Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

« Older Entries

CFP: Being Furry

March 25, 2024

Being Furry: Rotterdam, October 2024

In association with the Otterdam Furry Arts Festival (Rotterdam, the Netherlands)

Furries, loosely defined as fans of anthropomorphised animals and zoomorphic humans, have arguably existed since the 1970s. Yet, these remain an under-researched group. This could be due to academia viewing the fandom as “unworthy” of study (Roberts, 2015) the historically negative depiction of the fandom resulting in an aversion to being studied (Leshner, et al., 2018; Plante, et al., 2017), or any of a myriad of other reasons.

The most well-known efforts to study furries come from the International Anthropomorphic Research Project (2016; 2023), however many unique perspectives on the fandom are missing or unheard. Furthermore, those studying the furry fandom are largely disconnected from each other and lack a focal point.

This conference, the first of its kind, aims to bring together academics and furries from different fields and viewpoints. In doing so, this conference is the first step to formalising a field of ‘furry studies’ that explores and examines this creative community. Therefore, this conference marks the beginning of legitimising the field as a valid site for contemporary research, and to promote global and cross-field collaboration among furry scholars and those invested in this community.

The conference is part of the Otterdam Furry Arts Festival, a public event celebrating furry culture and art occurring in Rotterdam in October 2024. We encourage the wider furry community to take part as well as researchers, and we look forward to the insights this diverse audience will bring. Information about tickets for this event will follow shortly after the venue has been confirmed.

Theme: “Being Furry”

For the first furry studies conference, the theme, ”Being Furry”, will allow for a variety of proposals and act as a strong basis for the field’s inception. The conference aims to inspire discussion, especially given that ‘if you ask ten furries to define what furry is, you’ll end up with eleven different answers’ (Plante, 2023).

Rather than deciding on a concrete definition of “what a furry is” with this conference, our point of provocation is “What is Furry”? Here are some topics to start your thinking. This list is by no means exhaustive, and we encourage proposals about “Being Furry” that go beyond these suggestions:

  • Furry history: furry media, conventions, or activities.
  • Examinations of the fursona: physical ephemera, psychological attachment, aesthetics of costuming and fursuiting, species prevalence or attachment.
  • Furry identity: furries and queerness, the relationships between furries and wider LGBTQIA2S+ communities, neurodiversity in the fandom, experiences of BIPOC within the community.
  • Sex and the furry fandom: sex positivity, kink culture, NSFW practice and artwork.
  • Furry economies: artistic output, “suspiciously wealthy furries”, furries’ charity work, the relationships between furry and ‘big media’ outputs such as Disney films.


We encourage the submission of proposals for academic papers, short workshops, practitioner-based activities, best-practice showcases, and pre-formed panels. We welcome established academics at all stages of their careers, and warmly embrace independent scholars. We also encourage submissions from non-academic furries and welcome other presentation formats such as photographic essays, alternative presentation styles, etc.

Further details can be found on the Otterdam Furry Arts Festival website: https://otterdam.art/  

What we’re looking for

Please submit 500-word abstracts and/or proposals for panels, and/or other forms of contribution, by 17:00 UTC on Monday 10 June 2024. All submissions will be double-reviewed by a panel of researchers who are actively involved in furry fandom. You will be notified of the panel’s decision on 1 July 2024. Please ensure that all submissions (if primarily written) are in PDF format.

Submissions must also contain:

  • Name of author(s)
  • Affiliation of author(s), if applicable
  • Email address of author(s)
  • Title of proposal
  • A short biography of each author (up to 150 words)
  • References, if applicable


All proposals must be submitted via email to submissions@furrystudies.org with “Furry Studies – Otterdam 2024” in the subject line.

Ethos

This event is designed to build connections between those researching furries, providing an inclusive trans-disciplinary research and publishing space. Though based physically in Rotterdam, the conference will be a hybrid event with online modes of participation, to allow for proceedings to be as accessible as possible.

The official language of the conference, in which all submissions and eventual contributions are expected to be presented, is English. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a special issue of Popular Communication focused on furry studies.

Organising Committee

Reuben Mount (Vanguard Husky), College of English and Media, Birmingham City University, England UK

Rhys Jones, School of Culture and Communication, Swansea University, Wales UK

Tom Geller (Jack Newhorse), Stichting Otterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Informal Enquiries
hello@furrystudies.org

    Tags:, ,
    Posted in CFP, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

    CFP: Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow

    November 9, 2023

    Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow

    Deadline for submissions: 5th January 2024 (11:59pm)

    Conference date: 15th–17th May 2024 (hosted online)

    The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2024, to be held online on 15–17 May, with the theme of ‘Conjuring Creatures and Worlds’.

    Fantasy is inherently an act of conjuration. When we create, dismantle, or engage with fantasy, we are conjuring magic: the impossible, the mysterious, the unknown, and the indefinable. Conjuring fantasy is an act of creation not necessarily defined by our existing modes of being or reality, yet it is always in conversation with our own world. Thus, when we enter fantastika, we necessarily enter a conjured world that invites us to reimagine fundamental aspects of our existence. One way it effects this is by encountering seemingly nonhuman creatures, through which we meet the magical, the uncanny, the monstrous, the Other, and perhaps most uncomfortably, ourselves. Brian Froud writes in Good Fairies Bad Faeries (1998) that “like any supernatural encounter, meeting a fairy—even one who is gentle and benign—is never a comfortable experience”. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Coody argue in Monstrous Women in Comics that “the monster is difference made flesh”. The same is often true of the worlds these creatures exist in. Conjurations, then, are not wholly foreign; their components are knowable. Through fantasy we can conjure, and therefore communicate, with the necessarily mysterious, the otherwise ineffable.

