Category: Audience/Reception Studies
-
Discussing Weird Al’s Staying Power
In a first, the forty-ninth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast finds friend of the podcast Noelle Lynn Blood joining Christopher Olson and I to discuss the importance of Weird Al Yankovic to pop culture and nerds. In this episode, the trio examine how Weird Al has adapted himself to different eras in pop…
-
San Diego Comic Con
In a first, the forty-eighth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast finds friend of the podcast Joan Miller (@a_wild_acafan) joining Christopher Olson and myself to discuss the importance of the grand-daddy fan convention, San Diego Comic Con. In this episode, the trio discuss how SDCC came to be the pop cultural juggernaut that it…
-
Academic Thoughts on Hentai
And hentai texts serve as ways to reaffirm this dominion of man. Hentai women are created for the sole purpose of male survey. They are true fantasy, existing nowhere but in the imagination of man and his subsequent depictions of his imagination – she is simulacrum. Being man’s creations, they are to serve man’s desires,…
-
Work In Progress: Applying SMM to Fan Studies
This draft comes from a presentation given at the 2018 MPCA/ACA conference in Indianapolis. Introduction Communication scholar Brenda Dervin created the Sense-Making Methodology as a methodological approach for conducting interviews that draws on metatheoretical concepts such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and the humanistic approach to psychology. Since its formulation, Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) has been utilized across…
-
Survey on Watching Food Television
Dear Interested Study Participant, My name is Dr. CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and I am an Associate Professor in Communication Arts and Sciences at Dominican University. I am conducting a research project as on how people respond to television shows that depict food, cooking, and cuisines from around the world. I am requesting your voluntary participation in my…
-
Being Methodological in Audience Studies: Applying Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology
I’ve shared in previous posts (here and here) thoughts from my PhD candidacy exam. In this post, I share my thoughts on being methodological when it comes to doing audience studies. As with the other posts, this essay was originally written in 2007. 1. What does being methodological mean? To paraphrase myself from an earlier…
-
Defining Fandom as Repeatedly Returning
I presented this idea, based on previous work, at the MPCA/ACA conference of October 2018. I present it here for us to have a conversation about what it means to be a fan and how we define what a fan is.
-
Pro-Wrestling Slash
I’m so excited to start some work on the transmedia storytelling being done by Tommaso Ciampa and Johnny Gargano and how fans have been reacting to the story through their creation of Ciampa/Gargano slash. Here are some of my first thoughts on that work, and how it all relates to the encoding-decoding-recoding model I’ve written…
-
Media Personality Identifications and the Importance of Media Representation
The first research study I did in graduate school was on why people identified with individuals they only knew from the media. It would become my first ICA conference presentation — before PowerPoints were common! I first interviewed people to understand who they were identifying with and why they were doing so. Based on those…
-
The Fractured Fandom Book
My project all started with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. In 2010 a new animated series was released based on the old toy line (I had these toys as a kid). What amazed everyone is that a toy line and series meant for girls started to develop a following of adult men, who took…
It's Playing, Just With Research 