved onto a different topic, but not before Carla noticed. ‘I definitely saw some folks have like some reactions to that’, she admitted in her follow-up interview. This fleeting encounter pales in comparison to the intense, heated debates many of the fans report experiencing outside the focus groups, especially online. Nonetheless, it points to the challenges of discussing politics in relation to topics that are supposed to be ‘fun’. Both Carla’s initial hesitancy to critique an aspect of boycotting practice and the other participants’ reluctance to vocalize their disagreement suggest an (unspoken) self-disciplining and awareness that critiquing other people’s views or actions might disrupt a conversation that had otherwise been flowing smoothly.
Accusations that fans who criticize Israel’s participation or the EBU’s decision-making are ruining the fun illustrate the disciplining and exiling effects enjoyment can have in maintaining complicity. This happens within the fandom – some fans who contribute to fan media outlets told their focus group about pressure from editors to keep content light, while others who refuse to go along with the crowd quit their roles or lose friendships. But it also plays out at the institutional level. In the months leading up to the event, many fans who opposed Israel’s participation (along with activists and artists beyond the fan community) engaged a range of strategies to push for the state to be excluded, including sending letters and petitions to the EBU and national broadcasters, and urging competing artists who had publicly expressed support for Palestine to withdraw. In response, the EBU issued a statement chastising fans for engaging in ‘targeted social media campaigns against some of our participating artists’, asserting that while the EBU supports free speech, ‘we firmly oppose any form of online abuse, hate speech, or harassment’.Footnote 97 The EBU again cites the fact that the event ‘is a music and entertainment show’ where artists come to share ‘the universal message of unity through the language of music’ in order to create distance between the event and the atrocities committed by one of its participating states. It also discursively restricts how responsibility and complicity can be framed in relation to the event, diminishing the influence of competing artists in order to absolve them: ‘This [harassment] is unacceptable and totally unfair, given the artists have no role in this decision’. This rhetorical move feeds back into wider fan discourses – even fans who are adamant in their conviction that they should boycott the contest repeatedly express sympathy for artists, who they view as simply trying to do their jobs and enjoy themselves. Combined with the physical discipline of heightened securitization around the contest,Footnote 98 the EBU’s discourses of enjoyment centred on unity and entertainment thus not only work to discipline fans by punishing those who push back against the claim that everyone is ‘united by music’. They also constrict who can be seen as complicit, and what they are complicit – or not complicit – in.Footnote 99
Yet, as enjoyment encourages and maintains complicity, it also animates resistance. Confronted with the realization that their continued engagement with the contest enables the EBU to keep providing a platform for Israel, some fans endeavoured to minimize the impact of their attachment to the contest by boycotting or protesting. Esme, for example, is willing to sacrifice her enjoyment of Eurovision as part of a longer-standing commitment to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement: ‘Where I come from, the BDS call is sacred’.Footnote 100 Meanwhile, Lydia, who no longer felt comfortable with the idea of enjoying herself normally at the event but had already bought tickets, dealt with that tension by participating in demonstrations in Malmö. She explains this choice as trying to leverage a state of complicity into an opportunity to protest:
I attended the protests in Malmö and tried to engage in some disruption at the shows we were at this year to protest Israel’s presence … we had tickets booked, as it got closer, most of our conversations honestly were about kind of discomfort with still attending, how to kind of balance the opportunity to kind of put what we saw as necessary kind of political pressure there as Eurovision fans while not kind of giving the EBU any more money.Footnote 101
Still, protesting or boycotting does not entirely alleviate the hold Eurovision’s enjoyment structures have over its fans, nor does it free them from interrogating the complicities their love of the contest has wrought. Even as some fans explain that the choice to boycott or protest the contest was not a difficult one in terms of conscience and political conviction, they lamented the course of actions – taken by the EBU, by Israel and the European states that support it, and within the fan community – that means the event that once brought them so much joy no longer does. The future of these fans’ relationships with Eurovision is uncertain as they reflect on the ways their love of the contest has kept them attached to something they know enables harm. As Afshin sombrely reflects:
Eurovision was the joy of my life but how could it have been the joy of my life for so long without me, like, really engaging with the fact that Israel is wholly endorsed in its participation by almost everyone who, you know, who participates in the contest … It was the joy of my life for so long, but it’s like, yeah, different things to hold. Mmm. It is a shame.Footnote 102
Conclusion
This article has argued that examining how Eurovision fans navigate their engagements with the contest in light of Israel’s participation provides valuable insight into the role of enjoyment in enticing us into relations of complicity. In the first instance, doing so sheds light on the power of attraction: the liberal enjoyment atmospheres cultivated at mega-events like Eurovision work to hide the idea that their audiences and creators are implicated in harm at all through discursive claims and production choices that tie the events’ ability to provide entertainment to narratives of neutrality and inclusion. Other times, these enjoyment atmospheres compel people to knowingly set their politics aside, either because the fun experiences and liberal values offered by the contest seem worth prioritizing, or because the risks of being accused of spoiling the fun might mean losing out on an important source of community. In a context designed to keep as many people consuming as possible, fans make the choice of either setting their politics aside, finding a compromise between their enjoyment and political convictions, or forgoing their enjoyment altogether. Their choices reveal the ways that enjoyment enriches our understandings of the mechanisms that drive complicity, and of the relations between structure and agency, in the context of popular culture that we do not always (want to) recognize as enabling and causing harm.