    The act of conjuration is an ambivalent one, being both beyond and outside our own world yet inherently connected to it and therefore susceptible to the same limitations and preconceptions. In Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, Helen Young argues that “the logics of race and racial difference are so deeply ingrained in Western society that it is extremely difficult, often even for members of marginalised racial groups, to imagine worlds that do not have those structures.” Indeed, Fantastika has often been concerned with narratives where creatures “function as recognizable stand-ins for majorities and minorities and the inevitable conflicts that emerge between identity groups”. We are interested in explorations of marginalised identities, including creatures, systems of magic, and worlds concerned with (but not limited to) race, ethnicity, gender, queerness, class, and (dis)abilities. These conjured creatures and worlds offer an alternative viewpoint into other modes of identity and being. Additionally, the ways in which these fantasies are conjured is important. The medium through which the reader (in the broadest sense of the word) encounters and interacts with the fantasy affects its meaning.

    How do academics, creative practitioners, and fans conjure (and understand the conjuration of) fantasy, creatures and worlds? Fantasy and the fantastic have the capability to conjure the ephemeral and the horrific, the indefinable and the real, the Other and ourselves, but how do we understand these creations? And how do these encounters with creatures, magic, and worlds conform or challenge our understanding of the fantastic?

    GIFCon 2024 is a three-day virtual conference welcoming proposals for papers relating to this theme from researchers and practitioners working in the field of fantasy and the fantastic across all media, whether from within the academy or beyond it. We are particularly interested in submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers, and researchers whose work focuses on fantasy from the margins. We ask for abstracts for 20-minute papers. See our Suggested Topics list below for further inspiration. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bionote via this form by January 5th, 2024, at midnight GMT.

    We also ask for workshop descriptions for 75-minute creative workshops, for those interested in exploring the creative processes of conjuring these creatures and worlds into being from a practice-based perspective. Please submit a 100-word description and a 100-word bionote via this form by January 5th, 2024 at midnight GMT.

    If you have any questions regarding our event or our CfP, please contact us at GIFCon@glasgow.ac.uk. Please also read through our Code of Conduct. We look forward to your submissions!

    Suggested Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

    Fantasy texts and media by creative practitioners from marginalised backgrounds, and from beyond the anglophone and Anglocentric fantastic
    Creatures as corporeal and/or spiritual beings
    Worlds and magic as material or conceptual spaces, realms, or structures
    Multi-media representations of creatures, worlds, and creators
    Creating and recreating race, class, queerness, (dis)ability and other marginalised identities in fantasy
    Explorations and representations of the Other in fantastika
    Attraction to, repulsion or rejection of creatures and the nonhuman
    Depicting alienation, body dysphoria, body swapping and transformation in fantasy
    The anthropomorphising of objects and creatures
    Human and nonhuman binaries, hierarchies, and dynamics
    Conforming to and challenging conventional depictions of creatures e.g., mythic and supernatural traditions, folklore, fantastic tropes and iconic and archetypal characters
    Representations of fantastical creatures for example cryptids, fae, magical creatures, supernatural beings, the undead, humanoids, animals, hybrids, AI, extraterrestrials, demons, monsters, horrors, boogeymen
    Environments, alternate worlds, ecocriticism, posthumanism, the Anthropocene
    Conjuring futures and pasts
    Organic vs. artificial worlds, spaces and creatures
    Conjuring as a destructive or creative act
    Conjuring magic and magic systems
    How fandoms and scholars recreate, reinterpret, or conjure creatures, worlds and magic systems

    Tags:, ,
    Posted in CFP, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

    CFP: Queer Women’s Fandom: New Global PerspectivesQueer Women’s Fandom: New Global Perspectives

    August 18, 2023

    Queer Women’s Fandom: New Global Perspectives

    Special issue for Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture

    Co-editors: Jamie J. Zhao (City University of Hong Kong) and Eve Ng (Ohio University, USA)

    There are numerous fan communities and spaces, in different geocultural locations and linguistic contexts, dedicated to intimacies between women. Yet research on queer women’s fandoms – including fandoms of queer female public figures and their media presence, fan communities comprised of non-cis/non-heterosexually identified women, and/or queer reading activities done by women-identified fans – remains rather scant, especially compared to work on the queer fandoms of stars, celebrities, and idols who are cis-men. Furthermore, most scholarship on queer women’s fan cultures is focused on two types: femslash in Euro-American contexts and GL (“girls love” or yuri/baihe) in East Asian contexts. To develop a theoretically richer and more globally diverse account, this special issue seeks critical approaches to the transnational dimensions of queer women’s fandoms, including as they pertain to the formation and transformation of cross-racial, transcultural, and global queer fan identities, relationships to feminist and queer movements, the capitalization and coopting of queer fan labor, and other complexities of transcultural fandom.

