Registration is now open for a one day conference on ‘The small economies of the “new” music industry’ at the University of Bristol on 25th March.
A draft programme, registration details and other information can be found on the website
http://www.bris.ac.uk/music/events/severnpopnetwork-conf
The programme includes some presentations on fandom and fan funding, so would be interesting for fan scholars. Places are limited, so please register as soon as you can!
Will Brooker, who has written extensively about modern pop culture and fandom, launches a new web comic at midnight on 17th February, featuring a female superhero, Catherine Abigail Daniels, who is very different to female depictions and stereotypes we have seen before in comics. Not only is she a PhD student, but intelligence is her super power. Will Brooker has written the series, and designed and produced it with an almost entirely female creative team. We really recommend you go and take a look at this vibrant and exciting first issue!
Their website, where you can read the comic and see behind the scenes sketches is:
http://www.mysocalledsecretidentity.com/
They also have a Facebook page
(https://www.facebook.com/MySoCalledSecretIdentity)
and Twitter account (@cat_abi_daniels).
Issue 1 will be online permanently for free, in full colour, on its dedicated website, including sketches, designs and behind-the-scenes notes. Subsequent issues will be funded by donations through the site (suggested $5 minimum, with original art and other rewards for larger gifts). The money pays for the artists’ fees and a proportion is then donated to a women’s charity — for issue 2, they are funding
http://www.awayout.co.uk‘.
George Washington University have just announced this new course:
Fan Pilgrimages & Media Tourism (UW2020W)
What?
Tourists have a bad reputation. We are encouraged to look at their experience as necessarily inauthentic, doomed to superficiality at best, and at worst as an ongoing opportunity to insult other cultures. Fans of popular culture also have a bad reputation. Even though the media assures us that we are in the middle of a “Geek Revolution,” that same media is also quick to characterize fans as over invested, sometimes creepy, but more often just sad people who still need to “get a life”.
What then do we make of tourist/fans?
In this course we will examine the growing phenomenon of fan pilgrimage (growing in the sense that the tourism industry is now catering specifically to this market). We will consider fan pilgrims themselves – why do they go and what do they gain from the experience? Does fan pilgrimage, with its religious connotations, accurately capture that experience? How does fan pilgrimage differ from media tourism? We will also consider how key sites are presented to the public. How are they curated? What sorts of narratives are constructed? What constitutes an “authentic” experience for the fan tourist?
Our presence on-site will raise some fundamental questions about the research process and how we construct meaning around these sites. A research librarian will accompany us for a portion of the course, allowing for expanded discussion of on-site research methods.
Although based in London, the course will include group trips to Cardiff (Doctor Who) and Liverpool (The Beatles), with optional days out (sites to be determined). In London will we go on the Warner Brothers Studio tour of the Harry Potter sets as well as a tour of sites of filming in London. We will also go on a Sherlock Holmes walking tour of sites significant in both the short stories and recent films/television productions.
Students will have weekends free to visit other sites of their choosing in London and throughout the UK. These sites can range from the homes of literary figures to rock stars, libraries to cemeteries to football stadiums, theatres to churches to concert venues – in short any places that hold significance to the student based on their own fannish interests. This research will form the basis of students’ final papers.
Who?
This course is open to both undergraduates and graduate students. No previous knowledge of fan studies is needed for undergraduates.
Application Deadline: March 1, 2013
On-Line Dates: June 3-6, 2013
Overseas Dates: June 9-July 5, 2013
For more information on this course please go to the George Washington University Study Abroad Office
Or contact Katherine Larsen
klarsen@gwu.edu
The Media and Cinema Studies program and the Cinema and Interactive Media school at DePaul University are hosting a one-day celebratory colloquium for the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who on Saturday, May 04, from 9-6. This event will feature roundtable discussions of scholars and fans to speak about the impact of the show in various arenas as well as screenings that span the half-century history of Doctor Who. The emphasis of the colloquium will be the cultural importance of Doctor Who.
The audience for this event is both graduate and undergraduate students, both fans and scholars, and the focus should be on informed and enlightening discussion rather than formal academic papers. “The Celebration of Doctor Who” will take place on DePaul’s Loop campus.
If you’re interested in speaking on a round table, please send a 250 word abstract of your topic and a CV or resume to Paul Booth (pbooth@depaul.edu) by Mar 15. Also please email Dr. Booth with any questions. We hope that you will be able to join in the discussion and celebration!
