Archive for December, 2010
Telling Tastes: (Re)producing Distinction in Popular Media Studies
Eve Ng / University of Massachusetts-Amherst
What we study and how we learn to talk about it is productive of our identities along mostly covert dimensions of power. How do scholars distinguish themselves from the mainstream critics?
Revisiting Fandom in Africa
Olivier J. Tchouaffe / Southwestern University
The application of fandom and its resources is not the same in all cultures, and African fans might not be recognized as legitimate fans. The point of this piece is to demonstrate that there is a unifying figure of American domination of mass culture.
Embracing the “Overly Confessional:” Scholar-Fandom and Approaches to Personal Research
Tom Phillips / University of East Anglia
A scholar argues that embracing an “overly confessional” approach to his academic writing is integral to the fidelity of his research.
The Gathering of the Juggalos and the Peculiar Sanctity of Fandom
Michael Dwyer / Arcadia University
There has been a peculiar framing of fan practices as inherently admirable, or at least deserving of respect, throughout recent scholarship on fandom. Yet some fan practices are repugnant. The Gathering of the Juggalos is the scene of questionable fan practices contrary to the noble portrait of fandom elaborated by several scholars.
Stop Being an Elitist, and Start Being an Elitist
David Jenemann / University of Vermont
Given how Aca-fandom has created its own canon and looks down its nose at certain cultural forms like sports broadcasting, we could use a little of Adorno’s elitism in the discipline today.
We Have Met the Fans, and They Are Us: In Defense of Aca-Fans and Scholars
Catherine Coker and Candace Benefiel / Texas A&M
Fans hold their objects of study to a higher standard. How can the critical study of any text succeed without the passionate and knowledgeable participation of the scholar?
Fandom In/As the Academy
Paul Booth / DePaul University
A look at the specific pedagogical value of fandom as an activity and how it can be appropriated in a variety of educational contexts.
“We are all together:” Fan Studies and Performance
Jen Gunnels / New York Review of Science Fiction and M. Flourish Klink / MIT
Gunnels and Klink argue that fan studies parallels performance studies in discerning tensions between researcher and subject.
Special Issue: Revisiting Aca-Fandom
Is Aca-Fandom still a useful theoretical trope? Does it privilege some objects and remove the possibility of discussing others? Is aca-fandom merely a way to justify and privilege some tastes and thus reinforce them?
Bottlenecks and Flows: Media Scholars Consuming Electronic and Televisual Media
Julia Lesage / University of Oregon
A call to media scholars to begin open and productive conversation about how media are consumed, streamlined, archived, and pedagogically utilized.
Dan Patrick’s Backstage Musical: Watching Production in the Age of Media Convergence
Harper Cossar / Georgia Gwinnett College
An examination of the way media convergence is shaping contemporary sports television.
Fairly Normal Activity: Horror and the Static Camera
Janani Subramanian/ University of Southern California
When “nothing is happening” in Paranormal Activity 1 and 2, the empty room scenes as captured by static cameras in the Paranormal Activity franchise become suspenseful moments of audience reflexivity.
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