The Fan Studies Network

CFP: Textual Reception – Exploring Audiences’ Writing Practices from a Gender Perspective (special issue of Genre en séries / Gender in Series)

Whether through fan mail sent to celebrities and the popular press, critical pieces, derivative narratives such as fan fictions and other outlets, media audiences have often chosen writing as a privileged way to extend their experiences of reception. In very different contexts indeed, individuals have written about the cultural objects they loved or execrated, using various media to express themselves. If preserved and accessible, all these texts can reveal a lot about their authors, but also about the composition and structure of the audiences they belong or have belonged to. Above all, they are spaces in which the making of gendered identities and relationships within these audiences can be observed, providing scholars valuable resources to study media reception from a gender perspective.

This special issue of Gender in Series aims to gather works dedicated to the analysis of audience’s writing practices through the lens of gender, broadly speaking, to illuminate both the media cultures and the social discourses produced by these specific audiences. Previous works have already showed how “ordinary”, “domestic” or “fan” writings may be highly gendered and researchers are therefore invited to provide new case studies. Contributions that focus on the writers’ profiles, their writing and, if applicable, publishing conditions, are particularly encouraged, as well as those interested in the social meanings and uses of audience’s texts from individual or collective perspectives. In the line of works that have explored the relation between reading and gender or the construction of identities through mass media, it seems essential to understand how these writings can be means of self-presentation or how they convey ideological representations and determinations about gender. It is all the more important since they are inspired by cultural contents which are themselves embedded within social and gendered norms. Besides, as writing forms continue to have a central role – offline and online – in reception practices, this special issue also welcomes comparative works establishing bridges between different kinds of writing materials or between heterogeneous eras or contexts: identifying the proximities or ruptures within forms of textual reception will be helpful to discuss how media cultures and gender issues interact and how these interactions may change in time.

Contributors should feel free to focus on any type of written textual reception, whatever its content (correspondence, commentary, fiction, etc.) or media (paper, digital, etc.), and whether the texts were supposed to be publicly released or to remain in the private sphere. This special issue wishes to address textual reception in its diversity: articles may deal with objects of affection (or disgust) from literary, musical and audiovisual fields or deal with celebrities related to arts, sports or even politics. Proposals from any of the different social sciences (sociology, history, film and television studies, cultural and media studies, etc.) will be considered, provided the analysis is based on empirical material, derived from archives, ethnographic research and/or digital research. Articles may deal with the most involved amateurs, such as “fans”, but may also focus on more “ordinary” cultural consumers, as long as they have taken a pen or a keyboard to express themselves. Finally, even if studies about writings produced between the end of the nineteenth to the twenty-first century are preferred, more comparative works or approaches relying on older writings will, when appropriate, be taken into account.

Full CFP (with additional research directions, references, and practical information): http://www.thomaspillard.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/CFP-Gender-in-Series-Textual-Reception.pdf

(suggested references: http://genreenseries.weebly.com/bibliographie-appel-numeacutero-7.html)

Editors:
– Sébastien François: sebastien.francois@rocketmail.com
– Thomas Pillard: thomas@pillard.nom.fr

Important dates:
– Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2016
– Notification of acceptance or rejection: December 15, 2016
– Reception of full papers: March 1, 2017
– Reviews sent to authors: May 2017
– Reception of final articles: September 1, 2017
– Online publication: Fall 2017

Click to access Call%20for%20papers%20-%20HRC.pdf

Tema: Researching Internet Content

The Internet has recently celebrated it’s 25th anniversary and as Gartner’s hype cycle on emerging technology shows the Internet has already give rise to new, emerging as well as established technologies, platforms, ways of interacting and creating content.

In the humanities we traditionally study cultural content in it’s many different shapes and forms from letters and literature, to paintings and pottery. However, 25 years with the Internet has thoroughly affected the amount, shape, creation of and way we interact with the cultural content found on the Internet. This in turn has influenced the theories as well as the methods with which we can study cultural content. The field of Digital Humanities has built itself around the idea of using digital methods to study more traditional material such as handwritten or analogue documents. However, in recent years there has been a growing focus on the study of born-digital material, using both newly developed digital methods as well as more traditional methods.

This issue will include research papers that deal with methods, possibilities, challenges and in particular ethical considerations in relation to humanities research into Internet content.

This includes, but is not limited to the study of:
fanwork and it’s creators
DIY culture and how-tos
amateur forums
social networks blogs and bloggers

Researchers from any discipline and at any level are invited to submit a 200-word abstracts on this topic by 15 October 2016 to the issue editors, Henriette Roued- Cunliffe (roued@hum.ku.dk) and Thessa Jensen (thessa@hum.aau.dk)

The editorial team will review all abstracts, and authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers by 1 February 2017.