This matters for understanding the political power of mega-events because of the massive scale on which they entice audiences into complicity. For Eurovision, this dynamic has only worsened since 2024. The BDS boycott call remains in place, and several countries – Slovenia, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, and Iceland at the time of writing – have withdrawn from the 2026 contest over Israel’s participation. Yet the EBU has doubled down on allowing Israel to participate in 2026 and beyond, and insists that the Vienna edition of the contest will still be ‘a real celebration of 70 years of music bringing people together’.Footnote 103 Beyond Eurovision, the enjoyment infrastructures that keep people watching will be in full swing at the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics in the United States, where the extant violence, securitization, corruption, and environmental and social costs of these events will be exacerbated as they come into contact with not only the overtly repressive politics of the Trump regime, but also the full weight and apparatus of American soft power and cultural hegemony. In popular culture more broadly, cases such as authoritarian regimes buying English Premier League football teams to expand their economic reach and launder their political reputations,Footnote 104 or the author J. K. Rowling funding transphobic legal cases with profits from the Harry Potter franchise,Footnote 105 show how engaging with popular culture can implicate us in violence and cruelty no matter how much we personally enjoy it. Future research on enjoyment and on popular culture and world politics needs to reckon with the political power of enjoyment in its liberal and mainstream forms – and the ways fans and audiences buy into or push back on international mega-events’ claims to neutrality – if we are to understand how people are pulled into and kept in relations of complicity on mass scales.
Yet the Eurovision fans who forgo their own enjoyment to boycott the contest, or who leverage it by engaging in protests in the arena or by having ‘difficult’ conversations with friends, are a reminder that recognizing our complicities can be a powerful starting point for resistance. In highlighting the ways some fans endeavour to minimize or avoid contributing to harm, even as they continue to watch to the contest, I do not aim to let people off the hook for more complicit actions, but to show that complicity and resistance coexist. The structural conditions of racial-capitalism and settler colonialism that underpin much of the world’s suffering mean we cannot extricate ourselves from every complicit entanglement we are caught up in without first dismantling these systems. Nevertheless, as consumers of popular culture we can approach our engagements with an ethics of what Sanders calls ‘responsibility-in-complicity’ – affirming the ways we are folded together in order to hold ourselves accountable when our seemingly harmless sources of fun are not so harmless after all.Footnote 106 Recognizing the ways that enjoyment draws us in and keeps us attached to events and cultural objects that enable suffering is a core part of the process of resisting complicity and pushing for change, even – perhaps especially – when we enjoy the things we are trying to change.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526101788.
Acknowledgements
Much of the work of this article was developed while I was a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education at the University of Hull in March–April 2025. I would like to thank Catherine Baker, David Atkinson, and participants in the Newland Lecture Series in Music and Centre for Sustainability and Olympic Legacy seminars at Hull for their feedback and questions in the early stages of the idea. I am also grateful to Uygar Baspehlivan, Kesherie Gurung, participants at the Fan Studies Network North America 2025 conference, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, as well as to the Eurofans who participated in this research. Finally, Ben Rosher deserves special acknowledgement for patiently and skilfully reading and listening to more versions of this work than anyone should have to. Thank you.
Funding statement
This research was funded by the Kone Foundation (Grant number 202207789).
Ethical standards
The research received ethical approval from the University of Helsinki Research Ethics Committee in the Humanities and Social and Behavioural Sciences (Statement number 28/2024) on 17 April 2024.
Open access
