Call for Papers, Video Games: Time and Nostalgia

November 15, 2022 by

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.

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Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, 2nd edition Call for Chapters on Transcultural Fandom

November 1, 2022 by

Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, 2nd edition Call for Chapters on Transcultural Fandom

Work has begun on a second edition of The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, a 40+ chapter collection that provides reflection on and direction for the evolving field of Fan Studies edited by Suzanne Scott and Melissa Click. The project’s goal is to bring together an internationally and interdisciplinarily diverse group of established and emerging media fandom scholars to survey core concerns, evaluate the state of the field, and point to new directions of inquiry. The project will be organized into five main sections: Methods & Ethics, Fan Practices & Platforms, Identities, Transcultural Fandom, and Industry & Labor.

We are looking for new chapters for the collection’s section on Transcultural Fandom. In the Routledge Companion to Media Fandom’s first edition, the co-editors 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). Thus, we agree with Chin and Morimoto’s (2013) call for more work on transcultural fans and assertion that “… 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).

To continue to broaden our knowledge of the complex ways media fandom develops across cultures and national borders, we are seeking abstracts for the collection’s second edition section on Transcultural Fandom. We are particularly interested in media and fandoms that develop in or evolve from the Global South.

Submission Instructions:

Please submit a 500-word abstract and a CV by December 15, 2022 to the co-editors at click@gonzaga.edu and suzanne.scott@texas.edu. Please include both co-editors on your email submission.

Authors whose abstracts are selected will be notified by January 15, 2023 and asked to submit the first draft of their full (5000-word) chapter by August 1, 2023. Final chapter drafts will be due May 1, 2024.

References:

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.

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CFP: Fandom After #MeToo/#BalanceTonPorc

January 24, 2022 by

 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. 

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CFP: Pikachu’s Transmedia Adventures: The Continuing Adaptability of the Pokemon Franchise

June 8, 2021 by

In 2021, the Pokemon franchise celebrates the 25th anniversary of its debut in Japan and the fifth anniversary of its popular worldwide AR cellphone game Pokemon Go. In fact, Pokemon is arguably experiencing something of a resurgence and renaissance within the current cultural moment. When a pop-up Pokemon Centre store was opened in London in 2018 to mark the release of Sword and Shield, queues for entering the retail space frequently had to be closed due to demand whilst product lines regularly sold out on a daily basis. In 2019, when the long-running cartoon’s main character Ash Ketchum finally won a Pokemon tournament, major news sites humorously deemed this victory a newsworthy event (Bissett 2019). More recently, a revival in Pokemon card collecting has left retail shelves bare and scalpers running rampant whilst mint-condition ‘graded’ cards have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction (Koebler 2021). Meanwhile, the games themselves continue to be adapted to Nintendo’s console platforms, with the Nintendo Switch releasing both remakes of previously popular titles (Pokemon Let’s Go! Pikachu and Let’s Go! Eevee, Pokemon Snap) as well as new titles exploring hitherto unknown regions (Pokemon Sword and Shield). Much more than a franchise intended to commercially target and exploit children, the Pokemon franchise represents an enduringly popular intellectual property that continues to attract interest across generations. 

Despite this, in-depth and continuous academic study of this hugely popular intellectual property has been infrequent at best. In fact, the last time that a dedicated collection of essays exploring the franchise in a holistic manner was published was in 2004, with many of the contributors positioning the property as a ‘fad’ whose cycle of popularity was apparently at its end (see Tobin 2004; N.B. the augmented reality game Pokemon Go (Niantic 2016- ) has bucked this trend by generating considerable academic attention – see Kulak, Purzycki, Henthorn and Vie 2019; Saker and Evans 2021). Where Pokemon has attracted infrequent academic discussion, this has occurred in the context of assessing how wider cultural flows from Japan to the West have impacted on children’s media (Allison 2006; O’Melia 2020). What is absent, then, is a volume that takes the Pokemon franchise on its own terms and which situates the property within a much-changed media environment. Thus, a study is needed which considers Pokemon in terms of multiple contemporary debates within media and cultural studies. These include – but are no way limited to – cultural, technological, and media convergence (Jenkins 2006), discourses of transmediality and media mix (Steinberg 2012; Williams 2020), paratextuality (Gray 2010), licensing and/or (transgenerational) media industries studies (Santo 2015; Johnson 2019), material culture (Geraghty 2014; Bainbridge 2017) and fan cultures (Scott 2019; Stanfill 2019). Whether approached as a transmedia franchise, corporate intellectual property, system offering ludic possibilities, fan community, or otherwise, academic scholarship should better consider how the Pokemon franchise has engaged with, adapted to, and challenged the contours of the ever-evolving transmedia environment.