    In the only published edited collection entirely focused on queer women’s fan studies, Eve Ng and Julie Levin Russo called for a recentering of “queer women as the object of fannish cathexis” (2017). This current project builds upon that volume and further emphasizes that the global and transcultural elements of queer women’s fandoms deserve deeper investigation. Following Bertha Chin and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto’s (2013) transcultural fandom theory, we do not take “global” simply as something from the non-Western world. Instead, we propose that queer women’s fandom makes visible the encounters of local, transcultural, and global understandings concerning gender, sexuality, and media. It thus proffers fannish imaginaries and productions that contest, negotiate, and sometimes even collude with globalist and digital capitalism and heteronormative social structure.

    In addition, we envision the special issue as working to redress the disproportionate focus of current literature on fan cultures around explicitly lesbian-identified characters and celebrities that are available in LGBTQ-friendly, relatively democratic media and social environments. To date, there has been little academic attention on fandoms dominated by and about queer women in contexts where overt LGBTQ politics, movements, and representations remain taboo topics. We are therefore particularly interested in research on queer women’s fan spaces in largely conservative, misogynistic, homophobic settings, both online and offline, and the transcultural, cross-racial encounters and negotiations that may occur.

    In sum, this special issue of Popular Communication will examine fan practices and discourses centered on women’s homoerotic imaginaries through fresh transnational perspectives. Challenging the Euro-American-centrism and (more recently emergent) East Asian-centrism in global queer media and fan studies, we seek to advance cross-geocultural-linguistic conversations about how images, personas, desires, identities, and subjectivities of queer women are (re)produced, negotiated, and deconstructed, and the relations of these queer fannish imaginaries to the media texts and platforms, sociocultural contexts, and economic-political and regulatory forces through which they are enabled, complicated, and sometimes curtailed.

    The special issue will address the following overarching questions:

    • How has globalization facilitated or complicated the emergence, development, and interconnection of queer women’s fan cultures in different parts of the world?
    • In what ways are identities, subjectivities, and desiring voices of queer women enabled and reconfigured through negotiation with local, cross-cultural, transnational, and global media and public discourses on girlhood, womanhood, feminism, and queerness?
    • How do race, ethnicity, class, age, and geopolitics complicate global queer women’s fandoms?
    • Through what means have transnational feminist and LGBTQ movements converged with or diverged from queer women’s fan cultures in recent years?
    • How have emerging forms of digital technologies and social platforms contributed to the circulation of queer women-centered media and the formation of its fandom worldwide?

    Potential topics may include but are not limited to:

    • Emerging forms of queer women’s fan cultures, such as webtoons, TikTok videos, GL-adapted fanfics, audio dramas, games, etc.
    • Queer global fandoms around Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Sinophone actresses, K-pop, J-Pop, and Chinese pop women idols and girl groups, and/or androgynous celebrities in Asia
    • Other transnational and/or cross-racial fandoms of queer women celebrities and representations
    • The intersection of age, gender, and sexuality in queer women’s fan cultures, such as anti-ageism, fans’ preferences or romantic imaginaries of middle-age or senior queer women
    • The role of social media in manufacturing women as queer-identified celebrities, and/or the engagement of such celebrities with their queer fans
    • Queer women-centered media and platformization (cultural practices and the venues for cultural production proliferated through digital platforms’ infrastructural characteristics) 
    • Conflicts and/or connections between feminist groups/communities and queer women’s fan cultures
    • The role of heteropatriarchal cultures and media regulations in the formation and development of queer women’s fandoms

    To most strongly fit the theme of the special issue, submissions should examine their topics through a critical global/transnational/transcultural lens. Studies on queer women’s fan practices in the Global South from de-Western-centric, de-East Asian-centric perspectives are especially welcomed.

    References

    Chin, B., & Morimoto, L. (2013). Towards a theory of transcultural fandom. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 10(1), 92–108.

    Ng, E., & Russo, J. L. (2017). Envisioning queer female fandom. Transformative Works and Cultures, 24. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.01168

    Timeline

    • Please submit a 1,000-word abstract as well as a short (2-page) CV by October 15, 2023 to the co-editors of the special issue at jingjamiezhao@gmail.com and nge@ohio.edu.
    • Authors whose abstracts are selected will be notified by December 15, 2023.
    • Selected authors will be asked to submit complete manuscripts (6,000-7,000 words, including notes and references, in Word format, following the 7th APA style) directly to the journal’s submission site by February 28, 2024.
    • Acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee paper publication. All full paper submissions will be single anonymous peer-reviewed by at least two independent, anonymous scholars. The expected publication date for the special issue is 2024 (issue 3).

    If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact the co-editors.