For more information, please contact Paul Booth at pbooth@depaul.edu
This conference offers a serious opportunity to bring together academics, enthusiasts, creative practitioners and popular writers in a shared discussion about the cultural legacy of Sherlock Holmes. The Strand Magazine and the Sherlock Holmes stories contribute one of the most enduring paradigms for the production and consumption of popular culture in the twentieth- and the twenty-first centuries. The stories precipitated a burgeoning fan culture including various kinds of participation, wiki and crowd-sourcing, fan-fiction, virtual realities and role-play gaming. All of these had existed before but they were solidified, magnified and united by Sherlockians and Holmesians in entirely new ways and on scales never seen before. All popular culture phenomena that followed (from Lord of the Rings to Twilight via Star Trek) shared its viral pattern. This conference aims to unpick the historical intricacies of Holmesian fandom as well as offering a wide variety of perspectives upon its newest manifestations. This conference invites adaptors of and scholars on Holmes, late-Victorian writing, and popular culture internationally to contribute to this scholarly conversation. Our aims are to celebrate Conan Doyle’s achievement, to explore the reasons behind Holmes’ enduring popularity across different cultures and geographical spaces, and to investigate new directions in Holmes’ afterlife. This conference will precede Holmes’ 160th birthday in 2014 and launch a new volume of essays on Holmes co-edited by Dr. Jonathan Cranfield and Tom Ue, and form part of the larger celebrations in London and internationally. Location:
Senate House, London
Dates: 21 and 22 June 2013
Possible Topics:
Holmes and Detective Fiction
Holmes and Science
Becoming Holmes
Holmes and Gender
Holmes’ Costume
Holmes in Retirement
Holmes and His Boswell
Holmes and Steampunk
Holmes and Philosophy
Holmes and Moriarty
Holmes computer games
Holmes/Victoriana in the graphic novel (From Hell, Grandeville…)
Post-2000 film and television adaptation
Fan letters addressed to Holmes
Submit proposals of 350 words and biographies of 150 words by email to BOTH Jonathan at J.L.Cranfield@ljmu.ac.uk AND Tom at ue_tom@hotmail.com by 15 January 2013.
Call for papers
Severn Pop Network inaugural conference
The small economies of the ‘new’ music industry
University of Bristol
25th March 2013
The music industry is in a well-publicised state of upheaval. The emergence of digital reproductive technologies (such as CD burners and MP3s), of digital distribution and consumption technologies (such as the iPod, iTunes and Spotify), and of new social media (such as Myspace and Facebook) have radically disturbed established systems of production and consumption. The benefits of these changes have fallen unequally and most cultural commentary has focused on the problems caused to the global record industry. However, one of the distinctive features of the music industry is the continuity between localised ‘para-industrial acts’ and mainstream commercial practices. The importance of geographic and genre-based scenes means that small music economies have a greater significance for the structural organisation of the music industry than in other cultural industries: ‘in the music industry… the small is as significant as the big’ (Frith, 2000).
This conference focuses on the small-scale commercial practices developing in the ‘new’ music industry, paying particular attention to local economies and ‘direct’ interactions between musicians and fans. While research exists on how declining record sales may be affecting the major industry, how (if at all) are they impacting musicians at a more local level? Is declining record income relevant or is it being offset by falling costs of recording and distribution? Are the disintermediating technologies of the internet offering greater opportunities for ‘monetising’ musical activities? How are musicians, managers, labels, promoters and fans adapting to the new circumstances? How are the relationships between these key players changing?
We invite papers on any aspect of the ‘new’ music industry outside/beyond the major-dominated mainstream. Possible topics include:
Fan funding and crowd sourcing (such as Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter campaign)
The ‘monetisation’ of fan engagement
Initiatives to create local economy/scene infrastructure
The effects of changing regulation (including copyright) on local music economies
The emergence of new cultural/economic intermediaries (such as Bandcamp)
The role of recorded music in local music economies
New business models (such as Netlabels)
Promotion in the online music industry.
Please send proposals, of up to 250 words, for 20 minute papers, and a short author bio, to SevernPop@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is 18 January and authors will be notified of the outcome by 30 January.
***
The Severn Pop Network is an academic network of scholars interested in popular music and based at several universities spanning the river Severn. We meet approximately four times each year for paper presentations and reading group discussions. If you would like to get involved, please contact SevernPop@gmail.com
TV Fangdom: A Conference on Television Vampires
7-8 June 2013
The University of Northampton
Vampires have always made charismatic characters and with the rise of the VILF and the fangbanger they are more popular than ever. This conference aims to explore the vampire particularly in relation to its presence on television. From Barnabas Collins to the Count von Count, from Mona the Vampire to True Blood’s Pam, vampires appear everywhere on television schedules and in television history, whether in serials, made-for-TV movies, adaptations of gothic novels, adverts or children’s TV. How has the vampire mythos been tailored for TV? Does the vampire’s appearance on a domestic medium like television blunt its fangs and tame its hypersexuality? What kind of audience have TV vampires attracted and how has their popularity been exploited? In what ways has the vampire been remade for different eras of television, different TV genres, or different national contexts?
