The Fan Studies Network

Transformative Works & Cultures, Special Issue CFP: Social TV Fandom and the Media Industries

When Henry Jenkins calls the mid-2000s media landscape one of convergence culture, he describes the intersection of media industries, online social media, and television audiences. Using emerging multiplatform strategies producers can directly engage and immerse potential television audiences. Likewise, industry shaped hailing of fans creates fan-like audiences, but it does so within limits, reflecting industry concerns and agenda.

Nearly a decade later, both audiences and industry expect direct and continuous engagement between a series and its audience. Industry-instigated fandoms exist alongside and in conversation with fan-instigated community engagement. In particular, the rise of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr have made multiplatforming both more efficient and more mainstream, meaning that now nearly every television show has an online presence that welcomes fan engagement. As this reality of “social television” matures, however, the connections it promises between producers, actors, and viewers are tested by each new platform, each controversial story development, and by the ever-present politics of power and identity that shape any and all interactions between industry and audience.

This special issue aims to put emerging research on social media platforms and ongoing work on online fan culture in conversation to consider the impact the proliferation of those platforms is having on our understanding of the consumption and negotiation of television in era of on-screen hashtags, cast livetweets, Periscope, and the new world of “Social TV.” Topics may include, but are not limited to:

* Case studies of industry/fan engagement for specific series or networks
* Discursive framings of Social TV fandom in trade/popular press
* Negotiations of good/bad fandom in industry discourse
* Industry-produced transmedia storytelling and emergent platforms
* Industry-affiliated fan activism through Social TV practices
* Social TV in a global/transnational industrial context
* Adoption of fan identities by industry professionals
* Linear vs. non-linear Social TV practices
* Industry cultivation of and management of Superfans

Submission guidelines

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) is an international peer-reviewed online Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works copyrighted under a Creative Commons License. TWC aims to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community. TWC accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing.

Theory: Conceptual essays. Peer review, 6,000–8,000 words.
Praxis: Case study essays. Peer review, 5,000–7,000 words.
Symposium: Short commentary. Editorial review, 1,500–2,500 words.

Please visit TWC’s Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines, or e-mail the TWC Editor (editor AT transformativeworks.org).

Contact—Contact guest editor Myles McNutt with any questions or inquiries at mmcnutt AT odu.edu.

Due date—March 1, 2017, for estimated March 2018 publication.

This entry was posted on June 21, 2016 at 9:54 am and is filed under CFP, Publications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.