The Fan Studies Network

The inaugural International Vampire Film and Arts Festival will take place in Sighisoara in Transylvania, Romania, on May 26th – 29th 2016.

From Stoker to Rice; from Nosferatu to classic Hammer onto Twilight, The Strain and beyond – the vampire genre is the world’s most enduring and influential horror genre straddling film, television, literature, theatre, games and new media. IVFAF brings together vampire media-makers from across the World in one cross-industry event – an exciting four-day programme of film screenings, book launches, readings, theatre, seminars, workshops, tours, networking events, a trade fair and parties. The Festival will take place within the walls of the dramatic medieval citadel that was the birthplace to the real Vlad Dracula and will involve industry, artists, fans and academics.

Confirmed speakers include:

Dr Stacey Abbott (University of Roehampton)
Professor Richard Hand (University of South Wales)
Dacre Stoker (Author)

This call for papers is for scholars interested in presenting their work in the academic symposium that runs alongside the Festival (in association with the University of South Wales). Proposals for single 20-minute papers or pre-constituted panels (of 3 x 20-minute papers) on any aspect of the Vampire are now welcomed from scholars working in (but not limited to) the following areas:

• Literature
• Film & TV Studies
• Gothic Studies
• Media & Cultural studies
• Art
• Fashion
• Audience & Fan Studies
• Theatre Studies
• Music

We are also interested in proposals for academic roundtables or workshops. The deadline for proposals is Wednesday 9th March 2016.

Please submit 250 word abstracts and a short author biography to Dr Rebecca Williams at rebecca.williams@southwales.ac.uk

Further information and regular updates on the event, including information on the Industry Strand and the VampFest fan Festival can be found at http://ivfaf.com/

You can follow the Festival on Twitter @VampireFestival or find it on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/vampireartsfestival/?fref=ts

Sex and Sexualities in Popular Culture: Feminist Perspectives 2016

Call for Papers for a 1-day postgraduate symposium hosted by the Digital Cultures Research Centre

Abstract deadline: April 15th, 2016

Conference date and location: September 3rd, 2016, Digital Cultures Research Centre, The Watershed, Bristol

Eligibility: Postgraduate students (MA/MSc onwards) and creative practitioners

Send abstracts to: popsex.conference@gmail.com

Keynote speaker: Cheryl Morgan

The second annual Sex and Sexualities in Popular Culture: Feminist Perspectives symposium is returning to the Bristol Watershed in September 2016. Following an exciting inaugural symposium in 2015, this year’s event will continue our tradition of offering a safe, inclusive space for postgraduate students and creative practitioners to meet peers, share work and learn from each other.

We are delighted to welcome Cheryl Morgan as the keynote speaker for PopSex16. Cheryl is a Hugo award-winning science fiction critic and publisher. She is the owner of Wizard’s Tower Press and the Wizard’s Tower Books ebook store. Previously she edited the Hugo Award winning magazine, Emerald City (Best Fanzine, 2004). She also won a Hugo for Best Fan Writer in 2009. She is a Co-Chair of Out Stories Bristol and lectures regularly on both trans history and science fiction and fantasy literature.

We continue to be interested in how representations of sex and sexualities in popular culture shape feminist – and anti-feminist – issues and discourses. Since our 2015 event, we have seen both the box office success and backlash against films such as Mad Max Fury Road (noted for strong feminist themes and female leads in a traditionally male-dominated franchise) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (which upset “Men’s Rights Activists” through its failure to feature a straight, white, male hero). MRAs have also made abortive attempts to organise away from the keyboard. Eddie Redmayne, the cisgender male actor cast as the lead in The Danish Girl, has drawn criticism for his claims that the movie has brought trans issues to the mainstream. Fanfiction has received even more mainstream coverage with speculation that pressure from fans may move Disney to make one of the leads in the latest Star Wars trilogy canonically gay. And of course many aspects of sex and sexualities remain silenced and unrepresented in popular culture. We welcome, among others, proposals which examine these trends and take the (mis/under)representations of sex and sexualities in popular culture as a starting point to theorise the links between popular culture and real-world feminist issues and activism.