Keynote and featured speakers:
• Brigid Cherry, editor of True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic and author of Horror (Routledge Film Guidebook)
• Marcus Recht, author of Der Sympatische Vampir
• Catherine Spooner, author of Contemporary Gothic
Proposals are invited on (but not limited to) the following topics:
• TV’s development and appropriation of the reluctant vampire
• Vampire hunters on TV
• The vampire as allegory
• Issues of gender and sexuality
• Narrative and structure
• Different formats (miniseries, animation, made-for-TV movie)
• Adaptation
• Visual style
• Sound and music
• Special effects
• Scheduling
• Marketing and advertising
• New media, ancillary materials and extended narratives
• Intersection with other media (novels, films, comics, video games, music)
• Audience and consumption (including fandom)
• Genre hybridity
• The vampire and children’s television
• Inter/national variants
• Translation and dubbing
We will be particularly interested in proposals on older TV shows, on those that have rarely been considered as vampire fictions, and on analysis of international vampire TV. The conference organisers welcome contributions from scholars within and outside universities, including research students, and perspectives are invited from different disciplines.
Please send proposals (250 words) for 20 minute papers plus a brief biography (100 words) to all three organisers by 16th December 2012.
s.abbott@roehampton.ac.uk
lorna.jowett@northampton.ac.uk
mike.starr@northampton.ac.uk
Conference Website: http://tvfangdom.wordpress.com/
Two-Day International Conference: University of Sunderland
3rd/ 4th April 2013.
Keynote Speakers:
In the twenty-first century, adaptation studies has become a figurative combat zone. Some commentators, armed with post-structuralist weapons of dialogism and intertextuality, decry the analysis of dyadic relationships between source and target text given the wealth of enunciations spiralling within what Jim Collins calls the ‘intertextual array’ (1992: 331) Across the post-millennial landscape, digital convergence and transmediality have shifted adaptation studies foci from what Murray describes as an ‘academic backwater…intellectually parochial, methodologically hidebound and institutionally risible’ into ‘an inclusivist conception of adaptation as a freewheeling cultural process: flagrantly transgressing cultural and media hierarchies, wilfully cross-cultural, and more weblike than straightforwardly linear in its creative dynamic’ (Murray, 2012: 2). Indeed, the turn to poststructuralist models of adaptation have led to a dialogic widening of the analytical playing field to include the many varied utterances of convergence culture which include, but are not limited to: film, comic books, theme park rides, TV, literature, merchandising, and computer games. This orchestration of cross-platform, or transmedia storytelling, is ‘clearly…adaptation operating under a different name’ (ibid: 17). For some, adaptation is not a simple conjunction of source and translation, but a dialogic sphere of influence, appropriation and citation. From this position, all texts borrow, steal and assimilate from a wellspring of textual enunciations which demonstrate a “long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests [and] ghosts of previous texts” (Miller 2005: 22) that have no static, explicit origin point. Stam argues that critics should ‘be less concerned with inchoate notions of fidelity and give more attention to dialogic responses (Stam 2000: 76). The rigid binarisms of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ give way to what Jacques Derrida calls ‘mutual invagination’ where the ‘auratic prestige of the original does not run counter to the copy; rather, the prestige of the original is created by the copies, without which the very idea of originality has no meaning’ (Stam, 2007: 8). Perhaps, when it comes to questions of fidelity, it ‘is time to move on’? (Geraghty, 2008: 1)
For some commentators, however, fidelity is, and remains, an important critical issue. According to Dudley Andrew (2011:27), ‘Fidelity is the umbilical cord that nourishes the judgement of ordinary viewers [yet] for some time, the leading academic trend has ignored or disparaged this concern with fidelity’. As Geraghty puts it, ‘faithfulness matters if it matters to the viewer’ (2008: 3)). In True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (MacCabe et al, 2011:216), Fredric Jameson argues that excessive fidelity is annoying and that for original and copy to have equal merit then ‘the film must be utterly different from, utterly unfaithful to, its original’ (ibid:218). Other contributors to this volume discuss the dyadic relationship between novel and film, but offer something rather different to simple comparative hand-wringing and ‘the book is better than the film’ denunciations. For some, the adaptation is a different text altogether, while others claim that the translation is but one enunciation connected in an eternal ‘phantasmal spiderweb’ of heteroglossia and remediation (Miller 1990: 139). Rather than acknowledging that it is time to move on from fidelity analysis, is it not, rather, time to recognise the validity of multiple to approaches to the thorny topic of adaptation?
This conference invites papers on ALL aspects of adaptation and aims to provide a linchpin for all divergent and convergent strands of this burgeoning field. Papers are invited on the following topics:
Fidelity; Comparative Analysis; Audiences; Dialogism; Intertextuality; Post-Structuralism; Remakes and Reboots; Franchising; Sequels, series and serials; Transmedia Storytelling; Industry; Film; Comic Books; TV; Theme Park Rides; Animation; Computer Games; Merchandising; Paratexts.
