Author: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard
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Pete Warden: Why Nerd Culture Must Die
Originally posted on Pete Warden's blog: Photo by Attila Acs My first girlfriend was someone I met through a MUD, and I had to fly 7,000 miles to see her in person. I read a paper version of the Jargon File at 15 and it became my bible. Just reading its descriptions of the internet I knew it was…
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Feminist Tensions in The Last Exorcism and The Last Exorcism Part 2
At the Midwest Popular Culture Association‘s 2014 conference, Chris and I presented the first analysis from our exorcism cinema project. The presentation is titled: Feminist tensions in exorcism cinema: Case study analysis and comparison of The Last Exorcism and The Last Exorcism Part II. What follows are the notes for the presentation, which constitute an…
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Fan Studies Network Conference 2014
Originally posted on Nicolle Lamerichs: This weekend I attended the Fan Studies Network Symposium (26-27 September 2014). It was an engaging conference, and I’d love to talk about it some more here about its main themes and sketch some future directions in which fan studies may develop. New Directions Fan studies is a small field that…
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Online Learning Communities: A Dominican Conversation
At my school on Tuesday, September 23rd, Dominican University hosted our fifth annual Caritas Veritas Symposium. These symposiums are times for our community of faculty, staff, and students to reflect upon the university’s Catholic mission of care and truth, of working to create a more just and humane world. There are presentations, discussions, and activities…
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Sir Anthony Hopkins Performs an Exorcism in The Rite
Sir Anthony Hopkins is one of those interesting actors. Best known as an incredible actor throughout his entire career, sometimes he will do movies that are, for lack of better words, slumming it – doing a movie for a paycheck. Freejack. Alexander. The Edge. The Wolfman. Red 2. To be fair, I cannot really blame…
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In Defense of Fans via Fractured Fandom
In defense of fans and fandom, I want to make clear that I would not argue that fractured fandom happens all the time or involves a majority of the population of any particular fandom. What I would say about fractured fandom is that it reflects a larger social and cultural issue, in the United States…
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Fan Privilege and Fractured Fandom
Lately, almost every day reveals another story that could be related to a phenomenon I have been discussing on this blog: fractured fandom. Just within the past week, we have had stories about Men’s Rights Activists being misogynists in video gaming communities (here and here), a consideration of how the generation gap is causing problems…
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Valhalla Rising and the Demythologization of Male Violence
In a reworking of some analysis from his Master’s thesis, Christopher J. Olson presents his analysis of Nicholas Winding Refn’s existential film Valhalla Rising. In his analysis, Chris argues that Refn portrays a violent version of masculinity in order to critique globalized popular culture’s tendency to portray men in such rigid and limited ways. Read…
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Women self-identifying as digital game addicts: Their interpretations of power
[This paper comes from 2007 and was completed for a qualitative methodology course at Ohio State University under the amazing Patti Lather. She encouraged us to try different methods of communication research results; so I did a comic book, which you can see here.] What is digital game addiction? A number of approaches, theories, and…
It's Playing, Just With Research 