The Fan Studies Network

Are we the species that plays—or are we better understood as the species thatrepeats? Walter Benjamin suggests that, “For a child repetition is the soul of play.” Is play always at its core a form of re-play, an iteration of an earlier moment that resists a complete recurrence, yet is found in a series or sequence? We accept replication as a matter of course: Successful games and films always already have a sequel in the works, fashion is fueled by a recycling of its past, and images are increasingly manipulated to mimic the earlier eras of photographic technique. But what is the impact of these repeats, echoes, and continuations? And how do we understand the experience of play as a chain of sequels in the age of digital surrogates, cybernetic archives and networks of distributed storage?

Extending Play: The Sequel asks how conceptions of repetition, iteration, mimesis, chronography and sequence emerge through the dynamics and modalities of play in an increasingly repetitive, yet always playful world. We aim to continue the mission of the previous Extending Play conference, to entertain all approaches to the traditions, roles, and contexts of play that extend its definition and incorporation into far-flung and unexpected arenas. With The Sequel, we hope to focus on how play is culturally reproduced, repeated, continued, remixed, recycled, resequenced, and reimagined, and how play re-orders issues of power, affect, labor, identity, and privacy.

We invite scholars, students, tinkerers, artists, visionaries, and players to the second iteration of the Rutgers Media Studies Conference: Extending Play, to be held April 17th and 18th, 2015 on the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, NJ. Submissions are welcomed from scholars working in media studies and related fields across the humanities and social sciences. Our keynote conversations will include a conversation between Miguel Sicart (IT University of Copenhagen) and Anna Anthropy (Author, “Rise of the Video Game Zinesters”). Also, Marcus Boon (York University) will discuss the play of repetition with another guest who will be announced soon!

Potential topics for paper, panel, roundtable, and workshop submissions include, but are not limited to:
–Sequels, serials, remakes, covers, reprints, reissues, remixes, remasters, reprises, series, and sagas
–Media industries, including the business of sequels, franchises, and brands
–Social media and re-circulation, including memes, retweets, repins, and reblogs
–Resequencing, repetition, and the news industry
–Biomedia, genetic sequencing, and clones
–Sequels and repetition in history and historical knowledge, including global conflict, archives, and dynasties
–Mimicry, mimesis, and mirroring
–Repetition, continuation, and sequencing in digital networks, databases, and big data approaches
–Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Game Studies, Fan Studies, Critical Cultural Studies, Critical Media Studies, Critical Game Studies, and more!

Rutgers Media Studies Conference Extending Play: The Sequel promises to offer a memorable meeting of ludic inquiry, and to that end, we are looking to play with standard conference conventions. One track throughout the conference will be a series of public workshop sessions in which scholars and practitioners will host roundtable discussions on contemporary issues that bring together an audience of experts and interested parties. In the academic panel track, each presenter will have a maximum of 15 minutes to offer his or her ideas as a presentation or interactive conversation, and will choose one of the following methods of presentation:
–material accompaniment (hand out a zine, scrapbook, postcards, etc) 
–performance (spoken word, song, verse, dance, recording, etc)
–limited visuals (a maximum of 3 slides and 25 total words)
–game (create rules and incorporate audience play)

For additional ideas on how to play with media, play with time, or play with space during your presentation, visit our website atmediacon.rutgers.edu.

The deadline for proposals has been extended to Friday, December 12, 2014. We invite individual proposals, full panel proposals (of four members), and proposals for roundtable and workshop sessions. Please use the submission form on our website at http://mediacon.rutgers.edu/submit/ . If you would like to submit supplementary materials, or have trouble with the form, please send a 256 word abstract toextendingplay@gmail.com. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by February 1, 2015.

