Darragh McGee

Graduating with a PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada, in November 2015, I currently hold the position of Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Bath, UK.

As an inter-disciplinary social scientist, my principal research interests and teaching coalesce around the politics of youth, social justice and sustainable development as they are shaped by urban, national and global scales of inequality. Drawing on ethnographic modes of inquiry, my doctoral research has explored the shifting meaning and import of football amid a purported 'crisis' of youth in postcolonial Ghana, bringing into sharp focus how the growing popularity and appropriation of the game by male youth articulates with questions of personhood, social mobility, migration and masculinity across West Africa.

Of both scholarly and journalistic interest, my research offers an alternative angle of vision onto international debates surrounding the welfare of youth footballers across the Global South, the vast expansion of global sporting economies, and allegations of child trafficking in and through the game of football.