The Fan Studies Network

CFP: Special issue of Prism journal on ‘Fandom, Brands and Public Relations’
Amber Hutchins, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Kennesaw  State University and Natalie T. J. Tindall, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Georgia State University

Traditional public relations methods of communicating with target publics have changed. The idea of engaged publics or audiences has arisen in multiple fields, including audience studies, media studies, sport culture, participatory culture, marketing, cultural studies, and public relations. The conceptions of the public in previous models are no longer valid across all campaigns.

With the advent of social media, content producers and audiences can be one and the same. Fans have more ownership on a global scale, without the limitations of physical proximity, yet our current conceptions of public do not delineate between active and super-active publics, let alone discuss engagement with information beyond processing and seeking it or dealing with publics virtually who are highly motivated to communicate with organizations and brands. Also, in public relations, there is a huge shift to community managers. Yet, there is not a lot of knowledge about the publics who are interacting within the community; this is a place where this special issue can provide significant insight.

Fandom and participatory culture have been identified, discussed, and lamented over in these areas and in various global contexts, and these conversations are synonymous and parallel with the ideas outlined in the segmentation strategies and the robust research on the situational theory of publics.

However, little conversation between those areas has occurred. For example,  online community management of fans and critics is a relatively new method practitioners use to engage stakeholders and public. Although there has been some work on offline community management (or brand communities), primarily in fields outside of public relations, there is not much available for online communities. The work that has been done has been focused on marketing or cultural studies. If you look at our leading public relations and strategic communication journals, research on fans is rare, and the attempt to connect fandom research to segmentation and other public relations theory is nonexistent.

The goal of this project is to bring scholarly attention to the disciplines’ interaction, engagement, and interaction with fans who are publics. The purpose of this special issue is to integrate stakeholder and publics theories with those of participatory cultures and media studies/fan perspectives; to add new, fresh insight into the public relations discipline’s concepts of publics and segmentation; and to apply new research and understandings of publics.

·         Submission deadline: 1st February 2014

·         Anticipated publication date:  During the 2014 calendar year

Submissions for review should be sent to Amber Hutchins and Natalie T.J. Tindall, prfandom@gmail.com

http://www.prismjournal.org/cfpfandom.html

Special issue of Celebrity Studies

Audiences for Celebrity

Edited by Martin Barker, Su Holmes and Sarah Ralph

The study of audiences for celebrities and stars has developed spasmodically.  Apart from important early studies by Stacey (1994) and Kuhn (2002), and from a different angle Gamson (1994) Barbas (2001) and Allen and Mendick (2012), and a variety of marketing-derived studies, there has been only a scatter of works concretely addressing how distinct audiences engage with celebrities, and how those engagements become meaningful within their broader lives.  For this Special Issue we hope to gather essays embodying a range of kinds of research in both audience and reception studies traditions.  We invite proposals for papers to appear in a special issue of Celebrity Studies exploring how audiences engage (positively or negatively) with celebrity figures and culture. Proposals may address (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Studies of audiences for particular stars/ celebrities (from a range of different media forms, including film, TV, popular music, literature, sport, internet, social media, theatre, opera etc…)
• Studies of online fan cultures, or users of a particular media form
• Historical/ archival studies of audience engagements with celebrities/ stars
• Discussions of methodological issues in the study of celebrity/ star audiences
• Studies of celebrity/ star controversies or spectacular moments and audience responses

Please submit an extended abstract of 500 words (outlining the topic, methods, audience or reception materials used, and contribution to Celebrity Studies and Audience Studies) to susan.holmes@uea.ac.uk, by Friday 1^st November. Please also include a brief biographical note of 4-5 lines.  We plan to complete evaluation of abstracts by the end of November.  Those accepted will be asked to submit completed essays, to a maximum of 8,000 words, by the end of June 2014.

