The Fan Studies Network

Call for Proposals for an Essay Collection on Meta-Fiction, Intertextuality, and Authorship in Supernatural -deadline extended

One of the defining themes of the CW’s Supernatural is its interest in fiction and storytelling. The longest running genre series on American television, it has, throughout its twelve seasons, broken the fourth wall in a way that no other TV show likely has. From making Supernatural itself (and its fandom) exist within the world of the narrative to the unique relationship between canon and fanon, fans and creators, Supernatural is a groundbreaking look at the way narratives are created, told, and retold. Yet most scholarship dedicated to Supernatural has omitted thoroughly exploring this crucial aspect of the series. This collection seeks submissions on all manner of topics dealing with dealing with Supernatural’s use and exploration of metafiction, intertextuality, adaptation, authorship, and fandom. Topics can include, but are not limited to:
•Breaking the fourth wall: Supernatural’s unique use of meta-fiction, particularly in episodes such as “Metafiction,” “The French Mistake,” “Fan Fiction,” and “The Monster at the End of This Book,” and the character of Metatron.
•Supernatural as Transformative Work: it use and rewriting of myth, religion, and urban legend
•Genre: Supernatural’s use, adaptation, and reworking of various genres, especially in its “genre” episodes such as “Frontierland,” “Monster Movie,” “Hell House,” and others.
•“Tearing up the Rules and Rewriting the Ending” – themes of authorship and (re)writing and their relationship to other themes of the show such as free will
•God as writer, positioning Supernatural/the Winchesters’ stories as The Gospel
•American Culture within the show and its reworking/adaptation
•Popular culture, literary references, and intertextuality
•Fandom and Fan Work: Supernatural’s portrayal of fandom (“Fan Fiction,” “The Monster at the End of This Book”) and its inclusion of fan theories and “fanon” in the show
•The relationship between fans and creators outside of the text (social media, conventions)
•Canon, “Fanon,” and the relationship between the two
•Fandom politics, canonicity, and the porous boundaries around what counts as canon
•Ships, Shipping, and issues of canonicity
•Fan theories about authorship and textuality as they relate to Supernatural

Other topics are also welcomed, as are submissions from a variety of perspectives and levels of experience, including fans, aca-fans, and independent scholars. [the idea is to] create a collection of essays as diverse and varied as Supernatural itself.

Please submit an abstract of up to 500 words and a short biographical note to anaklimchynskaya@gmail.com by January 5th. Notifications of abstract acceptance will be sent out by January 15th, and the final draft will be due late Spring. McFarland has expressed strong interest in this collection.

CFP for a Special Issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities

“Imagining Alternatives”

From Afrofuturism to dystopian, apocalyptic fiction to alternate history to ecofeminism and cli-fi, authors of speculative fictions have been interrogating alternative worlds in literature, film, television, comic books, and video games. These visions give us access to alien planets as well as alternative perspectives on our own pasts, presents, and possible futures. They reflect our hopes and fears; they offer new narratives of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality; they suggest the magic and the horror embedded in our own realities.

This special issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities invites authors to interrogate imagined alternatives to existing systems of knowledge and distributions of power. We are interested in submissions engaging with a wide variety of subjects, genres, mediums, time periods, and national origins: from cyberpunk to steampunk, and from Gothic fiction to fan fiction. We also want to encourage authors to imagine alternative formats for their own work. In addition to traditional essays, we will also consider roundtables, interviews, photo essays, web comics, YouTube videos, Flash animations, web-based games, and other creative works.

To be considered for inclusion in the special issue, submit your work via the Resilience website (http://www.resiliencejournal.org/publishing-in-resilience/submission-form/) by June 1, 2017 for publication in the fall of 2017. Be certain to indicate in the abstract that you are submitting a piece for the “Imagining Alternatives” special issue.

Please direct any questions about the special issue to Megan Condis via email at megancondis.gmail.com or on Twitter @MeganCondis.