    Special Issue Editors:

    Jamie J. ZHAO is Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from Chinese University of Hong Kong and received another PhD in Film and TV Studies from the University of Warwick. Her research explores East Asian media and public discourses on female gender and sexuality in a globalist age. She is the editor of Queer TV China (HKUP, 2023), and coedited Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols (HKUP, 2017), Contemporary Queer Chinese Art (Bloomsbury, 2023), and the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, forthcoming). She has also (co)edited seven special journal issues on the topics of global media, celebrity, and fan studies. She is the founding coeditor of Bloomsbury’s “Queering China” book series and Routledge’s “Transdisciplinary Souths” book series. In addition, she serves on the editorial boards of Communication, Culture & Critique, Feminist Media Studies, Television & New Media, and Bloomsbury’s “Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies” book series.

    jingjamiezhao@gmail.com

    ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5106-4563

    Eve Ng is an associate professor in the School of Media Arts and Studies and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Ohio University. She is the author of Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Mainstreaming Gays: Critical Convergences of Queer Media, Fan Cultures, and Commercial Television (Rutgers University Press, 2023), and has published in Communication, Culture & Critique, Development and Change, Feminist Media Studies, Feminist Studies,International Journal of Communication, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Lesbian Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Popular Communication, Television & New Media, and Transformative Works and Culture. She is an associate editor of Communication, Culture & Critique, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Lesbian Studies, Television & New Media, and Transformative Works and Culture.

    nge@ohio.edu

    ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5570-6284

    Tags:, , ,
    Posted in CFP, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

    CFP: Fright Nights: Live Halloween Horror Events

    May 18, 2023

    CALL FOR CHAPTERS: EDITED COLLECTION

    Fright Nights: Live Halloween Horror Events

    Editors: Kieran Foster, University of Nottingham (UK), and Cassie Brummitt, University of Nottingham (UK)

    Horror’s origins – with its roots in folklore, mythology and the oral tradition – stretch much further back in time than screen media, and beyond even ‘canonical’ literature such as Frankenstein and Dracula. However, in the 20th century and beyond, horror as a media genre has become big business, especially in the screen industries where horror film and television franchises have become globally-exploited intellectual properties ripe for spin-offs, sequels, remakes, transmedia world-building and merchandising (Fleury and Mamber 2019, Harris 2010, Mee 2022).

    What remains less explored in extant scholarly literature, which this edited collection intends to address, is the phenomenon of space and place within horror’s commercial logics. Importantly, the past few decades have seen a rise in immersive, interactive environments that draw on horror imagery as an indelible part of the attraction. Events such as escape rooms, immersive experiences and fan-led celebratory events enable horror intellectual property to escape the confines of the big and small screen to pervade cultural spaces globally (Kennedy 2018, Ndalianis 2010). These physical, participatory, often visceral environments have implications for the ways in which horror properties are materialised, remediated, and engaged with.

    These kinds of immersive attractions are no more popular than at Halloween, where it has become increasingly common to see both branded and non-branded horror events take place across the globe. For example, in the UK, pop-up ‘scream parks’ such as York Maze’s ‘HallowScream’, or theme park events such as ‘Fright Nights’ at Thorpe Park, draw on non-branded horror, folklore and supernatural imagery. Meanwhile, internationally, events such as ‘Halloween Horror Nights’ (at Universal Studio sites in Orlando, Hollywood, Singapore and Japan) and ‘Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party’ (at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando and Disneyland Paris) exploit branded iconography, IP, and franchises.

    Horror’s preoccupation with the abject and the visceral offers arguably unique opportunities to translate cultural fears into a physically inhabitable and interactable experience. Seeking to address this important phenomenon, this edited collection will examine Halloween-focused horror events as an under-explored but sizable part of horror media’s global creative and commercial logics, both historically and contemporarily.

    We are seeking abstracts of up to 250 words in response to this theme (plus author biography up to 100 words). The form of contributions can be flexible, whether a standard chapter, an interview (for example, with a practitioner, an industry professional, or fans), an autoethnographic piece, or another creative means of exploring the topic.

    Topics may include but are not limited to:

    • Issues of labour in Halloween horror events
    • Marketing and promotional discourses of Halloween horror events
    • Franchising and intellectual property in Halloween horror events
    • Immersion and interactivity
    • Halloween horror events as film, media or literary tourism
    • Notions of play and lusory attitudes to Halloween horror events
    • Performance and emotion in Halloween horror events
    • Audience engagement and experience
    • Fan studies of horror events
    • Narratives and storytelling
    • Industrial relationships, logics and practices

    Please send your abstract and bio to Dr. Kieran Foster (kieran.foster@nottingham.ac.uk) and Dr. Cassie Brummitt (cassie.brummitt@nottingham.ac.uk). The deadline for abstracts is July 24th 2023.

    Tags:, ,
    Posted in CFP, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

    CFP: The SA Fan Hub: Fan Studies in the Global South

    May 16, 2023

    19 – 20 October 2023 at Nelson Mandela University, South Campus, Gqeberha, Eastern Cape

    There is an idea that everyone is a fan of something and has a corresponding attachment to a text/object. The aim of understanding how or what this attachment inspires, and the perception thereof is the intention of fan studies.

    Social and new media has introduced new practices that has formed an integral part of contemporary culture. These practices, with its roots entrenched in fandom, continues to expand in terms of not only its cultural influence but also the diversity of the participants. As it stands, the field of fan studies demonstrates a distinct lack of discussion in and around transcultural fandom, especially that of the global south and, particularly, Southern Africa. Chin and Morimoto (2013), two prominent fan studies scholars affirm that non-Western fandoms remain part of the periphery of mainstream fan culture and remain disconnected despite the migration of fandom to online spaces (2013:105). As such, this symposium intends to bring together academics, acafans, and fans who want to discuss and understand how fandom is developing across the cultures and borders of the global south and Southern Africa. We are seeking participants whose approach to fan studies shares the intention of contemplating new avenues of inquiry that consider fan studies from an interdisciplinary and distinctly African perspective.