Exploring 30 Years of Studio Ghibli: Spirited Discussions

A Cardiff University and UEA collaborative project – 18th April 2015 Cardiff University 

2015 marks the 30th anniversary of Studio Ghibli, and with that anniversary it is time to reflect on the domestic and global success of Japan’s most famous animation studio. With the retirements of Studio Ghibli’s most famous director, Hayao Miyazaki, and it main producer, Toshio Suzuki earlier this year, the future of Studio Ghibli is in turmoil, provoking rallying cries from fans and critics alike. The Wind Rises may have been Miyazaki’s swan song, but this is not his first retirement. Despite Miyazaki’s professed departure, Ghibli’s other directors like Miyazaki’s founding partner, Isao Takahata, and Hiromasa Yonebayashi have produced recent hits of varying degrees for this powerful studio that suggest overlooked aspects of the Studio in need of further analysis and discussion. This anniversary year is therefore a pertinent time to celebrate and critically reflect on Studio Ghibli, not only exploring Miyazaki’s famous films, but also considering other facets of the Ghibli universe. This symposium explores a diverse range of topics, exploring the wide international appeal of Studio Ghibli and the cultural significance of everything from the studio’s canon to its more obscure local activities.

Submissions from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives are welcomed, with possible topics including (but not limited to):
• Discourses of national and transnational cinema
• Animation methods and the role of cel animation versus CGI
• Ghibli anime in comparison to other animation
• The role of children in Ghibli cinema
• Adaptation of literature stories to cinematic texts
• Ghibli’s relationship to other media such as TV series, commercials, music videos, and videogames
• Merchandising and fan objects/creations
• The Ghibli Museum and discourses of space
• The role of auteur(s) and mass media production
• Postcolonial Studies
• Subtitles, dubbing, and translating texts
* Ghibli as brand and business
• Cross-cultural fan practices
• Wider socio-political issues played out in Ghibli narratives
• The studio’s history, development and relationships with outside institutions

Please send a proposal of 250-500 words and a CV/resume, or if you have any queries, to rendellj1@cardiff.ac.uk by the 15th January 2015.

Call for Papers: Television Genres in the Age of Abundance

Comunicazioni Sociali – Journal of Media, Performing Arts and CulturalStudiesIssue III 2015

The arrival of digital technologies was supposed to spell the end of the line for television, the most dominant medium of the last half of the twentieth century. However, the opposite has happened — there is more television than ever before and, as Toby Miller recently put it, “people like it more than ever”. As a result, many people have rushed to characterize what has become of the medium.

This special issue of Communicazioni Sociali is devoted to making sense of how television genres have changed and adapted in an era where more television is more abundant than ever. There are those, such as Jason Mittell, who claim that we are living in an age of “complex TV” that is characterized by considerable innovation in narrative styles of dramatic television series. However, this reflects a small — albeit important — portion of the total amount of television available across a range of channels. Such developments are part of the constant back-and-forth between media industries estimations of what their audiences expect and desire from particular television genres and the economic opportunities that arise from them. Others note the narrative possibilities that have been created due to television’s incredible mobility, available on different technological platforms from 3D televisions mounted on the wall to cell phones and tablets. Services like Netflix provide new opportunities for accessing television programming, like House of Cards, while at the same time capturing audience information that allows them to determine future productions as well as to organize its existing catalogue in categories such as “Goofy Comedies”. Governments have increasingly become active in the television business, with channels like RT and France 24 as examples of networks producing programming that mimics the style and content of commercial all-news networks. Although there is greater emphasis on our ability to record and replay television programming according to personal preferences, the live event — especially sports — remains a key component in the economics and aesthetics of television.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
-Genre versus series, or episodes, or season as an object for television analysis
-Genre and the study of television industries
-Genre and the construction of celebrity within television
-Making sense of “mixed” genres, (eg: “dramedies”, ‘Biopics”)
-The “Netflix” effect and the creation of “micro-genres”
-Theoretical approaches to the study of television genres
-Continuities and discontinuities in TV genres
-Case studies of specific, contemporary genres: news, soap operas, talent and variety shows, reality programming, drama, sitcoms, satire, documentary, awards programs, sports
-Television networks built around generic styles (all-news, cartoons,food, travel, lifestyle)
-Gender and the discursive construction of genres as “masculine” or“feminine”
-Genre, sound, and television style
-Mainstream and marginalized genres of television within different national or regional contexts
-Genre and transmedial and/or intermedial storytelling
-Genres and production styles within “algorithmic culture”
-Genres, distribution and scheduling
-The role of paratextual and promotional material in the construction of generic identity
-The legal and regulatory framework around genre production
-Seriality and the consumption of television genres
-Television criticism as a genre