We aim to create a space safe for experimentation – both with new ideas and with presentation formats. We therefore encourage a range of submissions, including workshops, discussions, pecha kucha, as well as the traditional 20-minute paper format.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

– Representations of women’s desire and sexualities in popular culture
– Non-cis- and heteronormative sexualities in popular culture, especially beyond “gay and lesbian”
– Representations of sex work
– Infertility and sexual dysfunction
– Sexual intersections, including race, disability, religion, class and socioeconomic status, gender, etc.
– Sex and sexualities in gaming
– Sexual pleasure in popular culture
– Invisibility: (a)sexualities unrepresented
– Sex, sexualities and social media
– Sex and sexualities in fan and transformative works

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bio to popsex.conference@gmail.com by April 15th, 2016.

We look forward to your proposals

Bethan Jones, Monika Drzewiecka, Milena Popova

Ageing celebrities and ageing fans in popular media culture

19-20 May 2016 at Department of Media Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen.

We are proud to announce that the following keynotes are confirmed for the seminar:

Professor Matt Hills, Aberystwyth University, Wales.
Professor. C. Lee Harrington, Miami University, USA.
Reader, Dr. Deborah Jermyn, Roehampton University, England
Senior lecturer, Dr. Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs, University of Salford, England.

Call for abstracts

DEADLINE: 1 March 2016: 250-300 words for paper presentations. Abstracts should be submitted to linenp@hum.ku.dk and jerslev@hum.ku.dk

There is increasing interest in celebrity and age within media studies, most recently represented by the edited volume Women, Celebrity and Cultures of Ageing. The same goes for age in fan studies, with the edited volume Ageing, Media and Culture (2015) devoting a few chapters to ageing and life course in fan culture. This seminar combines these two strands of research, with a focus on both female and male celebrities and fans. The seminar is dedicated to discussions of representations of and meanings related to ageing in contemporary celebrity and fan culture across a range of media, from fashion ads and tabloid magazines to music, film, television, social media, and other media platforms.

Ageing remains contentious in popular culture, with young stars being cast to play much older characters. The ageing female body is either contained or pathologized in audiovisual media, eloquently described by Vivian Sobchack in the late 1990s. Nowhere is ageism as prominent a logic as in media production. Celebrity culture is a culture of youth. Recently, however, movements have emerged that run counter to this pervasive notion of celebrities as young and beautiful. Much effort has been made by mature female actresses to publicly call attention to the lack of older female characters in film. Jane Fonda co-stars with Lily Tomlin and co-produces the Netflix comedy series Grace and Frankie, which deals with women starting over post-divorce late in life and reinventing themselves as modern single women. Elderly celebrity, writer Joan Didion, was chosen as the face of Celine’s spring campaign of 2015, as was singer Joni Mitchell for Saint Laurent.

Just as with celebrities, fan cultures are mostly considered to be teen or youth phenomena. However, an increasing number of mature adults and seniors are active members of fandoms, both online on social media platforms and as participants at fan conventions. Playfulness or excessive enthusiasm for a media product or celebrity are no longer seen as the exclusive property of the younger generations, but there is still a lack of knowledge about what happens when fans become parents and grandparents or when people become fans in later life. Similarly, we seek to understand the possibilities new media and platforms, such as Tumblr, offer fans and how social media encourage older people to perform fan practices. One mature fan writes in her Twitter bio: ‘Old enough to know better, old enough not to care.’ Finally, a range of television and film series have returned with updated versions of the original older shows (including Sherlock (2010-), Doctor Who (2005-), Twin Peaks (2016), X-Files (2016)), creating an opportunity for fans of the original series to engage on social media platforms and immerse themselves in the narratives once again. This seminar examines the role fandom plays in the life course of mature and elderly fans.

In summary, we hope to shed light on new tendencies related to ageing in celebrity and fan culture in popular and entertainment media by bringing together the two research traditions and the cultural spaces in which they overlap.

The seminar includes but is not limited to:

– Tabloid and celebrity media’s focus on age and ageing

– Representations of ageing celebrities at red carpet events

– Representations of ageing in popular media narratives

– The role of fandom for mature and ageing fans in online/offline fan culture

– Old stories, old audiences? Audiences for revived narratives such as Sherlock Holmes film and TV franchises, Star Trek, Doctor Who, the X-Files, Twin Peaks, etc.

