'An outsider in our midst': narratives of Neil Lennon, soccer and ethno-religious igotry in the Scottish press

This essay offers a critique of media narratives concerning soccer and those of 'difference' in contemporary Scotland, in particular those who have Irishness as their different identity. It examines certain newspaper narratives concerning Neil Lennon of Celtic FC during autumn 2005. During this period Lennon was characterized as a soccer villain. The commentaries drew on existing perceptions concerning his personality and style of play. More importantly Lennon's national identity (Irish) and his religious background (Catholic) were integrated into the narratives, marking him as an outsider in Scotland. These narratives resonate with public and private discourses of 'otherness' concerning the Irish Catholic diaspora community in Scotland. These broader discourses are manifest as ethno-religious prejudices directed against this community. The discourses of 'outsider' and 'otherness' that surround Lennon, Celtic FC and the Irish Catholic community expose the myth of Scotland's collective self-image as an egalitarian and inclusive society

Cloaked websites: propaganda, cyber-racism and epistemology in the digital era

This article analyzes cloaked websites, which are sites published by individuals or groups who conceal authorship in order to disguise deliberately a hidden political agenda. Drawing on the insights of critical theory and the Frankfurt School, this article examines the way in which cloaked websites conceal a variety of political agendas from a range of perspectives. Of particular interest here are cloaked white supremacist sites that disguise cyber-racism. The use of cloaked websites to further political ends raises important questions about knowledge production and epistemology in the digital era. These cloaked sites emerge within a social and political context in which it is increasingly difficult to parse fact from propaganda, and this is a particularly pernicious feature when it comes to the cyber-racism of cloaked white supremacist sites. The article concludes by calling for the importance of critical, situated political thinking in the evaluation of cloaked websites