What does “playing, with research” mean, anyway?

“Playing with research” is an embracing of curiosity and creativity within the research process. It’s about experimenting with new ideas, testing unconventional methods, and exploring different perspectives—all without the fear of failure. It’s taking the serious pursuit of knowledge and helping the world and adding a splash of playfulness, making room for serendipity and unexpected discoveries.

In many ways, it mirrors the joy of tinkering or exploring something with fresh eyes. It could be as simple as brainstorming wildly imaginative hypotheses, combining disciplines in unique ways, or even reshaping how data is visualized to tell a story. It’s less about rigid rules and more about innovation, wonder, and discovery.

So, who am I to do this work?

I will keep my curriculum vitae as up-to-date as possible on this page.  To access many of the papers listed in my C.V., you can follow the links on the page or visit my profile page at Academia.edu or Research Gate.

You can also find out more about my work by visiting my Slideshare profile, my Issuu page, and my LinkedIn profile. Feel free to contact me at creinhard@dom.edu.

You can find our first edited anthology, Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship, on Bloomsbury’s site.

Our monograph on the horror subgenre of exorcism cinema, Possessed Women, Haunted States: Cultural Tensions in Exorcism Cinema, on Rowman & Littlefield’s site.

You can find our second edited anthology, Heroes, Heroines, and Everything in Between: Challenging Gender and Sexuality Stereotypes in Children’s Entertainment Media, on Rowman & Littlefield’s site.

You can find my monograph, Fractured Fandoms: Contentious Communication in Fan Communities, on Rowman & Littlefield’s site.

You can find our third edited anthology, Convergent Wrestling: Participatory Culture, Transmedia Storytelling, and Intertextuality in the Squared Circle, on Routledge’s site.

You can find the podcast I do with Christopher Olson, The Pop Culture Lens, here.