This call for papers seeks abstracts of 300-500 words for chapters of approx. 6000 words that explore topics including (but not are limited to):

  • The Industrial development of The Pokemon Company and its corporate relations with Nintendo and other licensed partners.
  • Pokemon and the historical development of media industries studies.
  • The evolution of Pokemon: The Card Game and its relationship to industrial contexts.
  • The evolution of the Pokemon computer games (e.g. games studies perspectives; remediation relating to Let’s Go!, Snap, etc.)
  • Pokemon and/as character licensing.
  • Pokemon and transmedia storytelling and/as transmedia text.
  • Pokemon, transmedia tourismand the Experience Economy (e.g. the Pokemon Cafe; the annual Pikachu Parade).
  • Pokemon Go and developments in augmented reality experiences and/or the gamification of space.
  • Detective Pikachu and Pokemon’s other cinematic adaptations.
  • Pokemon’s historical developments as anime.
  • Pokemon’s historical developmentsas manga
  • Pokemon and/as fan fashion (e.g. high-fashion licensees, jewelry, make-up).
  • Pokemon and/as paratextual theory.
  • Interventions concerning Pokemon and identity politics (e.g. feminism, critical race theory, queer theory).
  • Pokemon and/as the global expansion of kawaii/cute culture.
  • Thematic analyses of the Pokemon franchise (e.g. its ties with environmentalism).
  • Pokemon’s links to Japanese ‘soft power’.
  • Fan practices and transformative works related to the Pokemon franchise across multiple forms and platforms.
  • Pokemon and/as children’s culture.

We are especially interested in soliciting chapters featuring non-Western perspectives as well as ones engaging with historically marginalised or underrepresented groups. 

We hope to include work from both established and emerging scholars; junior scholars & graduate students are encouraged to apply.

Please email abstracts of 300-500 words with an accompanying Author Bio of approx. 150 words to Ross Garner (GarnerRP1@Cardiff.ac.uk) and EJ Nielsen (ejnielsen.ephemera@gmail.com) by 27 August, 2021.

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CFP: Participatory Culture Wars: Controversy, Conflict and Complicity in Fandom 

May 7, 2021 by

***Call for papers and contributions for an edited collection*** 

Participatory Culture Wars: Controversy, Conflict and Complicity in Fandom 

Edited by Dr Simone Driessen, Bethan Jones, Dr Benjamin Litherland. 

It has become increasingly clear that fandoms and participatory culture are sites of controversy, conflict and even complicity, complicating earlier assessments that sought to celebrate creativity, collegiality, and community. As we continue to make sense of the consequences of web 2.0, the study of fans – the affective bonds, identities, and productive cultures of a highly mediated and networked society – is vital in understanding our current moment, whether expressed in debates about “cancel culture” or ongoing “culture wars”. Fans have had to rethink and reassess their relationships to fan objects, consider their role in reproducing global systems of inequality, and reflect on the meaning of participation in an era that is marked by both moral ambivalence and political earnestness.  

Implicitly and explicitly, fannish practices are involved in a variety of key social, political, and cultural issues across the globe. They can be seen in politics, ranging from QAnon’s role in the storming of the US Capitol building, conspiracy theories relating to the covid pandemic, and the continued expansion of the global reactionary and populist right, from Britain to India to Brazil. They can be seen in new cultural terrains produced by networked movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, #OscarsSoWhite, and the accompanying activism and responses as fans come to terms with the crimes, misdemeanors, and disagreements of former faves, like Xiao Zhan, Joss Whedon, or JK Rowling. They are expressed in the strategies and tactics of inter- and intra-fandom conflicts, whether Meghan Markle and the Royal Family or some Chinese fan responses to BTS talking about the Korean war. And, pressingly, fan tourism, collector culture, and the energy use of digital culture all contribute to the ongoing climate crisis.  

