Author: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard
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Cross-Gender Fandom
We understand a fan to be someone who’s affection for a media product to be above and beyond that of the rest of the audience (Jensen, 1992a, b). This affection involves higher and more various ways of engaging with the media product than others would exhibit. A common question in fan studies asks if this…
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On the Issues of Disagreement Becoming Censorship
The conversation I had one night and into the next morning with the GamerGate supporter (i.e. a ProGGer) was long. It started off with my comments on Twitter about the need to not censor texts and instead use them to create dialogue. But the problem is that people too often don’t want to talk about…
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Banning Smartphones and Laptops in Classrooms
Much has been said lately about whether or not to ban all mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, laptops) from the classroom and require students to use the more traditional pen and paper to take notes during class time. The basic logic of this class management approach is that students will become easily distracted by their…
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Experiencing the Co-Construction of Kayfabe: AAW Take No Prisoners
This blog post expands on the ideas of the co-construction of kayfabe, an idea I presented at the Popular Culture Association 2016 conference in Seattle. For this post, I reflect on a live wrestling event I attended in an attempt to define what my partner, Christopher Olson, and I mean by “convergent wrestling.” The entire presentation…
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This Jedi’s Reaction to The Force Awakens: An Autoethnography in Fractured Fandom
I didn’t go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens when it was released in theaters. I couldn’t bring myself to. And this is coming from someone who saw — willingly and enthusiastically — each of the prequels in midnight openings. I saw Phantom Menace numerous times in the theater — even while doing an internship…
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The Dark Side of Fandom
Last fall the call went out from the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (aka C2E2) for proposed panels for the 2016 convention. I had just been part of a very successful discussion at an academic conference that considered the problems, tensions, fractures that fans have been facing, online and offline, for years. But that was…
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Reviewing the Virtual Worlds Entertainment Study
These thoughts were produced at the end of my time on this project, in May of 2012, for the Virtual Worlds Research Group at Roskilde University. These thoughts involve my reflection on the project that I completed as part of the research group, and do not reflect the thoughts of anyone else involved with the…
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Virtual World Television and Interactive Television
This is the end result of the work I have been doing with Pooky Amsterdam. This paper is the write-up of the presentation Avatars, Audiences and Interactive Television. I do not think there is enough in this paper to make pursuing publication worthwhile, but I do hope to use the categorizations of the three types…
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Sense-Making and Avatars Research Proposal
This post contains a research proposal I wrote in 2008 for a project to involve virtual worlds that I never completed. This proposal would be changed to become the main experiment I did with the Roskilde University Virtual Worlds Research Group. If anyone is interested in building off this proposal, then please contact me. Sense-making…
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Gendering Robots 2005 Proposed Research Methods
As discussed in the previous post Gendering Robots 2006 Research Proposal, I have been thinking about doing research on how people make sense of the gendered nature of robots, AI, and other artificial agents — apparently for longer than I remembered! Here is the method section I wrote over a decade ago for how to…
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