I’m really interested in the ways we define fandom. Is it just associated with popular culture, or is it a more fundamental aspect of human life? I’m going to use this blog to work through my thoughts on this matter, so it isn’t by any means a completed document, and I will do my best…
Tag: fan studies
Virtual World Fandom Quasi-Autoethnography
This post contains my reflections on trying to express my Star Wars fandom in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. These reflections are based on the Twitter thread I ran in the summer and fall of 2020, which can be found here. I tried to reconstruct it chronologically to show the progression of events and my thoughts…
WrestlePosium I Presentation
Earlier this year I organized, ran, and presented at the inaugural WrestlePosium open online symposium for the Professional Wrestling Studies Association. My presentation concerned the work I have been doing looking at wrestling fans writing slash for the characters of Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa. The entire presentation can viewed here. The other presentations from…
Why Is Sense-Making Methodology Methodological?
This is from a class paper I wrote for Brenda Dervin in 2006 at Ohio State University. The most efficient and useful way I can conceive of answering this question is by exploring it in relation to my phenomenon of interest, fandom. Fandom has been studied using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, as a…
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…
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.
Call for Chapter Proposals: Eating Fandom
Call for Chapter Proposals for Anthology Title: Eating Fandom: Intersections between Fans and Food Culture Editors: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard (Dominican University), Bertha Chin (Swinburne University of Technology, Sarawak, Malaysia) and Julia E. Largent (McPherson College) Rationale: An emerging field of fan studies looks at how fans interact with different aspects and elements of food cultures….
Fractured Fandom and Power Flows
In the past decades, academic scholarship has celebrated fans and their fandoms, and even public discourse has seen a turnaround from ostracizing fans to embracing them. While there are benefits to being fans, problems do exist within fandoms and threaten to emotionally and even physically hurt fans, and these problems should be addressed so that…
Fractured Fandom in Online Spaces
Fractured Fandom in Online Spaces: Problematic Communication in Communication-Inscribed Places This blog post represents a presentation I gave at the 2017 Central States Communication Association Conference, and is based on research I am doing on my Fractured Fandom project. This project is an online self-interview study conducted in 2015. The larger project is being written…