– Gender studies in relation to ageing in celebrity culture and fan culture

– Genre and ageing: the action hero, ageing in comedy, etc.

http://mcc.ku.dk/research/focus-areas/ageing-and-old-age-in-the-media-and-elderly-peoples-media/box/activities/arrangement1/

Media Engagement: Connecting Production, Texts and Audiences

International Symposium Wallenberg Foundation, Lund University and University of Westminster

Wednesday 4th May 2016, Boardroom, 309 Regent Street, London Preceded by the seminar Media Industries and Engagement Tuesday 3rd May (CAMRI seminar series) Organisers Annette Hill and Jeanette Steemers

How do people engage with media such as television drama, twitter feeds, or reality entertainment? Media engagement is a broad term for research into how we experience media content, artefacts and events, from our experience of live performances, to social media engagement, or participation in media itself. Media engagement offers a rich site of analysis for exploring the dispersed connections across industry contexts, cultural forms, and audience experiences.

This symposium provides a platform for research on new terms of media engagement. We want to understand industrial contexts for engagement, including performance metrics, production practices and policy discourses. And we want to understand people’s shifting and subjective relations with media as live audiences, catch up viewers, illegal users, citizens and consumers, fans and anti-fans, contestants and participants. Media engagement thus encapsulates research on audiences, fans or producer-users, and the ways these different groups co-exist with those making content and driving policy and politics. The aim of the symposium is to investigate how industrial contexts, producers and audiences co-create, shape and limit experiences within emerging mediascapes.

We welcome research that relates to the following areas of enquiry for media engagement:
1.Industrial contexts for engagement: production practices, policy discourses and stakeholder coalitions
2.Empirical production and audience research: quantitative and qualitative methods and practices Audience experiences and engagement: affect, emotion and passion
3.Fans and anti-fans: labour and fan practices
4.Unmeasured audience: informal media economies and illegal practices

The conference includes a combination of invited speakers and open panels. Confirmed speakers include Professor Göran Bolin (Södertörn University, Sweden), Professor Raymond Boyle (Glasgow University, UK), Professor John Corner (Leeds University, UK), Professor Annette Hill (Lund University, Sweden), Professor Jeanette Steemers (University of Westminster, UK), Dr Paul Torre (University of Northern Iowa, USA), Professor Anne Marit Waade (Aarhus University, Denmark). The symposium is connected with the Media Experiences project, a production and audience study of television drama, documentary and reality entertainment based at Lund University, in collaboration with Endemol Shine Group, and funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (http://mediaexperiences.blogg.lu.se/).

Please submit abstracts of 300 words in English by 23rd March 2016 to Jose Luis Urueta (jose.luis_urueta@kom.lu.se). There is a registration fee of 25 GBP.

Information about the CAMRI seminar series:
https://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars

http://www.kom.lu.se/index.php?id=51836

Call for Papers/Proposals: AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium
Los Angeles, CA (July 1-4)

anime-expo.org/academic-program
animemangastudies.wordpress.com/symposium
Submission deadline: April 15, 2016

The Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation, the parent organization of Anime Expo (AX), the largest anime convention in the U.S., is inviting proposals for plenary addresses, presentations, and panel discussions for the 2016 AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium. The Symposium will be held from July 1 to July, 2016 at the Los Angeles Convention Center (Los Angeles, California) as the Academic Program track of this year’s Anime Expo.
Japanese animation (anime) and comics (manga) are unique forms of visual culture that attract and inspire audiences around the world. The AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium serves as the premier site for presenting and sharing research on a wide range of topics related to the creation, production, distribution, and worldwide reception of anime/manga, their history, relationships with other media, and the experiences and practices of anime and manga fans.
The Symposium’s goal is to bring together a diverse, international group of scholars, and facilitate the development of anime/manga studies as a defined academic field. As an integral part of Anime Expo, and open to all attendees, it also introduces general audiences to the methods, practices and tools of academic research into popular culture and fosters a dialogue between academics and fans. Participants in the Symposium will be able to join a celebration and appreciation of Japanese popular culture and interact directly with the convention’s attendees. Inherently interdisciplinary, it is open to approaches from different fields, and welcomes a wide range of speakers. Early-career scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, and independent researchers/industry professionals are especially encouraged to submit proposals!
These can take the form of a longer plenary address (45-60 minutes), an individual presentation, or a round-table panel discussion. Because of the Symposium’s broad educational mission, speakers are urged to consider subjects, topics and approaches that will be of interest to general, non-specialist audiences and do not require significant theory backgrounds or familiarity with particular subjects.

