The Fan Studies Network

CFP: Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, special issue on Science Fiction and Videogames

For over half a century—from the spaceship duels of Spacewar! and the
attacking waves of the Space Invaders, through to the explorations of
the Metroid series and the complex environments of the Bioshock
games—electronic gaming has made extensive use of science fictional
themes and settings. Likewise, science fiction, in books like Ender’s
Game, films like The Last Starfighter, and TV shows like Defiance, has
often explored tropes of videogaming within its created worlds. Both
regularly, even obsessively, address questions of identity,
embodiment, and representation, as well as the constructions and
constraints of culture; both are also constituted in the complex and
often fraught relations between fan groups and society.

Foundation (http://www.sf-foundation.org) seeks papers for a special issue on science fiction and
electronic gaming that will delineate and explore zones of concern
shared by these two rapidly developing bodies of criticism and theory.
What might their intersections reveal about the gaps, conflicts, and
kinships of our present cultural moment? How does the history of
science fiction criticism speak to game studies, and vice versa? How
might the modes of play we develop in electronic realms translate to
our methods of critical reading or viewing? What SF works, canonical
or otherwise, might be read differently when seen as anticipating or
responding to digital gaming?

All topics and methodologies are welcome, potentially including (but
not limited to) genre theory, fandom, constructions and
representations of cultural identities, physical and intellectual
disability, platform studies and media archaeology, software and
critical code studies, print culture, and readings of individual
titles or series.

Send submissions of up to 8,000 words (including endnotes) by 15 April
2014 to journaleditor@sf-foundation.org, attaching the file as
electronic text in either .rtf or .doc format. For questions about
formatting, see the Foundation style guide at sf-foundation.org;
direct all other inquiries to Andrew Ferguson at af3pj@virginia.edu.

CFP: K-POP AND K-DRAMA FANDOMS

Special issue of Journal of Fandom Studies 
Guest Editors: Crystal S. Anderson and Doobo Shim

This special issue responds to the well-established and global subculture of fans of Korean popular music (K-pop) and Korean television drama (K-drama). K-pop and K-drama are the products of Hallyu, a cultural movement from Korea directed towards the global stage that originated in the late 1990s.  Recent global successes of Korean artists such as Psy, Girls Generation, 2NE1 and BigBang as well as K-drama actors such as Lee Min Ho and Jang Geun Suk represent only a portion of the vibrant and diverse fandom.  This special issue seeks to examine the uniqueness of K-pop and K-drama fandoms and their contribution to global fandom scholarship. 
K-pop and K-drama represent hybridized modes of cultural production aimed at global audiences that emerged from Korea in the 1990s. Initially, K-pop fandoms were centered in Korea and locales in East Asia.  As a result of technological advances in digital music and social media such as Twitter and YouTube, the fandom has grown to more international locations. Similarly, K-drama saw popularity in Korea and East Asia, and increased international access through online streaming sites and satellite options contributed to the rise of more global K-drama fandoms, with some variants.  Unlike the U.S. television drama production, K-drama fans participate in the creation of the show through feedback to the drama series up to the point that the writers have to change their story lines.  This is a very unique “strength” of K-drama in that this practice allows continuous communication between producers and audiences. Overwhelmingly female, the fandoms for both K-drama and K-pop are poised to provide gendered renditions of cultural production and consumption. The possible polysemy embedded in Hallyu cultural products may produce a dynamically interesting consumption according to a different specificity and locality. 
The spread of K-pop and K-drama fandoms has spurred scholarship on the subject.  While K-pop and its fandom represent one of the most visible aspects of Hallyu, they receive the least critical attention from academia. Two groundbreaking collections, East Asian Popular Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave (2008), and Hallyu: Influence of Korean Popular Culture in Asia and Beyond (2011) do not feature any submissions on K-pop.  Studies of K-drama fandom are more plentiful, but tend to focus on the attitudes of fans in East Asia.  Moreover, the theoretical approaches to the fandoms tend to revolve around notions of hybridity and globalization that de-emphasize the multiple cultures in play.  For example, the coverage of fans in Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-Pop Idols (2010) is largely limited to the cases in Southeast Asia.

 
In response to this void, this special issue solicits innovative examinations of all aspects of K-pop and K-drama fandoms. Papers on the topic could relate to specific ideas given below but are not restricted to:
– New critical and theoretical approaches to the study of K-pop and K-drama fandoms or reimagined critical interventions associated with theories of hybridity, cultural proximity and globalization·    
-Comparative approaches to the global spread of K-pop and K-drama fandoms, especially comparisons between fandoms based in East Asia and other parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and the United States·    
-Interplay between fans and artists/actors·    
-Fan activities and cultural production, including fan art, blogs, mashup videos, cover dance groups·    
-Fan discourse and commentary, such as comments on social media and forums·    
-Economic impact of fan activity, including impact on sales of music and merchandise as well as advertising revenue·    
-Fan philanthropy·    
-Fan backlash, including the formation of anti-fan clubs, anti-fan movements, negative/erroneous portrayal of fans·    
-Analysis of the demographic of K-pop and K-drama fandom, particularly with attention to age, nationality and race/ethnicity·    
-In-depth examination of specific fandoms as well as fandoms in specific countries

Details of the publication are on the Intellect website: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=213/view,page=0/
Deadline for submission of Abstracts: 31 October 2013.