Deadlines & Guidelines

Please send your abstract to both the editors Massimo Scaglioni (massimo.scaglioni@unicatt) and Ira Wagman (ira.wagman@carleton.ca ) byJanuary 31, 2015. All notifications of acceptance will be emailed no later than February 15, 2015. Abstracts must be from 300 to 400 words long, and may be presented in English or French. The proposal shall include: 5 key words, authors, institution, and contacts (email), together with a short curriculum for each author.

If the proposal is accepted, the Author/s will be asked to send thewhole article by May 1st 2015. Contributions will be sent to two independent reviewers in a double-blind procedure prior to publication decision. Articles should be of between 4,000-5,000 words in length (no more than 35,000 characters, spaces and notes included), but shorter articles will be considered.

The Aesthetics of Online Videos (Special Issue of Film Criticism)

Scholarship on online videos often focuses on digitalization, user interfaces, and/or the phenomenon of peer-to-peer sharing. While such issues (and related matters of cultural globalization, the amateur/professional divide, and alternative forms of distribution) are certainly relevant to studying online videos, these approaches tend to foreground social impacts over aesthetic analysis. 

This special issue of Film Criticism seeks essays that turn attention to formal and stylistic aspects that have been downplayed in the analysis of online videos. Examining online videos as cultural artifacts worthy of aesthetic analysis and interpretation, this issue invites contributions from a range of methodological and theoretical approaches. As a whole, the issue seeks work that engages online videos as aesthetic objects, considering visual and sound style, without losing sight of the electronic, digital, and online context of this form.

Potential topics may include (but certainly are not limited to):
* Animal videos (e.g., viral videos, unedited/streaming nature documentaries)
* Ubiquitous “social videos” (e.g., on Vine, Facebook, Buzzfeed, Metacafe, Vimeo)
* Online video poetics (historical development in form, style, production practice)
* Online video genres (documentary, drama, sports, news, music, etc.)
* Web original series, webisodes, online video channels
* Aesthetics of online video conferencing, TED talks, interviews
* Political, advocacy, and other forms of persuasive videos
* Political mash-ups
* Online video activism
* Online promotional culture (e.g., trailers, promos, “bonus” videos, choose your ending ads, branded videos, sponsored videos, product or service demos)
* ‘Haul,’ ‘unboxing’ and other shopping videos* Web original series, webisodes and online video channels
* Online music videos (as well as parodies, remixes, amateur ‘covers’ etc)
* Amateur and fan videos (mash-ups, spoilers, covers, etc.)
* Recycling (online clips and highlights from film and television)
* Video blogs (vlogs), lifecasting, YouTube celebrity videos/sites
* Shock and/or Stunt videos (parkour, pet tricks, etc.)
* Videos of video gameplay
* How-to videos
* Virtual Tours
* Experimental/avant-garde videos
* Gifs

Send 500 word proposals along with a brief 100 word author bio to Stephen Groening atgroening@uw.edu by November 15 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS

Special issue of Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN

Audiences and their musics: new approaches

There is a certain imbalance in the way we analyse sound, compared to the way we research images. Listening feels somehow more passive than watching or reading. Even in academic writing, we operate with phrases that accentuate this visual bias, such as ‘as we can see’ or ‘to shed light’. This imbalance is especially striking when considering modes of engagement with music media. While a body of audience research has been able to make connections to reception and literary studies (arguing that the interpretative work of the viewer mediates the reproduction of textual meanings), modes of listening, on the other hand, have been traditionally confined to the domains of semantics, musicology and sound studies.