Queering the Whedonverses—a Slayage special issue

Over the last 15 years, Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies and other publications have featured a range of writing and scholarship about queer issues, identity and representations related to the Whedonverses but there has not yet been a publication dedicated solely to queer Whedon studies. A renewed interest in feminism and queer identities in mainstream culture and academia, alongside greater public recognition for LGBTQ issues and more attention being paid to popular culture across media: all suggest that the time is right for a concentrated examination of the Whedonverses from the perspective of queer theory and queer identities as they overlap but also differ, in all their complexity as they exist within an intersectional world. The editors of this Slayage special issue thus invite proposals for papers on any aspect of queerness and the Whedonverses, in specific national or international contexts.

Contributions may focus on, but are not restricted to:
• Queer sex and sexualities
• Queer bodies
• Queering as a discourse or position of subversion or “troubling” normativity
• Queer studies, the Whedonverses, and the academy
• Teaching queer studies via Whedonverse texts
• Subject-specific approaches to queering the Whedonverses
• Intersectional approaches to queerness within the Whedonverses
• Production and creation
• Acting and performance
• Audiences, reception, consumption
• Fan activity and production
• Formats, platforms and media—are some more open to being queered than others?
• Aesthetics (including sound and music)
• Comparative studies of Whedonverse productions, or the Whedonverses and, e.g., the Marvel Universe
• Genres and genre-queering: comedy, musical, melodrama, horror, Gothic, action, science fiction, superheroes
• Tropes, stereotypes and the same old stories
• Cult and mainstream, high and low culture, taste and ‘quality’

Send a 200-300 word proposal and a short bio by 16 December 2016 to Lorna Jowett (lorna.jowett@northampton.ac.uk) and Hélène Frohard-Dourlent (helenefd@gmail.com), who will notify you early in January 2017 if your proposal is accepted. If your proposal is accepted please note that a first draft will be due in April 2017.

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.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: A Tumblr Book

co-editors: Allison McCracken, American Studies, DePaul University; Louisa Stein, Department of Film and Media Culture, Middlebury College; Alexander Cho, University of California Humanities Research Institute

We’re putting together a book to identify ways in which Tumblr has had an important social and industrial impact, both as a digital platform and a cultural forum.­ This volume will be multi-vocal and accessible to a broad audience, representing a variety of Tumblr users and commentators, including scholars, public intellectuals, activists, and fans. We are particularly compelled by Tumblr’s status as a social media platform known for fostering spaces for socially marginalized users, including youth, people of color, queer people, the disabled, and the poor.

This publication will be in English, but we are committed to exploring non-Western perspectives and others beyond the US/UK. We are soliciting contributions that focus on various aspects of the platform, including any combination of:

Tumblr’s affordances and limitations as an interface/platform and as a cultural space
Aesthetic and linguistic traditions on Tumblr, including hashtags, gifs, images, and notes
History and development, including the Yahoo acquisition
Industry presence, marketing practices and goals
Creative production and/or critical analysis
Intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, age, and ability
Community development and support
Politics and activism (including the “social justice warrior” discourse)
Identity formation and affirmation
Education and mentoring networks
Transnational/transcultural studies
Tumblr within the transmedia landscape
Fan cultures and activities
The centrality of sexually explicit content (“nsfw”), pornography, and pleasure
Teaching, therapy and other professional uses (such as “social media director”)
Ethical concerns
Contribution Guidelines:

We welcome proposals that address any of the aforementioned topics of analysis, and we are looking for work in a range of formats, including traditional academic essays, shorter think pieces, personal testimonies, interviews, video essays, art, GIF essays, and group discussions. This book will combine hard copy and digital components in order to incorporate multimedia contributions. For example, we are interested in community histories and activities (written by individuals or groups), critical discourses and discussion (including specific examples of such), and creative production we can reference in the book and publish digitally (such as fan art). We will use both illustrations and written excerpts with artist and author permission. It is very important to us to feature a variety of voices; please feel free to contact us for help in developing a proposal, especially if you are not familiar with the publication process but have an idea of something you’d like to contribute.

Written work should generally fall between 2,000 and 7,000 words. Inclusion in the book will be based on abstracts of between 300-500 words and, for full consideration, they should be received by September 30, 2016. Contributors can use their tumblr or public names or remain anonymous. Please send this abstract and any questions or concerns you have to atumblrbook@gmail.com. Visit http://a-tmblr-book.tumblr.com for more information.