    The prospective presentations, panels, and/or discussions will ideally have a clear global south perspective and may include but are not limited to:

    • Fan practices and social media platforms
    • Fan identities
    • Transcultural fandom
    • Industry
    • Race
    • The ethics of fan studies
    • Fans as curators
    • African fan fiction
    • African/Global South sports fans
    • Fan tourism
    • Music fandom
    • Queer fandom
    • Masculinity
    • Femininity
    • Fan cultures
    • Whiteness in fandom
    • Intersectional fandom
    • Political fandom
    • The future of fan studies

    Topic/abstract Submissions: 31 June 2023

    Please Note: Although the symposium is scheduled to be held in person on the NMU campus in Gqeberha, arrangements will be made, upon request, for hybrid presentations to accommodate participants who are unable to travel.

    Submissions must include the following elements:

    • Complete contact information and institutional affiliation (if applicable) for the participant;
    • Biography
    • An indication of which aspect you want to form part of. i.e. presentation, panel, discussion;
    • A 250-word overview of your topic

    References
    Chin, B. and Morimoto, L. H. (2013). “Towards a theory of transcultural fandom,” Participations, 10, pp. 105.

    The SA Fan Hub

    Dr. Catherine Duncan
    Dr. Janelle Vermaak-Griessel
    Dr. Natalie Le Clue

    https://sites.google.com/view/safanhub/home?authuser=4

    Tags:,
    Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

    Call for Chapters: Transcultural Media Fandom in the Asia Pacific

    March 13, 2023

    Call for Chapters: Transcultural Media Fandom in the Asia Pacific

    Editors

    Dr Tingting Hu

    Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communication, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

    Dr Fang Wu

    Associate Professor, School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

    Targeted publisher

    Hawaii University Press (AsiaPop!)

    Routledge (Digital Media and Culture in Asia)

    Project Aims

    In recent years, the field of fan studies has seen exponential growth in the global academia, with many remarkable books such as the Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (2018), edited by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, and Aussie Fans: Uniquely Placed in Global Popular Culture (2019), edited by Celia Lam and Jackie Raphael adding to the literature. While the former aims to evaluate the state of the field and comprehensively survey core concerns, the latter focuses on how Australian fandom explores the national popular culture scene through themes of localization and globalization. In the Asian context, Lu Chen’s monograph Chinese Fans of Japanese and Korean Pop Culture (2018) has focused on the reception and interpretation of the Chinese audience involving the content of transnational cultural flows in East Asia. 

    Previous literature has predominantly focused on media fandom in the U.S. and the U.K., with only sporadic non-Western fandom-related scholarships. Despite popular Asian cultures such as Hallyu and Otaku creating a global impact in recent years, the Asia-pacific continues to receive scant academic attention, largely because the Asia-pacific has long been conceptualized as a geographically vast and culturally heteroglossic ‘other’ to the Euro-American formation (Wilson and Dirlik, 1994). While some scholarships have investigated how stardom and fandom in China, Korea, and Japan influence western countries in terms of culture, economy, and politics, popular cultural exchanges and transcultural practices among Asian Pacific countries still require closer observation.  

    This project’s goal is to bring together Asian-pacific-focused media fandom research across diverse disciplines and contexts to assess the state of the field, empirically investigate fandom activities, and point to new research directions. Engaging with a wide array of media texts and formats, this project will be organized into three main sections:

    Part I 

    Identities, Activities, and Practices 

    • the transformative textual practices of fans.
    • the transcultural practices and media activities of fans.
    • the range of identities that are represented in fandom media practices/activities.

    Part II 

    Technology, Industry, and Economy 

    • the networked relationship between media technology, industry, and fans.
    • the dynamics between media fandom, industry, and economy.
    • the evolution of media fans in relation to technology, industry, and economy in different cultural contexts. 

    Part III

    Gender and Sexuality 

    • the gendered identities of fans as represented by their media activities.
    • the gendered and/or sexual-related practices/issues involved in fandom media activities.
    • the fandom engagement with sexual minorities and/or the LGBTQ communities.

    This anthology will adopt a transcultural perspective to broaden our knowledge of the complex ways that media fandom develops across cultures and national borders. In the Routledge Companion to Media Fandom’s first edition, Click and Scott (2018) have argued that “The absence of a robust dialogue in fan studies scholarship about race and transcultural fandom is one of the field’s most obvious deficiencies” (p. 241). They have also mentioned Chin and Morimoto’s (2013) call for more attention to transcultural fans and assertion: “… non-English (often non-Western) fandoms are not peripheral to ‘mainstream’ fan culture. Rather they are part of the transcultural interplay of fandom as much as any other, separated only by barriers of language, distribution, and availability that have become eminently surmountable as fandoms have migrated online” (p. 105).

    In conclusion, we hope to examine diverse forms of media fandom research in the Asian-pacific contexts (within but not limited to the thematic scope listed above), paying attention to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and broader Oceania. 

    Submission

    Please send a 500-word abstract and your CV to the editor at tingting.hu_academic@hotmail.com, wufangwf@sjtu.edu.cn.

    Abstract submission deadline: May 1, 2023

    Submission of full proposal to the publisher: September 1, 2023

    If the proposal is accepted, full chapters would be expected by December 2023.