Please submit an Abstract (200 words) and keywords (five) and profile of author/s (50 words)

Deadline for submission of Full Papers: 15 January 2014.Please submit a full paper (6,000-9,000 words, including references and tables).
Please send Abstracts and Full Papers to: Dr. Crystal S. Anderson (canderson14@elon.edu).
For any further queries, please write to: Dr. Crystal S. Anderson (canderson14@elon.edu), Associate Professor, Dept of English, Elon University
OR
Dr. Doobo Shim (mediapoet@gmail.com), Professor, Dept of Media & Communication, Sungshin Women’s University

Call for Papers – Participations: International Journal of Audience Research:  “Masters of the Universe: World-Building and World-Exploring”

 Editors: William Proctor (Centre for Research in Media & Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK) & Dan-Hassler Forest (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam).

The publication of Mark J.P Wolf’s Building Imaginary Worlds: The History and Theory of Subcreation (2012) is a landmark event in academia. ‘Imaginary worlds,’ writes Wolf, ‘rank among the most elaborate mediated entities [and] have been largely overlooked in Media Studies despite a history spanning three millennia’ (ibid:2). Indeed, the study of world-building is an important field of enquiry given the wealth of people who explore these ‘geographies of the imagination’ as a fundamental feature of their daily lives (Saler, 2012:4). As New York Times film critic, A.O Scott observes, ‘today there are hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions of people whose grasp of the history, politics and mythological traditions of entirely imaginative places could surely qualify them for an advanced degree’ (2002). It is important therefore to recognize that popular entertainment ‘is moving more and more in the direction of subcreational world-building’ and thus warrants close scrutiny and scholarly examination (Wolf, 2012: 13).

In literary studies, Michael Saler’s As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford, 2012) explores the world-building adventures of J.R.R Tolkien, Arthur Conan-Doyle and H.P Lovecraft. Taken alongside Wolf’s work, the two studies complement one another and open up a wider debate about world-building and narrative transmedia in important directions.

While Wolf and Sader raise many important issues and analyses, this call for papers seeks to bring the audience into the conversation to explore world-building from theirperspective: what is important to the reader? Is it true, as Wolf and Sader both argue, that the story-world must make sense? How do audiences traverse the fictional realm of imaginary worlds in practice? Does world-consistency matter, and if so, for what reasons? Is a sense of saturation ‘the goal,’ as Wolf puts it, and to what extent is this even possible? Do audiences ‘rummage for micro-data,’ as David Bordwell argues, and if so, what do they search for? What is the main rationale for their engagement and in what ways do they engage? How do audiences negotiate ‘counter-factual’ texts that can destabilize the ontology of a story-system?

In short, this special section will focus above all on questions that are crucially important for the world-explorers themselves?

This special section of ‘Participations: Journal of International Audience Research’ invites scholars to contribute to the burgeoning field of world-building. Firstly, the work must engage with audiences as opposed to textual analyses while, secondly, providing an original contribution to the field. Speculative accounts about audience engagement are not the aim here – what we are interested in here is a mapping of specific communities and their rich relationships with world-building. How this may be measured is of interest here, too, but the speculation is to be avoided. Materials in circulation, as in web forums and the like, can be utilized, as can audience research conducted by the researcher. If building an argument about how audiences might respond, researchers should consider how to test and verify their claims.

Subjects may vary considerably – this list is not exhaustive and the editors welcome proposals that fit within the widest possible purview of this project. Similarly, this should not indicate any single medium but any medium (or combination thereof) that engages with story-worlds and world-building: examples include prose fiction, comic books, TV, film, theme parks, and any other that meets the requirements of this special section.

Audiences and Imaginary Worlds.

Saturation, Immersion and Absorption.

World-Building and World-Dwelling.

Consistency, Cohesion and Causality.

Seriality.

Narrative Braiding

Proposals will be considered depending upon their validity for audience studies. There are many imaginary world systems that exist in a wider range of media windows including (but not limited to):

The World of Prometheus and Alien

Game of Thrones/ A Song of Ice and Fire

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower

The Novels of Michael Moorcock

Dr. Who

Blade Runner

The Whedon-Verse

Pacific Rim

Star Trek

Star Wars

Twilight

Frank L. Baum and Oz

True Blood

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Comic Book Universes (DC/ Marvel/ Image/ IDW)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe

Harry Potter

China Miéville’s Bas-Lag

While Wolf and Sader (2012), among others, do not count soap operas within the imaginary world schemata due to its similarity with the Primary World (that is, the ‘real world’), we believe that this does not take into account the audience members who visit ‘hyperreal’ settings such as The Rovers Return pub that is an iconic feature of Coronation Street. In 1981, Christine Geraghty claimed that viewers of Coronation Street demand consistency from the text even going so far to employ a programme historian to ensure facts are adhered to. This practice mirrors the so-called ‘series bibles’ of imaginary worlds from Star Trek to Star Wars which have served as templates for many other organized world-building exercises. Thus, all fictional worlds are imaginary worlds. This will hopefully attract a larger range of projects than is commonly the case. The following may be considered although these lists are not exhaustive but offer an example of the range of story-systems available for study:

Coronation Street

Eastenders

The Killing

The Sopranos

The Wire

Sex and the City

Dexter

Breaking Bad

Charles Dickens

William Shakespeare

All proposals will be considered provided they meet the purview of this special issue.

As an online journal Participations does not work with strict word-limits, but instead encourages authors to show their materials, methods of investigation and analysis and theoretical frames explicitly, for the readers’ benefit, without being unnecessarily prolix.  The Journal also does not insist on one style of formatting for references and bibliography, but asks authors to ensure that they are internally clear, consistent and complete.

Abstracts of 350 words are to be forwarded to both William Proctor (billyproctor@hotmail.co.uk) and Dan Hassler-Forest (D.A.Hassler-forest@uva.nl) by October 31^st, 2013. For any queries or suggestions, please contact both parties also. Successful scholars will be expected to submit first drafts by February 1^st 2014. The special section is planned for publication in November 2014.