Engaging the Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture

Full name / name of organization:

Elyce Rae Helford (senior editor), Mick Howard, Sarah Gray-Panesi, Shiloh Carroll / Middle Tennessee State University

Contact email:

ewfcollection@gmail.com

The past thirty years have offered a growing and changing body of scholarship on images of fantastic women in American popular culture.  Collections from Marleen Barr’s Future Females (1981) and Future Females: The Next Generation (2000) to Elyce Rae Helford’s Fantasy Girls: Gender and the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television (2000) and Sherrie Inness’s Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture (2004) have offered multifaceted commentary on ways in which contemporary media culture posits and positions “empowered” women in speculative fictions.  Engaging the Woman Fantastic in Contemporary Media Culture takes part in this tradition and brings it to the present day with emphasis on texts from the 1990s to the present and media from young adult fiction to social networks.  In particular, this edited scholarly collection, to be published in 2014 by Cambridge Scholars Press, engages with female protagonists, antagonists, and characters that challenge such simple binaries in popular literature, television, comics, videogames, and other new media.  As a whole, the volume will examine how images of fantastic women address prevailing ideas of gender, race, sexuality, class, nation, and other facets of identity in contemporary American culture.

We welcome proposals on all aspects of the “Woman Fantastic” within an imaginative fictional context and originating or retaining special media resonance from the mid-1990s to the present. Submissions should be grounded in a particular critical or theoretical perspective and center on a single text and/or character. We especially seek manuscripts within the following categories:

• Media: social networks and internet culture (e.g. Tumblr’s Eschergirls, Twitter’s Feminist Hulk, webcomics)

• Approaches: postcolonial, queer, disability, fandom

• Focus: images of women of color and/or queer women in any medium other than film

Note: We do not seek submissions on film, non-American texts, or DC comics.  Also, because we are most interested in publishing studies of texts that have not been written about extensively elsewhere (e.g. the Harry Potter novels), be sure to offer a unique focus or new angle if you write on academically popular texts.

To submit, send a two-page proposal with working bibliography and brief vita (as a single .doc or .rtf attachment) to ewfcollection@gmail.com by November 1, 2013.  Complete, polished manuscripts are due by January 30, 2014.  Queries are welcome.  Acceptance will be handled on a rolling basis.

EWFflyerCFP

Call for contributors to Playing Harry Potter:

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has served as the inspiration for numerous performative acts created by and for fans of the books. While the Warner Bros. films and Universal theme parks were produced to capitalize on the books’ commercial success, HP fans have responded to the narrative in a grassroots, often non-commercial fashion—initiating performances that contribute to the ever-growing collection of Potter fan-generated content, or “fanon.” As the makers of A Very Potter Musical declare, these performances are “solely for the personal, non-commercial enjoyment of ourselves and other Harry Potter fans.” Nonetheless, they have successfully reached mass audiences and galvanized a fan base comprised largely of amateurs and persons who might otherwise be uninvolved in the arts. Moreover, fan-based performance extends beyond the production of original plays such as AVPM and Potted Potter to include a wide range of artistic representations from puppetry to Role-Play and Cosplay. This anthology of collected essays is the first to offer an examination of both the motivations and effects of Potter fan-performance and a critical analysis of the relationship these performances have to “official” or “sanctioned” Potter representations such as the Warner Bros. films, Pottermore, and the Universal theme park. Of particular interest is the investigation of the meaning (both in terms of definition and significance) of “performance” in the HP context and its wider cultural implications.

Editors seek chapter contributors for this book proposal. Topics may include but are not restricted to: Cosplay/Role-Play/Life-Play, performativity in internet forums, the Muggle Quidditch sports movement, gender bending, slash fiction, racial representation/cross racial-performance, trans-nationalism, radio plays, and shows like Potted Potter and A Very Potter Musical.

Submissions for consideration should include a 250 word abstract of the chapter and a CV. Send both to Lisa Brenner at PlayingHarryPotter@gmail.com. Deadline October 4, 2013.