Scholars of participatory culture can play a key role in assessing many and more of these issues, but they will also have significant and ongoing impact on the way we conceptualize fans, fandoms, and participatory culture. This work builds on developing themes in the field. Ongoing scholarship about racism, sexism, and homophobia in prominent fan spaces is vital (Massanari, 2017; Pande, 2020; Scott, 2019), and Jonathan Gray’s conception of anti-fandom (2003; 2005; 2007) is an important moment in indicating the darker underbelly of fan cultures. Yet scholarship on QAnon and Trump fandom (Reinhardt, forthcoming; Miller, 2020), cancel and commenting culture (Clark, 2020; Ng, 2020; Barnes, 2018), reactionary fandom (Stanfill, 2020), ethical consumption (Wood, Litherland & Reed, 2020; Tyler, 2021) and serial killer fandom (Nacos, 2015; Rico, 2015) pose important questions which cannot be answered simply by reference to anti- or toxic fandom.  

This collection brings together some of these authors and perspectives while developing and extending these debates. We are keen to broaden the scope of the issue so that studies of fans of film and television are included alongside studies of music, literary, theatre, sports and politics. And we are especially eager to include case studies beyond the anglophone and global north. We are also interested in the practices of organizations in fan-adjacent areas such as marketing, production, branding and influencer culture. We welcome traditional essays and research papers and non-traditional formats, such as roundtables, interviews, and think-pieces, from people inside and outside of the academy. Topics might include but are not limited to: 

·        Conspiracy theories and/as fandom. 

·        ‘Culture wars’, intra- and inter-fan conflicts, and other broader disagreements or discontent about the meaning and values of popular cultural texts.  

·        The consequences of anti-fandom and toxic fandom. 

·        Expressions and practices of ethical consumption, whether via “cancel culture”, commodity activism or similar. 

·        The moral economies of fandom, and their consequences for the media and cultural industries. 

·        The ethical implications of participation, whether through fan activism, dark fandom or other. 

·        The environmental impact of fandom, from NFTs to fan tourism. 

 
Please send an abstract of 300 words, along with a short author biography of 150 words to participatoryculturewars@gmail.com by 31 July 2021. Please also address any queries to this email address. 

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CFP:  Nightmare Before Christmas (Key Films/Filmmakers in Animation series, Bloomsbury) 

January 28, 2021 by

This edited collection will consider Nightmare Before Christmas as a milestone in animation and film history as well as a key cultural object with lasting impact. The book will be inserted in Bloomsbury’s Key Film/Filmmakers in Animation series. 

In the thirty years since its release, Nightmare Before Christmas has drawn repeated academic attention. Many of these contributions have seen the film as an entry point to larger arguments about Tim Burton’s work, whether in terms of its animation (Cuthill 2017), representations of gender (Mitchell 2017), and use of fairy tales (Burger 2017). Less often, Nightmare Before Christmas has been considered in relation to other frameworks, such as its presence beyond the film industry, in theme parks (Williams 2020a, 2020b), and the way it negotiated changing cultural expectations of children’s media and horror (Antunes 2020). Though this literature has shed light on several aspects of the film’s significance, there is to date no sustained scholarly inquiry that brings these insights together and examines the historical and cultural significance specifically of Nightmare Before Christmas. This edited collection seeks to address this gap, considering the different layers of meanings and history of Nightmare Before Christmas from pre-production to the present day.  

Nightmare Before Christmas was released quietly in 1993 under Disney’s Touchstone banner and sold primarily on the art-house appeal of its animation technique, amid fears that a close association with child audiences would harm Disney’s reputation. But the film was an immediate success and has since been reclaimed by Disney as one of its most beloved family titles. Growing into a cult phenomenon, Nightmare Before Christmas still cultivates a dedicated fandom across the globe today with an array of merchandise, tie-in products, and other media. 

Nightmare Before Christmas marks an important moment of technological development in stop-motion animation, and the technique has continued to have a key presence in the industry, particularly associated with horror- and gothic-inspired narratives (Selick’s Coraline and ParaNoman, or Burton’s Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie), where it blurs questions of suitability for child audiences and continues to fuel debates about the art of animated films and its target audiences. Indeed, the specific combination of stop-motion and children’s horror in Nightmare Before Christmas is key to how the film has negotiated genre, suitability, and other cultural categories in its original and retrospective reception, questions which often become tangled with ideas of nostalgia. 

More recently, Nightmare Before Christmas continues to serve as a point of reference for negotiations of genre and of the boundaries between mainstream and niche cultures, both on screen and in spaces of fandom. Its many afterlives expand well beyond the film industry, occupying manga and comic books , board games, and other paraphernalia, as well as physical rooted localities through events such as the live-staged musical, theme parks, and in exhibits (Hicks 2013), as well as through the fan practices that the film has inspired, such as fan fashion (Cuthill 2017) and makeup, cosplay, textual production, and transcultural fandom. 

