V for Vendetta and Resisting Fascism

In the thirty-ninth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I present a special episode as they compare and contrast the graphic novel V for Vendetta and its film adaptation. In this episode, we discussed how the two versions of the story reflected on the social, cultural, and historical periods in which […]

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 […]

Pop Culture Lens on They Live

In the twenty-third episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher and I welcome back friend of the podcast Joe Belfeuil to discuss John Carpenter’s 1988 cult classic They Live and how the film seems as relevant if not more now. The short story the film is based on can be found on this website. […]

The Dark Side of Fandom

Last fall the call went out from the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (aka C2E2) for proposed panels for the 2016 convention. I had just been part of a very successful discussion at an academic conference that considered the problems, tensions, fractures that fans have been facing, online and offline, for years. But that was […]

Virtual World Television and Interactive Television

This is the end result of the work I have been doing with Pooky Amsterdam. This paper is the write-up of the presentation Avatars, Audiences and Interactive Television. I do not think there is enough in this paper to make pursuing publication worthwhile, but I do hope to use the categorizations of the three types […]

Women self-identifying as digital game addicts: Their interpretations of power

[This paper comes from 2007 and was completed for a qualitative methodology course at Ohio State University under the amazing Patti Lather. She encouraged us to try different methods of communication research results; so I did a comic book, which you can see here.] What is digital game addiction? A number of approaches, theories, and […]

The Last Exorcism Part II: Not Really Real

In our last post, we discussed the first found footage exorcist cinema, The Last Exorcism. What we have found interesting with this latest series of exorcism cinema is this desire to bring to the forefront the idea that such cases of exorcism are real, either through the filming techniques or the demonstration of being inspired by […]