As a result, dichotomies of music-listening experiences have been imagined: ‘deep’ versus ‘superficial’, ‘conscious’ versus ‘background’, ‘everyday’ versus ‘special’, ‘motivated by aesthetic pleasure’ versus ‘motivated by goal achievement’. These modes have not only been treated as mutually exclusive, but also as indicative of music, genre and individual characteristics of the listener, thus being rarely understood to exist simultaneously or to influence each other. On the other hand, even acknowledging that music is accompanied by a plethora of other stimuli, analysing these engagements in detail remains vital, as empirical data suggests that audiences consciously switch between modes, and identify them as such. As recent studies suggest, placing the media experience within the rich context of everyday life does not preclude multimodality; on the contrary – it allows us to make important connections between media, the personal and the social.This special issue will seek contributions that critically engage with the shift from formalist approaches to music to a model encompassing the experiences of listeners. Postgraduate students and early career researchers across the social sciences and humanities are invited to submit. We are especially looking for original, empirical work that tests and challenges existing theorisations of listening modes, and/or proposes new conceptualisations.

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words for papers of approx. 6,000 words. Accepted papers will be published in a special guest-edited issue of Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN.

Possible topics might include but are not limited to:
–          Music in everyday life: what does it mean?
–          Un/changing listener experiences in the digital age
–          New practices of music participation
–          Music and generations; music and class
–          Taste and preferences: still relevant?
–          The genre in listening-          Western and non-western music audiences.

Abstracts should be sent to the guest editor Rafal Zaborowski at r.zaborowski@lse.ac.uk by 8 December 2014. For enquiries please contact Rafal or the journal general editor Simon Dawes atsimondawes0@gmail.com

University of Chester, Friday, 10th April 2015

Keynote speaker: Dr Cornel Sandvoss, University of Surrey

In the mainstream media, postwar popular music fandom has traditionally been associated with collective displays of emotion. Yet fandom is actually about a range of things: shared tastes and personal convictions, individual subjectivity and wider community. Fandom does not exist entirely in private nor entirely in public, but is characterized a process of continual mediation between the two. Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere suggests that shared spaces of discussion have political consequences, making the crossing of the private/public boundary a political act. It is possible for fans to have relatively public experiences in private and private experiences in public. What new forms of public sphere does popular music fandom create? Edward Comentale suggested that Elvis Presley created a “public sphere within the public sphere.” Furthermore, both ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ are transforming in a networked society and neoliberal era. As communities of imagination, fan bases are providing new models for public activism based on shared values. Fandom can therefore help to indicate where conceptions of the private and public might require some reformulation. We invite papers associated with this subject on specific topics such as the following:
•       Closet popular music fandom
•       Fandom and intimacy
•       Music fan diaries and confessionals
•       Voyeurism and fandom
•       Fan mail and its representation
•       ‘Masses’ and ‘manias’ – collective fandom in the mass broadcast era
•       Fan communities as their own public spheres
•       Fandom, festivals and spectacles
•       Collecting, exhibiting and curating and music fandom
•       Genre fandom and the public sphere
•       Fan philanthropy and activism
•       Fan productivity as social commentary
•       ‘Drive by’ media, news and documentary portrayals
•       Interaction on social media
•       Fandom, affect and the public display of emotion
•       The public/private boundary and historical fan studies
•       Abject heroes and music fan shame

Papers will be 20 minutes in length with 10 minutes for questions. Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a bio of no more than 50 words to: m.duffett@chester.ac.uk before Wednesday, 19th November, 2014.

Organized by: Dr Mark Duffett, University of Chester and Dr Koos Zwaan, Holland University of Applied Sciences.

This event is free to staff and students from any university – please visit the following link for tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/popular-music-fandom-and-the-public-sphere-a-one-day-symposium-tickets-13092065721