How can we best understand Nightmare Before Christmas and its significance in the history of film and animation? What is Nightmare Before Christmas’ legacy thirty years on, and how does it continue to challenge and delight audiences, scholars, and industry today?  

This book aims to collect diverse and original insights into the meanings and impacts of Nightmare Before Christmas from a range of disciplinary perspectives and methods. Some suggested topics include: 

  • Nightmare Before Christmas in animation and film history; 
  • animation and genre (musicals/fairy tales/horror/family/etc); 
  • narrative structure in Nightmare Before Christmas and the audience; 
  • stop-motion as animation technique and cultural object; 
  • animation and branding practices; 
  • Nightmare Before Christmas as seasonal media (Christmas/Halloween); 
  • suitability, animation, and young audiences; 
  • children’s horror animation before and after Nightmare Before Christmas;
  • animation and nostalgia; 
  • animation, technology, and art; 
  • the music of Nightmare Before Christmas (songs, covers, re-releases, etc.); 
  • the politics of representation in Nightmare Before Christmas; 
  • childhood in Nightmare Before Christmas and its associated texts and practices; 
  • authorship and associated debates (Burton/Selick/Elfman/Disney), including the links between Nightmare Before Christmas and other works; 
  • franchises and franchising relationships; 
  • live and experiential events linked to the film (live musicals, theme park attractions, the Beetle House restaurants in New York and Los Angeles, Tim Burton exhibitions, etc.); 
  • transmedia and merchandise (Funko figures, action figures, board games, clothing and make-up, cookbooks, etc.); 
  • transnational critical and audience/fan reception; 
  • fandom, subcultures (Goth/emo), and fan practices, including transformative works (fan animation, fanfiction, fan videos,…); 
  • cosplay and the body in Nightmare Before Christmas fandom. 

JQuestions and informal discussion can be directed at any of the three co-editors: Filipa Antunes (a.antunes@uea.ac.uk), Brittany Eldridge (brittany.eldridge.18@ucl.ac.uk), and Rebecca Williams (rebecca.williams@southwales.ac.uk). Formal proposals (under 300 words) and short bio should be emailed to Rebecca Williams by 3 May 2021. 

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

June 9, 2020 by

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

 

 

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

June 9, 2020 by

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).

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CFP: Transformative Works & Cultures special issue on Fandom Histories

June 9, 2020 by

Fandom Histories

https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/89

Fans demonstrate a broad interest in the past, both of their objects of fandom and their own communities. They collect, catalog, preserve, restore, and publicly display historical artifacts and information in their own archives and museums. They study archival materials and collections, interview witnesses, and read historical scholarship, developing historical narratives and theses. Their research materializes in the form of analog and digital nonfiction media such as print and online publications, documentaries, podcasts, video tutorials, and pedagogical initiatives. Through their work, fans historicize their own fandom and tie it into broader historical questions, connecting to issues like heritage, gender, and the nation. While some fans do this as community historians, focused on small and self-financed groups, others work within large and well-known cultural organizations and businesses, bringing this work into the mainstream.

The goal for this special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures is to explore the question of how fans produce knowledge about the past and actively engage with history. We are particularly interested in essays that show what fans do as historians, such as running publicly accessible archives and museums, and using archival materials for the production of nonfiction media. We want to shift direction from the question of why and how fans are collecting to analyses of why, how, and with what impact fans are creating and disseminating knowledge about the past. Such contributions will further our understanding of how central engagements with the past are to individual and collective fan identities, and how fandom connects to historical debates.

We encourage contributions covering all geographies and forms of fandom, including film, television, music, games, sport, fashion, celebrity culture, themed environments, theatre, dance, and opera. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Theorizing fans as historians.
Fan-produced nonfiction media about the past.
Use of archival and historical materials in fan works.
Fan-run archives and museums.
Memorialization of fandom.
Transmedial practices in fan-made histories.
Fan-made histories as fan pedagogy.
History making and inclusion/exclusion in fandom.
Fans as historians and the media and/or heritage industries.

Submission guidelines
Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) is an international peer-reviewed online Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works copyrighted under a Creative Commons License. TWC aims to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community. TWC accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing.

Theory: Conceptual essays. Peer review, 6,000–8,000 words.
Praxis: Case study essays. Peer review, 5,000–7,000 words.
Symposium: Short commentary. Editorial review, 1,500–2,500 words.