    References

    Chen, L. (2018). Chinese Fans of Japanese and Korean Pop Culture. Routledge. 

    Chin, B. and Morimoto, L. H. (2013). “Towards a theory of transcultural fandom,” Participations, 10, pp. 92-108.

    Click, M. A. and Scott, S. (2018). “Race and transcultural fandom: introduction,” The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, pp. 241-243.

    Lam, C. and Raphael, J. Eds (2019). Aussie Fans: Uniquely Placed in Global Popular Culture. University of Iowa Press. 

    Wilson, R., and Dirlik, A. (1994). “Introduction: Asia/Pacific as space of cultural production,” boundary 2, 21(1), 1-14.

    Tags:, ,
    Posted in CFP, Publications, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

    Call for Papers, Video Games: Time and Nostalgia

    November 15, 2022

    12 May 2023, one-day symposium run by @ExeterComms, Department of Communications, Drama and Film, University of Exeter

    Organisers: Aditya Deshbandhu, Neil Ewen, Shannon Lawlor, and A.R.E. Taylor

    About the conference:

    This one-day in-person conference at University of Exeter’s Streatham Campus will be structured by two thematic strands. One will focus on ‘time’ and the other on ‘nostalgia’.

    Time – Morning Session

    Keynote: Professor Christopher Hanson, Syracuse University   

    Video games are an inherently interactive medium that offer players and researchers multiple avenues to explore time and temporality. These temporalities can unfold across multiple scales, from the narrative time of the game itself to the time that exists beyond game worlds. Video games demand time if they are to be completed or mastered and, similarly, players require time to reconfigure and make games their own. Video games have incorporated time-based mechanics and dynamics in myriad ways – some games, like MMORPGs, are effectively never ending, while others have their engagement durations extended through updates, DLCs or reward systems that incentivise player engagement or time spent in-game.

    Time in games has been a key area for study in the field of video game studies and is a dimension that often unifies this very diverse domain. This panel hopes to initiate new conversations on time and temporality in video games by reflecting on how new developments in gaming culture (as well as new game and console releases) alter experiences of game time and temporality. Increasingly, games are emphasising temporality in their play mechanics, enabling players to manipulate narrative time, while the rising popularity of mobile gaming means that ‘game time’ increasingly moves beyond the temporal confines of the game itself. For example, game-accompanying platforms like companion apps have allowed game time to seep into the mundanity of everyday life and vice-versa. We welcome contributions that approach the theme of temporality and video games from a range of angles, such as (but not limited to): 

    • Grinding and ‘no lifing’ as temporal experiences
    • Journeys of the collector, the quest for gathering in-game items, gear, and trophies
    • Playing with permadeath
    • Altering dimensions of time in the play experience to showcase mastery of the game or a willingness to win with increased complexities – speed runs and Nuzzlocke-like challenges
    • Understandings of time and temporality through acts of leisure, labor and playbor
    • Representations of time and temporality in video game narratives/play mechanics
    • Lived experiences of game time
    • Conceptions of time and temporalities in mobile and free-to-play games
    • Game time beyond the screen 
    • The ‘always on’ and ‘live’ worlds of online games
    • Game and console development and launch time (including ‘crunch time’ and launch/release anticipations)

    Nostalgia – Afternoon Session

    Keynote: Professor Debra Ramsay, University of Exeter

    Nostalgia permeates gaming in various forms, from remakes of classic games to new games made to mimic the look and feel of early games (such as the use of 8bit aesthetics and music). Companies like Nintendo repeatedly revisit their core franchises (Mario, Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, etc.) which continue to attract new and returning players, while companies like Rockstar and Bethesda re-release their biggest titles on new consoles, such as Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto V, with great commercial success. The appeal of rediscovering the same games in new and ‘improved’ forms has resulted in a slew of remakes and reboots in gaming, while at the same time the rise of retro gaming reflects a desire to discover new stories in old formats, due to nostalgia for previous gaming experiences. The afternoon session of the conference will be dedicated to critically exploring and critiquing nostalgia and games in various ways, including but not limited to:

    • Nostalgia’s role in intra-generational gaming
    • Nostalgia and fandom
    • Games and memory
    • Nostalgia in games as comfort / pleasure / affect
    • Nostalgia as regression
    • The value of nostalgia in games
    • Nostalgia and aesthetics
    • Nostalgia and interactive storytelling
    • Nostalgia and sound

    We look forward to receiving proposals from established scholars, emerging career researchers, and postgraduate candidates who are engaging with video game studies within or across multiple disciplines.   

    This in-person event will take place on the University of Exeter’s Streatham Campus. Attendance is free.

    Proposals for 20-minute presentations should include:

    • Your name, email, and affiliation
    • Proposed paper title
    • Abstract (400 words max)
    • Bio (100 words max)

    Please send proposals to Aditya Deshbandhu and Shannon Lawlor by 20 January 2023: a.deshbandhu@exeter.ac.uk and shannonlawlor92@gmail.com

    Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 5 February 2023.

    Conference presentations will be considered for two edited volumes (Temporality in Video Game Studies and Nostalgia in Video Games) in the Routledge series Games and Contemporary Culture, edited by the symposium organisers.