Important dates:

15 October 2016: deadline for abstracts

1 February 2017: deadline for full paper

CFP: Queers and Queerness in Science Fiction

Writing from Below seeks submissions for a special themed issue on the poetics and politics of queers and queerness in science fiction. We seek critical and creative works, from any disciplinary perspective, in any format or medium, on the intersection of science fiction with the study of genders and sexualities. We seek to make visible the invisible queer pasts, presents, and futures of science fiction, to critically and creatively cultivate science fictional possibilities pressed into service for the coming of future actual and imagined queer bodies, lives, relationships, communities… and we are especially interested in the sociological perspective—the impacts of science fiction, in its myriad manifestations, on genders and sexualities as experienced, expressed, performed in human societies.

Writing from Below is a peer-reviewed online open-access gender, sexuality and diversity studies journal. We provide a forum for new research on gender and sexuality and the array of intersecting practices, ideologies, and issues that shape their human experience and social expression. For this special issue, topics might include (but should not be limited to):

· The representation of queers, queerness, and same-sex sexualities in science fiction, across various mediums (song, dance, literature, film, visual arts, etc.)

· The history of queer science fiction, its legacies and our inheritances

· The critique of privileged sexual and gender practices in science fiction—discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion; power and coercion

· Queer social movements—their advancement, representation, critique—in science fiction

· Contemporary cultural, social, political, legal, ethical, biological, environmental, and technological issues in gender that science fiction draws attention to and comments on

· Queer geographies, place and space in science fiction

· New modes or models of gender, sexuality, and eroticism articulated through science fiction

· The future of queerness: what will queer be (if it persists) in future science fictions

· Hope, hopelessness, and queer science fictional futures

· Dystopian and utopian representations of futuristic queerness

· Post-humanism and/or trans-humanism, in theory and practice

· Bodies and texts in science fiction: non-human queerness, post-humanist queerness, queerness without bodies; cyborgs and augmented humans; intersexuality and alternative embodied genders

· Dildos and deathrays: sex, sexuality, and technology

· Queers Destroy/Destory Science Fiction: canons and cannons

· Science fiction and/or fan studies, genre studies, game studies, etc.

The future beckons with a queer fist, and we need you to write it. Do not be limited. Like your forebears: Be brave! Play with form, style, and genre. Invent, demolish, reimagine. We welcome submissions from any field which intersects with the study of gender, sexuality, and diversity. We publish traditional academic research as well as less conventional creative forms of research—we love to encourage scholarly experimentation.

We are open for submissions until 7 November 2016. Please visit the Writing from Below website for more information, and to submit your work: http://www.writingfrombelow.org.au.

Dr Quinn Eades
Managing Editor
Q.Eades@latrobe.edu.au

Dr Stephen Abblitt
Managing Editor
Stephen.Abblitt@open.edu.au

Writing from Below
La Trobe University, Victoria, 3086
http://www.writingfrombelow.org.au

We are delighted with the many wonderful abstracts we have received, and thank all prospective authors for their proposals.

To complete the various themes of the book we are now specifically requesting abstracts exploring the following themes:

Downloading and Streaming in Australia (the impact of Netflix on Australian viewing; immediate access to series such as Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead; avoiding spoilers etc.)
Australian fandom and the Asia Pacific (Anime, KPop, JPop, Bollywood etc.)
Investigating fandom of Australian film and Television productions (Kath and Kim, Underbelly, Offspring, Summer Heights High etc.)
The extended deadline for submissions is September 17 2016.

Please see the original CFP (below) for submission instructions.

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Online, offline and transcultural spaces in Australian Fandom

Australian fans have access to a wide array of popular culture content from around the world, developing relationships with these products that are as rich as fans from other parts of the globe. Until recently access to media products is limited by temporal and spatial distance from countries of origin. Yet, at the same time practices from diaspora communities to preserve cultural identity introduces a multitude of global media content to a wider Australian audience. Australian fans thus engage with a mixture of ‘conventional’ and ‘niche’ media products that places them both within the margins and in the mainstream. While there may be parallels between Australia and other nations with multicultural communities, the geographical location, history and cultural mix of Australian society give rise to unique contexts shaping the consumption and practices of Australian fans.

We thus ask the question: What makes the Australian fan experience unique? What influence does geo-political location have on the consumption and appropriation of popular culture in the Australian context? What impact does Australian multicultural society have on exposure and access to popular culture? What drives Australian fan interaction with global popular culture, and how does this interaction intersect with narratives of ‘Australian-ness’ in local and globalised contexts?

This book seeks to explore the specific and unique experience of being fans living and Australia.

