The Pop Culture Lens
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Overlapping Fandom, Political, and Religious Attitudes
My name is CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Ph.D. and I am a Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Dominican University. I am conducting a research project as part of a larger study on the overlaps between fandoms, politics, and religions. I am requesting your voluntary participation in my study surveying people’s political and religious beliefs […]
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A Manifesto for 21st Century Higher Education
Looking over alum surveys for my school, thinking about what the future of higher education is, and am finding that both undergraduate (UG) and graduate (G) alums seem to want the same types of knowledges and skills, just in more and more specific contexts that aid their careers. I did a quick and dirty content […]
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Compassionate Pedagogy for Online Teaching
In this blog post, I am collecting my thoughts as well as links to other people’s thoughts and writings about how to teach online from a perspective and position of compassion for learners. This information was originally collected on Twitter. Additionally, this notion of “compassionate pedagogy” is not limited to online teaching and learning but […]
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A Communication Toolbox for Communication Literacy
The following is an excerpt from my book Fractured Fandoms: Contentious Communication in Fan Communities. To read all of the information, you will need to get the book, either from a seller or your local library. [Do not cite this blog post as it is an abridged version of what appears in the book. All […]
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Marriage Around the World
An undergraduate paper from my cultural psychology class — how much have times changed in the two decades since? In 1999, Davila et al. examined the changes in attachment which are thought to occur in American married couples after the “newlywed phase.” They tested several theories to see how attachment style can change as people […]
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Investigation into the Mass Media: Then and Then Again
I love finding old papers I wrote. They help me understand where I came from and show the process of becoming a scholar — or whatever I want to call myself these days. I think we need more established scholars sharing these types of reflections on their processes, so finding old papers is a way […]
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Professional Wrestling Fanfiction from an EDR Perspective
I have been working on this project for a couple years now (as seen here, here, and here). I’m not sure if it will ever get to the point to be truly publishable, and I don’t really need it “published” in the traditional academic sense. So, I’m just going to continue sharing my thoughts on […]
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Media Engaging(s): Or, How I Learned To Be Both/And in an Either/Or Discipline
This essay contains an early draft of what I ultimately wrote for the Participations special issue on “media engagement” as a concept in audience studies. This essay contains some good ideas that were no where near ready for publishing. I may also not have the time to come back to them, as I have been […]
agency, audience studies, Communication Studies, critical studies, Cultural Studies, fan studies, human-computer interaction, media effects, media engagings, media studies, media uses and effects, minutia, objectivity, phenomenological, power, reception studies, Sense-Making Methodology, Situationality, structure, subjectivity, talk-aloud, transjectivity, Uses and Gratifications -
Squirrel Girl and Feminism
I created this video for DePaul’s Pop Culture Conference in 2021 on superheroes. For the first time, it was an entirely online conference with asynchronous, video presentations for academic work. The ideas in this piece come from a chapter I wrote for an anthology being produced by Bryan Carr and Meta G. Carstarphen. That chapter […]
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Fandom During the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant impacts on our lives, including how we experience our fandoms. Cons were moved online or cancelled. New movies came out on streaming apps at the same time as theatrical releases. Online gaming replaced in-person gaming. And people turned to their fandoms to cope with the pandemic. Krysten Stein and […]
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Disney+, the Fan Industrial Complex, and Star Wars
I love this term: Fan Industrial Complex. Chris thinks he heard it from someone else, so I will need to investigate it. Because from a media ecology perspective, it’s very useful. That’s what we have now with online mediated fan-producer networks. The technologies and economic systems require a symbiosis between more ardent fans and producers, […]
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The Four Paradigms in Spiral Form
Subtitle: A positivistically constructed model to critique dominant design with a postmodern flair This was a group project from a class with Patti Lather at OSU in 2005 that I completed with Carrie Hung, Hana Kang, and Yongfang Zhang. I look at it now and think it’s so twee! In looking at the four research […]
It's Playing, Just With Research 