    Tags:, ,
    Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

    CFP: Fandom After #MeToo/#BalanceTonPorc

    January 24, 2022

     1 July 2022, The University of Chicago, Paris 

     Keynote speakers:
    Kristina Busse (University of South Alabama)
    Alexis Lothian (University of Maryland)     

    In late 2017, in the wake of the widespread scandals surrounding American film producer Harvey Weinstein, the hashtag #MeToo started trending on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Using this hashtag, primarily (though not exclusively) female victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault shared their experiences and decried the ubiquity of these experiences even in a supposedly modern and egalitarian world. 

    Although the #MeToo hashtag has since been used to decry experiences of sexual violence in any context, the origins of the movement in the Weinstein scandal, and the subsequent sharing of the hashtag by various well-known actors, has ensured a continued focus of the movement on the entertainment industry. In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, actors/comedians such as Louis CK and Jeffrey Tambor also found themselves under public scrutiny in this context, with Tambor, for example, being fired from the Amazon Prime Video series Transparent in February 2018. 

    Similar movements also developed in other national contexts, such as France, where the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal in 2011 prompted increased public discourse on sexual harassment and assault, and where the hashtag #BalanceTonPorc started trending at the time of the Weinstein scandal, explicitly inviting women to name and shame their harassers and abusers. The movement quickly gathered steam in France, but also received criticism, for example in a public letter in January 2018, which was signed by over 100 French women in entertainment and which denounced the movement as going too far and punishing core French values such as chivalry. The letter itself was heavily criticised, as well, with particular signatories issuing apologies a week later.  

    Given this particular focus on the entertainment industry, it is not surprising that the global #MeToo movement has affected audiences and fans of media forms, including film, TV, music, video games, and more. Since fans often develop affective, parasocial relationships with the objects of their fandom–including the producers of particular content, actors, characters, etc–the accusations and scandals emerging in the wake of #MeToo have necessarily provoked discussion and even conflict within fan communities, have affected the ways in which fans relate to their fandoms, and have impacted even the “forms of cultural production” (Jenkins 2013, 1) these fans have proceeded to produce. 

    In recent years, these effects have not been limited to accusations of sexual violence within the context of #MeToo movement; indeed, this movement has become part of a wider trend toward holding popular entertainment figures accountable for particular views considered morally unacceptable or damaging. An example of this is, for example, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, who has come under scrutiny since late 2019 for her purported views on civil rights for transgender people; these views have impacted the Harry Potter fandom in various ways, with particularly LGBTQ fans vowing to cease purchasing licensed Harry Potter products, alongside other reactions of a similar nature (Yehl 2021).  

    While fan studies as an academic discipline has existed since the early 1990s and has since both proliferated and become increasingly mainstream in the anglophone world (Scott and Click 2018, 1) and in France (Bourdaa 2015), no academic work or event has yet confronted the important question of the impact of #MeToo, #BalanceTonPorc and their offshoots on fan communities and practices. This conference, then, aims to bring together international scholars interested in this issue. Potential topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to: 

    • Social media discussions and arguments between fans concerning revelations or accusations of celebrity sexual/sexist violence. 
    • Empirical research on fans’ reactions to such revelations/accusations. 
    • Accusations of sexual/sexist violence within fan communities.  
    • Representations of, or reactions to, #MeToo/#BalanceTonPorc in fan works (fan art, fanfiction, fan vids…).     
    • Representations of the #MeToo movement in media works (e.g. The Morning Show, Promising Young Woman, Bombshell, The Loudest Voice) and fan reactions to them. 
    • Attempts by celebrities accused of sexual or gender-based violence to appease their fans. 
    • Posthumous reconsiderations of specific celebrities in the #MeToo/#BalanceTonPorc era. 
    • Reconsiderations of past works (including characters, themes, stories…) in the #MeToo/#BalanceTonPorc era. 
    • The position of the “acafan” (Jenkins 2011) when the object of their research is accused of sexual or gender-based violence. 
    • Writing and rewriting film and media history in the #MeToo/#BalanceTonPorc era. 
    • Teaching film and media studies in the #MeToo/#BalanceTonPorc era. 

    We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20-minute papers, to be sent to eve.bennett@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr and l.lanckman@herts.ac.uk by 18 March 2022. 

    Please also indicate if you would like to present your paper face-to-face (in Paris) or remotely. We hope that the Covid-19 situation will enable us to offer both options.

    Symposium attendance will be free of charge. 

    Tags:, , ,
    Posted in CFP, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

    Reflections from the Future: A Collective Storytelling Challenge from the Civic Imagination Project

    June 9, 2020

    As part of the Civic Paths Group within Henry Jenkins’s Civic Imagination Project team, based at the University of Southern California, a new collective storytelling challenge has been launched. As Sangita Shresthova outlines: “we are excited to launch “Reflections from the Future”, a participatory storytelling challenge that invites people to take a minute to imagine a future far beyond our current moment and share this imagination to inspire others to share their visions too. The collection will also become an enduring archive that preserves our imaginations at this current time”.  You can read more here: http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2020/4/12/take-part-in-a-collective-storytelling-challenge-and-inspire-others-by-sangita-shresthova

    All responses will become part of 2060: Reflections from the Future, a public and shared collection that connects our current hopes, concerns, and aspirations.

