Category: Audience/Reception Studies
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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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Gendering Robots 2005 Research Proposal
Recently, the question of how we attribute gender to asexual entities like robots and AI has been something I have been pondering more and more. How we understand engage with entities like Alexa from Amazon, Siri from Apple, and Cortana from Microsoft is fascinating, as well as how we think about robots like BB-8 or…
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Three Approaches to Media Reception and Audience Reception Studies
This paper was part of my 2007 comp exams, or qualification exams, that I needed to complete before being allowed to do my dissertation. This paper basically serves as the backbone for how I understand reception studies and how I do such research. In this paper I will discuss three approaches to understanding audience reception…
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Making Sense of Cinema Anthology
Edited by Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and myself, Bloomsbury Academic will release Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship on February 25, 2016. Making Sense of Cinema is an anthology collecting empirical studies that display different methods for studying real film spectators engaging with real films. Film studies has…
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Professional Wrestling, Smarks, and Convergent Media
As part of the project on understanding professional wrestling through the theoretical lens of convergence (i.e. convergent wrestling), I recently wrote out an explanation for how Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and I see this concept of convergence being able to describe various aspects of professional wrestling. Now, being that we are academics, one…
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Convergent Wrestling: The Nature of Professional Wrestling
Professional wrestling has been criticized for its emphasis on the fiction of its entertainment rather than the reality of its sport. My partner, Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me), and I argue that professional wrestling functions as a convergent media product, representing a vital text for examining the media landscape of the 21st century. The…
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Call for Papers: Pro Wrestling Symposium
Here is another call that is speaking to research near and dear to my heart: The Pro Wrestling Symposium: Laying the Academic ‘Smackdown’ Weekend of Saturday, 18th June 2016 Hosted by the Department of Theatre, Film & Television Studies, Aberystwyth University As one of the only cultural forms to have had an almost consistent presence…
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Call for Papers: The Fan Studies Network conference 2016
Originally posted on The Fan Studies Network: THE FAN STUDIES NETWORK CONFERENCE 2016 25-26th June 2016 University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Keynote Speaker: Professor Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California, USA). The fourth annual Fan Studies Network Conference is returning to the University of East Anglia for a two-day programme in June 2016. The…
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The Pop Culture Lens Takes on Joss Whedon
On this eighteenth episode of The Pop Culture Lens, we present the recording of a second roundtable discussion from the 2015 Midwest Popular Culture Association Conference. This roundtable discusses the topic of director and showrunner Joss Whedon — and how much of a controversial figure and person he is for so many people, including his…
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