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…
Tag: fan studies
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…
Identification with Favorite Media Personae
I presented this study at my first International Communication Association conference in May 2005. It was the first major study I did by myself in graduate school. I remember making these slides to show on a projector — there was no PowerPoint! I should probably revisit it. Identification with Favorite Media Personae: A phenomenologically-informed conceptualization of…
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…
The Pop Culture Lens: Fan Harassment
I have been talking about this idea of fractured fandom on this blog for awhile now, because I have been concerned with the problems and tensions fans are facing in contemporary fan communities and fandoms. Across the Internet and around the world, it seems that hardly a day goes by without another story, another anecdote,…
The Pop Culture Lens: Episode on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Fandom
On a special episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I discuss a subject that has been one we have debated numerous times in our private lives and has become one that I have been focusing on as a research project: fandom, is it good or bad? http://ThePopCultureLens.podbean.com/mf/web/4kuzg8/Ep9FandomGoodBadUgly.mp3 We begin the conversation…