We seek authors to contribute critical chapters for an edited volume to be submitted to University of Iowa Press. Topics include but are not limited to:
Online fandom
Offline fandom (including convention attendance, fan-celebrity interaction etc)
Fan perceptions of celebrity brands/identities/public persona
Fan fiction
Cosplay culture
Anime culture
Manga culture
Subcultures of fandom
Transcultural fan practices (e.g. fan Subbers)
World cinema fandom
Cult cinema fandom
Comic book fandom
Distribution practices including Fast tracked television, Streaming services and Netflix
Fandom and national identity

Please email 300 word abstracts and your CV to both Celia Lam and Jackie Raphael by September 17 2016. Proposals should be for original chapters that have not been previously published (including conference proceedings), and are not under consideration from other journals or edited collections.

Dr. Celia Lam is Lecturer in Media and Communications, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney (celia.lam@nd.edu.au)

Dr. Jackie Raphael is Lecturer in Design, School of Design and Art, Curtin University (J.Raphael@curtin.edu.au)

CFP: Call for Submissions for chapters in an edited book
Book title: *Revisiting the Aca-fan Concept with and beyond Jenkins*
Submission deadline: October 1st, 2016.
Editor: Prof. Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb – Centre Norbert Elias (Eds.)
Publisher: Routledge

*Description*
Jenkins has described himself as an “Aca-fan”, a term that first gained currency in the early 1990’s. Jenkins is further credited with helping in the wide-spread popularization of the term, together with Matt Hills’ concept of the “fan-academic”, that describes an academic who consciously identifies and writes as a fan. Jenkins’s theories was extensively discussed in 2011, in a special issue of Cultural Studies edited by James Hay and Nick Couldry but this volume did not focus on the Aca-fan concept. Furthermore, over the past several years and in spite of the Hills or Jenkins partial responses (Hills has enlighten his approach of the acafan in « Media Academics as Media Audiences: Aesthetic Judgements in Media and Cultural Studies », 2007) and the few papers published worldwide (Maigret-Macé, 2005; Booth, 2013; Cristofari-Guitton, 2015, Gimello-Vilatte, 2015), the academic community (including fandom studies scholars) had not yet deeply explored the perimeter of the Aca-fan concept as a whole topic of study. More recently, Paul Booth acknowledged that the ‘Aca-fan’ “does not do enough to involve fans in the process of research”, (Booth, 2013) while Bruno Cailler and Cécile Masoni observed an antagonism between both communities (Masoni-Cailler, 2015). Paradoxically, while Jenkins most powerful concepts such as transmedia convergence or participatory audiences were dissected worldwide, the Aca-fan heuristic values remain relatively neglected and under-discussed within the academic field.

*Statement of Aims*
Guided by these questions, we are seeking chapters for an edited collection that historicizes, interrogates and problematizes the Aca-fan concept as a stimulating framework. The aim of this edited volume is to both revisiting and reinterpret, from an epistemological perspective, several research defined key concepts that have formulated “fan-academic” propositions with and beyond Hills and Jenkins among others. Editors are especially interested in testimonies from academics engaged in emerging academic fields, where the Aca-fan concept is familiarized such as studies in performing arts, popular music, digital games, media studies, communication sciences, or audience theory and media epistemology, just to name a few.

We invite prospective participants to submit a 500 words abstract that draws upon empirical and/or critical approaches through the exploration of Aca-fan contemporary and/or historical issues. Chapters may address (but are not limited to) the following topics:

*Analyzing early profane and academic works, prior to Hills and Jenkins, that are devoted to academic fandom such as “An Ethnography of Star Trek Fandom” (Di Costanzo, 1977) or “Thinking About Slash/Thinking About Women” (Bjorklund, 1988), among others.
*Case studies stemming from scholars implementing the Aca-fan concept in their classes and further questioning the impact of such, from an epistemological perspective.
*The Aca-fan concept: concerning a practice-based Audience theory and Reception Studies
*Discussing Social Science Methodology through the Aca-fan: Is the scholar a fan just “like the others”?
*What is the concept meaning to non Aca-fan scholars?
*Legally introduce scholar’s tastes and quality judgment through academic writings: A (new) form of criticism?
*Participant Observation Data Collection method
* Analysis of academic debates regarding Aca-Fandom rhetoric

Please submit a 500 word abstract, a list of 10 references and a brief biography to Centre Norbert Elias – Prof. Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb (cne-ecc@[alt]univ-avignon.fr) by *October 1st, 2016. *Successful submissions will be notified on October 15th. Upon acceptance, full articles (between 6000 and 8000 words, including references) will be due at the latest on the 1st of December.