Josh Bland is a funded ESRC PhD researcher at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. His research specialisms are football fandom cultures, industrial heritage and critical heritage studies. His current PhD project explores football fandom cultures as living heritage, and examines how football fandom may empower working-class communities to exercise cultural resilience against contexts of traumatic change in a UK context.
He also currently works as Director of Research for The Deep Creative, is on the creative committee at the National Football Museum and runs “Against the Run of Play”, a heritage-focussed Substack. He has previously led a Curating London project on football and home at the Museum of London and worked as Director of Policy for sports policy think tank Fair Game.