Some potential areas/topics the proposals can address include:
• Genres, genre conventions and subversions, franchises, adaptations and interpretations of Japanese and non-Japanese literature and other media, cross-media adaptations (such as anime/manga into video games and stage plays), the increasing prominence of remakes and reimaginings.
• Professional and amateur translation of anime and manga, censorship/self-censorship, translation of “non-speech” elements such as signs, writing, particular fonts, etc.
• Depictions of gender and sexuality, and the role of gender in the production and consumption of anime/manga.
• Fan service and objectification, the male and female gaze, the interplay of male and female creators, producers, and audiences.
• Responses to current social and political issues, such as marginalized communities, crime, terrorism and international conflict, relations between Japan and other countries, the 3.11 Tohoku Disaster and its effects on Japanese society.
• The growing influence of Western media and Western markets on anime/manga. The effects of streaming, crowdfunding, direct involvement by Western producers. The impact of Japanese visual culture on animation and comics outside Japan.
• Fan cultures, activities, practices and experiences – clubs, conventions, cosplay, fansites, fansubbing, anime music videos – in Japan, the U.S., and around the world.
• Potentials for anime/manga as platforms for social change and the political identities of anime/manga fans.
This year, the symposium is particularly interested in exploring questions related to:
The economics of anime and manga:
• The roles of particular creators and other individuals
• Entrepreneurial and business models
• The state of the anime/manga industry in Japan, in the U.S., and around the world
• Industry trends and future projections
Teaching about Japanese animation/Japanese comics at the secondary and post-secondary level
• Developing lesson plans
• Selecting themes and titles to feature
• Interacting with different types of students
• Integrating anime and manga into other classes
• Responding to Common Core Standards

If you are interested in participating in the 2016 AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium, please submit the title of your proposed talk or panel, an abstract (300 words maximum) and your CV to Mikhail Koulikov, mkoulikov@gmail.com.
Deadline for submissions: April 15, 2016.
Selected speakers may be offered complimentary admission to Anime Expo 2016.

For additional details about the AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium, including the previous years’ schedules and lists of speakers, please visit https://animemangastudies.wordpress.com/symposium

Transgressive Textualities: A Postgraduate Symposium
Department of English, University of Malta
20–21 May 2016

Call for Papers
https://www.facebook.com/events/907457572630392/
http://www.um.edu.mt/events/tt2016

[T]he Text cannot stop (for example, at a library shelf); its constitutive moment is traversal….
– Roland Barthes

[L]iterature seemed to me, in a confused way, to be the institution which allows one to say everything, in every way.
– Jacques Derrida

[I]n London the most interesting literary activity is happening outside the book.
– Tom McCarthy

Language is transgressive. Any act of comprehension is in effect the demonstration of a dissatisfaction with the bounds of the mere graphic inscription or sound of words. To render sense we ‛transgress’ beyond the marks on the page, beyond the auditory phenomenon. An experience of the limit is, then, right at the (transgressively dispersed) heart of language.

Literary language multiplies and amplifies this originary transgression. It foregrounds and celebrates the potentially radically unstable metaphoricity of language that not only cannot be contained within limits, but is most what it is at the point of traversal through and beyond limits. Literary language, animated by what Wallace Stevens called ‛the intricate evasions of as’, is, it might be said, nothing if not transgressively exorbitant.

The ubiquitous word ‛text’ perhaps most starkly articulates this dual limit-and-transgression nature of language. On the one hand text is the material existence of language, but on the other it is simply that which is readable, and can only be experienced as a production, as an activity that happens beyond the page. The material text is simply the occasion of this transgression.

But literature is changing and we might now ask what new or alternative forms of material instantiation of the readable now invite transgression towards signification? Is the site of the limit
experience of the literary still predominantly the printed text, or is the literary migrating elsewhere, in the ultimate act of self-transgression, to be hosted and facilitated by new and emerging forms of textuality? Where, it might be asked, do we find transgressive textualities today?

And then there are the perennial forms of transgression associated with literature, whatever the context of its manifestation – the ways in which literature can challenge social and institutional structures, cultural and moral conventions and, indeed, law itself. Provocative and controversial, literature has always been something of an outlaw discourse, saying the unsayable, thinking the unthinkable….