This list is not exhaustive: any topic will be considered that fits in with the scheme described above. Panel proposals will be considered.
Abstract Deadline: 1st October 2012.
Conference Organisers: William Proctor; Professor John Storey. Email for Abstracts and all queries: billyproctor@hotmail.co.uk
European Fandom and Fan Studies, 10 November 2012
One Day Symposium, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
and University of Amsterdam Department of Media Studies
Call for Papers
Fan Studies is growing but primarily focused in North America. This one day symposium at the University of Amsterdam seeks to explore the state of Fan Studies and the variety of Fandoms focused within the broader social and geographic boundaries of Europe. Inter-disciplinary papers are invited to explore the nature of the field itself or how different fandoms function within Europe. Potential avenues of exploration may include how Fan Studies is represented, studied, and received within European universities, by funding bodies and publishers. Papers on Fandoms may explore how European (English and non-English speaking) fans of European and non-European objects of fan appreciation participate in fandom, the differences between internet fandoms and local/national/international fan practices, and the different objects of fan appreciation.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
-Transformative Works
-Fan History
-Fan Infrastructures
-Fan Charity and Activism
-Fan Cultures and Identities
-Impact on Public Policy and Industry Practice
-Economies within Fandom and/or Fan Studies
-Students as Fans
-Fan Studies within Higher Education courses
-Crossing national, cultural, and language boundaries in Fandom and Fan Studies
The symposium is associated with a special issue of the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures tentatively slated for 2015, with full papers due January 1, 2014.
Event Details
The symposium will be held in the centre of Amsterdam, easily accessible from Amsterdam international airport.
Submission Process
Please send a 300 word abstract along with a short (100 word) biographical note to Anne Kustritz (A.M.Kustritz@uva.nl) or Emma England (E.E.England@uva.nl) by 10 September.
Report from the Pop Line: On the Life and Afterlife of Popular
The concept of the popular, or popular culture for that matter, has never ceased to be an ambivalent one. Although it has come to occupy a particular place under the spotlight over the past decades within the broad study of culture, such apparently privileged position has not deprived it of the manifold ambiguities, complexities or misconceptions that have often involved its general understanding.
Since its emergence within the context of the processes of industrialization and the changes they brought about, namely in terms of cultural relations and the development of the capitalist market economy, the concept of popular culture has been, not only utterly rejected by intellectuals and scholars alike, but also denied any possibility of constituting a serious and valid topic for academic debate. Up until the mid twentieth-century, popular culture was often reduced to a poor and simplistic form of entertainment and pleasure, and was even deemed morally and ethically questionable (not to mention aesthetically). However, and particularly after the 1950s, new perspectives would soon alter this perception in very significant ways, especially with the emergence of Cultural Studies and the influence their project had on both sides of the Atlantic. From severe condemnation, popular culture quickly evolved into a period of positive reception and celebration, which resulted from critical work developed inside the academia, but also popular demand outside it.
The concept of the popular was then adopted both as an intrinsic feature, and as topic in its own right of artistic creation developed under the sign of pop. From pop art to pop music, a new understanding of culture has been put forth, building from what is embedded in the ambivalence of the popular and its many possibilities of intersection with new artistic forms of expression.
At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, popular culture finds itself at a crossroads: has the concept been drained of its meaning because of its overwhelming popularity? After the euphoria around the popular, what afterlife can be expected from it? Should we still be discussing the popular as opposed to high and folk culture? And where and how do pop art forms intersect with the current notion of the popular?
This conference wishes to address the complexities surrounding the debate around the notions of both pop and the popular and discuss the possibilities of their afterlife.
The event wishes to bring together doctoral students, post-doc researchers and international key scholars from different areas and disciplines, to share research interests and works-in-progress, engage in fresh intellectual discussion and build a community of young scholars.
Papers are welcome on the topics listed below, amongst others:
Popular Culture in Theory
Life and Afterlife of Popular Culture
Popular, Power and Politics
Popular Culture: Globalization, Centres and Peripheries
Material Culture
Popular Arts
Celebrities and Fans: The Dynamics of Popularity
Representation, Mediation and Mediatisation of the Popular
Cultures, Subcultures, Scenes and Tribes
Pop and Popular: Overlap, Dissemblance and Divergence
Confirmed keynote speakers:
John Hutnyk (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Luísa Leal de Faria (Catholic University of Portugal)
Speakers should be prepared for a 20-minute presentation followed by questions.
Please send a 300-word abstract, as well as a brief biographical note (100 words) to email popline2012@gmail.com by July 15th, 2012. Proposals should list paper title, name, institutional affiliation and contact details.
Successful applicants will be notified by July 31st, 2012.
Please note there is a conference registration fee of 30€ due by October 30th. We regret that travel and accommodation funding for conference participants is not available at this time.
The Fan Studies Network 