Please visit TWC’s website (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines, or email the TWC Editor (editor [AT] transformativeworks.org).

Contact—Contact guest editors Philipp Dominik Keidl and Abby Waysdorf with any questions or inquiries at fansmakehistory [AT] gmail.com.

Due date—January 1, 2021, for estimated March 15, 2022 publication.

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FanLIS: Building Bridges Symposium (London, UK, 9 April 2020) – registration now open

March 6, 2020 by

Regitstration is now open for FanLIS: Building Bridges.  A one day, interdisciplinary symposium exploring the intersections between between fandom, fan studies and library and information science.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fanlis-building-bridges-symposium-registration-93408526417

About this Event
Building Bridges: exploring interdisciplinary intersections between fandom, fan studies, and library and information science.
Interdisciplinary Symposium: 9th April 2020 hosted by CityLIS, at City, University of London

Organisers: Ludi Price & Lyn Robinson

Event Image Artist: Ludi Price

Programme: https://blogs.city.ac.uk/fanlis/fanlis-symposia/fanlis-2020/fanlis-2020-programme/

Website: https://blogs.city.ac.uk/fanlis/

Twitter: #FanLIS @CityLIS #CityLIS

Our first FanLIS symposium will take place on 9th April 2020, at City, University of London.

The theme of the event is “Building Bridges: exploring interdisciplinary intersections between between fandom, fan studies, and library and information science.”

We invite all who have an interest in the ways in which fandom, fan studies, and library & information science overlap. Examples include the ways in which fans create, organise, disseminate, classify and preserve fanworks; the publishing of fanfiction as mainstream literature; fans as citizen journalists; or the beta-reader as editor. This symposium will contribute to the nascent interdisciplinary dialogue, by bringing together scholars from fan studies, LIS and beyond, to find commonalities, inspire new conversations, reveal hidden and unexpected intersections, and suggest new methodological approaches that will enrich the current discourse of fandom and fan practice.

As part of its research strategy, the Department of Library & Information Science, CityLIS, at City, University of London, explores the liminal areas between disciplines, seeking out new domain approaches, innovative practice, and the as yet undiscovered ways in which the processes of the information communication chain can be further refined and understood.

Recently the fan studies community has become interested in building bridges between different cultures and disciplines, with Dr.Naomi Jones, during the Fan Studies Network Conference 2018, emphasising the importance of interdisciplinarity in moving the field forward. This challenge was taken up by Kelley, Price, Schuster and Wang in the Fan Studies Network Conference of 2019, where they presented their interdisciplinary, collaborative project on fandom, which started in the Spring of 2018. This collaboration brought together scholars from the fields of cultural studies, the digital humanities, and library and information science to talk about fandom and fan practice, and has allowed a wider exchange of ideas between disciplines.

In common with fan studies, library and information science has a keen interest in the utility of their research outside the field, and in understanding to what extent it effects an impact outside its own disciplinary boundaries. For example, while library and information science (LIS) has a rich history of user studies, its impact outside of the field is less clear, despite multidisciplinary studies being shown to have more impact (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015). Thus, it would seem that this is the perfect opportunity to bring members of these two disciplines – fan studies and LIS – together, in order to move the concept of ‘interdisciplinarity’ away from just a subject of conversation, towards something real and tangible.

Fan practice shows many parallels with the interests of information professionals, such as librarians, archivists and curators. Fans are ardent collectors (Geraghty, 2014); they take pride in the classification of their work; they develop best practice in the preservation of fanworks (Swalwell et al., 2017); and as some of the first adopters of the internet (Jenkins, 2006), they are comfortable using technological innovations which many information professionals have yet to embrace. Other fan activities with which LIS has overlapping engagement are the publishing of fanfiction as mainstream literature (Peckosie & Hill, 2015), classification of fanfiction, such as on the Archive of Our Own (Price, 2019), and copyright, to name but a few. Rarely, however, does LIS literature acknowledge the relevance of work carried out in the fan studies discipline, e.g. Versaphile’s (2011) look at the preservation of fannish history and Johnson’s (2014) look at fanfiction metadata. Likewise, there is little evidence that fan studies authors are aware of the rich troves of relevant work carried out within the LIS discipline. This creates a significant lacuna in knowledge, which could be assuaged by a less siloed approach to research conversations.

The CityLIS FanStudies Project pulls together previous work we have undertaken along the boundary of fanstudies and LIS, and hopes to create a framework for future collaboration and research.

See our call for papers; now closed.

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