    You can read more about the project and submit your story (which does not have to be in English) here:

    https://www.ciatlas.org/prompt

     

     

    Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

    Call for Papers: Celebrity Studies journal special issue on Children and Celebrities

    June 9, 2020

    Call for Papers: Children and Celebrities

    Special Edition of Celebrity Studies journal edited by Djoymi Baker, Jessica Balanzategui, and Diana Sandars

    The entertainment industries create the most widely circulated popular images of children and childhood, and yet the role of children in celebrity studies warrants further study. As John Mercer and Jane O’Connor (2017) point out, the intersection between Childhood Studies and Celebrity Studies has been gaining traction in recent years, highlighting a tension between the dominant discourses of innocence surrounding children, and the highly competitive commercial imperatives of celebrity culture.

    New participatory entertainment ecologies have created new opportunities for child performers, leading to the rise of new kinds of child celebrities and surrounding reception cultures. For instance, on YouTube, the world’s most popular user-generated video streaming service, some of the most successful celebrities are children: eight year old Ryan Kaji – a North American child who reviews toys for the channel ‘Ryan’s World’ (formerly ‘Ryan ToysReview’) – was the highest-earning YouTube personality of the year in both 2018 (Statista, 2019) and 2019 (Berg, 2019).

    The child on screen, the child viewer, and the child star continue to be influenced by concepts of childhood that first emerged in the 19th century, eliciting discourses of harm and protection and attracting waves of moral panic in different eras. These public debates most often reveal more about adult sensibilities around often nostalgic notions of childhood than they do about children themselves. As Karen Lury puts it, “the essential understanding of the child here is the child as being rather than becoming”(2005: 314), a subject lacking agency, which leads Hugh Cunningham to caution “we need to distinguish between children as human beings and childhood as a shifting set of ideas” (2005: 1). In the current cultural moment and in prior eras, the categories of child and adult are mutually reinforcing ideals that are articulated and reflected in a range of distinctive ways through celebrity culture. For example, since the world went into lockdown, the family home has taken centre stage for live broadcasts and social media feeds, and as a result viewers have been inundated with images of celebrities in isolation with their children.

    There is more cultural evidence around childhood as a cultural concept than the lived experiences of children, a distinction which becomes key when considering children as fans of child and adult celebrities. In the field of Fandom Studies, Kyra Hunting notes the tendency to examine adolescent and teen media fans at the expense of children. She suggests this is partly due to practical, methodological reasons around collecting data, but argues it also reveals a resistance to framing children’s participatory media engagement as a form of fandom. This is despite the fact that “the playing child” functions as a “model for fandom” studies (Hills, 2002: 9). As such, we need to be mindful of how the child audience is addressed by star vehicles and paratexts, compared with what children actually do as fans, even (or particularly) if this does not accord with teen and adult models of fandom, and what intergenerational modes might be in play.

    We seek original essays of 6-8000 words that address children and celebrities through an interdisciplinary approach, across a range of media forms and eras, for a special issue of Celebrity Studies (prospective publication 2023, pending the journal’s review of abstracts).

    We will be looking for internationalisation, a range of scholarly experiences, gender balance, and that each of the abstracts tackles their topic or research question through broad and dynamic celebrity intersections.

    Topics that the articles may address include, but are not limited to:

    Examination of specific child stars or celebrities
    Fandom around child stars, among children and/or adults
    Child fans of adult stars
    On and off-screen dynamics between child stars and their co-stars
    Child celebrities and their online persona
    ‘Fur babies’: celebrity companion animals as ‘children’
    Intersectional explorations of gender, race, and/or sexuality around child stars, from their youth through to adulthood
    Nostalgia around child stars of the past
    Intergenerational spectatorship and child celebrities
    Public discourses around child star breakdowns
    Acting and screen performance
    Ageing child stars
    Children on reality TV
    The child actor industry
    Child actors in adult film and television
    Celebrity families in music, film, television and social media cultures
    Child labour and consent
    Child stars and stalkers
    Children of celebrities
    Children, celebrity culture, and moral panic
    Child stars and merchandising
    Children, celebrities and genre
    Adult stars who feature in children’s film and television

     
    Please send proposals of 300 words and a 50 word author bio to Djoymi Baker djoymi.baker@rmit.edu.au, Jessica Balanzategui jbalanzategui@swin.edu.au, or Diana Sandars sandars@unimelb.edu.au by 7 August 2020.

    References

    Berg, M, 2019, “The highest paid YouTube stars of 2019.” Forbes 18 December. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/12/18/the-highest-paid-youtube-stars-of-2019-the-kids-are-killing-it/#446f8a3338cd (accessed 19 December 2019).

    Cunningham, Hugh, 2005, Children and childhood in western society since 1500, New York: Routledge.

    Lury, Karen, 2005, “The Child in Film and Television,” Screen, Vol. 46, No. 3, Autumn, pp. 307-314.

    Hills, Matt, 2002, Fan Cultures, London: Routledge.

    Hunting, Kyra, 2019, “Finding the child fan: A case for studying children in fandom studies,” Journal of Fandom Studies, Vol.7, No. 2, pp. 93-111.

    Mercer, John, and Jane O’Connor, 2017, Childhood and Celebrity, London: Routledge.

    Statista, 2019, “Most popular YouTube channels as of September 2019, ranked by number of subscribers (in millions).” Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/277758/most-popular-youtube-channels-ranked-by-subscribers/ (accessed 01 December 2019).

    Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

    « Older Entries