This interdisciplinary Symposium is interested in exploring transgressive textualities through their various forms and manifestations, including literature and literary theory, language, cultural criticism, film, digital art, digital video games, performance, the internet, philosophy and other approaches.

Papers may discuss, but need not be limited to, issues like the following:
Taboo and censorship
Literature and protest
Intertextuality
Posthumanism
Transgression and subjectivity
Electronic literature
Body as a site of transgression
Multimedia adaptations of the literary
Queer literature
Fan fiction / fandom
Translation
Power, discourse and radical politics
Participatory culture
Appropriation of language
Violence and psychosis
Humour and horror
The carnivalesque
Apocalypse fiction
Transgressive philosophies and philosophies of transgression
Transgressive art and the art of transgression

Proposals of around 300 words, accompanied by a short biographical note not exceeding 100 words, should be emailed to transgressivetextualities2016@um.edu.mt by 18th April 2016. The organisers are planning to publish selected Symposium papers in the postgraduate journal Antae (https://antaejournal.com).

Fantasies of Contemporary Culture
Cardiff University, 23 May 2016
Call for Papers

Keynote speakers:
Dr. Mark Bould (UWE Bristol)
Dr. Catherine Butler (Cardiff University)

From the record-breaking sales of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, both in print and on film, to the phenomenal success of various forms of hyperreal ‘reality television’, contemporary Western culture seems singularly obsessed by the spectacular and the fantastic. This desire to experience other(ed) realities is also evidenced by the continued popularity of neo-historical literature and period drama, the domination of Hollywood cinema by superhero movies, and by the apocalyptic and dystopian imagery that abounds across genres and target audiences. With a long critical and cultural history, conceptualised by scholars as diverse as Tzvetan Todorov, Farah Mendlesohn, John Clute, Brian Attebery, Fredric Jameson, Lucie Armitt, and Darko Suvin, fantasy has arguably become the dominant mode of popular storytelling, supplanting the narrative realism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Rather than attempting to define fantasy, horror, weird, or science fiction as distinct genres, we wish to take up Katheryn Hume’s expansive definition of fantasy as anti-mimetic, or as ‘any departure from consensus reality’ (Fantasy and Mimesis, 1984, p. 21), in order to engage with the broader artistic motivation to question the limits of the real. This symposium, then, will explore the political and cultural functions of such fantasies. To what extent does the impulse to create fantasy art comment back upon this ‘consensus reality’, and to what extent does it represent a separate reality? How might the fantastical characters and environments that populate our contemporary cultural landscape be informed by the experience of twenty-first-century metropolitan life, and how do such texts (in)form that experience in return?

Roger Schlobin claims that the ‘key to the fantastic is how its universes work, which is sometimes where they are, but is always why and how they are’ (‘Rituals’ Footprints Ankle-Deep in Stone’, 2000, p. 161). With this claim in mind, we invite submissions from any discipline that address the relationship between current cultural, social and political dialogues and fantasy texts – specifically ones that interrogate dominant structures of power, normativity and ideology. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the relationship between fantasy texts and contemporary culture through the lens of:

• Theories of fantasy
• Ideology and world building
• Ecological fantasies
• Escapism
• Cognitive mapping
• Utopian/dystopian vision
• Categories of monstrosity and perfection
• The humanities (fantasies, futures)
• Capitalist critique
• Genre studies/border crossings
• Age studies (childhood fantasy versus adult fantasy)
• Gender studies
• Alternate histories and retrofuturism
• Postcolonial fantasy (incl. Welsh)
• Nationalism and politics
• Inequality and race relations

We welcome paper and panel proposals from postgraduate students, independent researchers, affiliated scholars, writers, and artists from any background or career phase. Paper proposals must be between 200-300 words; panel proposals should be between 400-500 words. Please send abstracts, including your name and e-mail, institutional affiliation (if any), and a short biography (100 words maximum), to Dr Tom Harman (HarmanTL@cardiff.ac.uk) and Megen de Bruin-Molé (DeBruinMJ@cardiff.ac.uk) by 21 March 2016.

The programme will include coffee/tea breaks, lunch, and a wine reception. This will be covered in the registration fee (£10 for students and part-time staff, £20 for salaried staff). For more information and updates, please visit the symposium website at http://culturalfantasies.wordpress.com.