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CFP: Girl Audiences in the ‘Girlscape’

May 10, 2024

Michele Paule (Oxford Brookes) and Sarah Godfrey (UEA) are excited to announce this call for papers for a themed edition of the Participations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 

CFP: Girl Audiences in the ‘Girlscape’

The term ‘girlscape’ was coined by Tomiko Yoda to describe a ‘mediatic milieu, disseminated via a variety of media channels, linking feminine bodies, affects, objects, and environment’ in which the identificatory figure of the girl is placed ‘at the centre of a consumer culture conceived of as both utopian and egalitarian’ (2017, 173). Yoda develops the theory in terms of Japanese tourism campaigns drawing on wider cultural discourses that position girls as enjoying new freedoms and influence in post-70s Japan. We borrow the term and extend it to consider ways in which girls are increasingly positioned as consuming, agentic, highly visible subjects within contemporary media, and also as ideal prod-users whose online practices sustain platform activity and enjoin the consumption of others. The ‘girlscape’, while encompassing global media elements, will manifest differently in and across different local and national contexts.

If, as Michelle Santiago Cortes (2020) claims, ‘teenage girls rule the internet right now’ they must also navigate the complex conditions and restrictions of this new visibility (Banet-Weiser 2018). Girls’ participatory audience practices draw attention to ways in which algorithmic measures are serving up ever-more tailored and intimate menus for their consumption, while their own activities are consciously shaped through the ‘datafication of affect’ as they work to accrue followers (Bishop 2019; Zhao 2021). The prod-usage of girl audiences and fans enriches the transmedia landscape as they appropriate and remix content that may resist, negotiate with or entirely reproduce hegemonic girlhoods (Hall 1973). At the same time as girl fans’ labour is increasingly important to media platform activity and profitability in economies of attention, girls’ activities as fans and online participants continue to attract derision and hostility (Wilson 2018). The ‘girlscape’, of course, is not limited to digital realms; legacy media including film, young adult (YA) fiction, television, music, and merchandising ‘paratexts’ exist and combine as a part of the proliferation of popular girl-focused media. 

The consumer address to girls of ‘can-do’ Western media feminisms, and the datafication of girl audience economies have been extensively critiqued for their reproduction of middle-class, white, figures and their relegation, exoticisation or elision of non-normative girlhoods. While some corporations have mobilised feminist and inclusive politics in featuring, for example, Black girls, Islamic girls, queer girls and disabled girls in their media output, such ‘naive integration’ (Heiss 2020) has been critiqued for its commodification of feminist politics, its ultimate reinscription of normate bodies, and its reproduction of cultural focus on girls’ appearance. Minoritised girls nonetheless shape their own visibility via alternative media practices such as traditional ‘zines (Reynolds 2020), Twitter signifyin’ (Florini 2014) and counter-narrative podcasts (Greene 2021). This complex and rapidly mutating milieu begs for more empirical research into how girl audiences/readers/users are engaging with the contemporary ‘girlscape’. We therefore invite papers based on original research into any aspect of girl audiences. The following themes are suggestions, but are not restrictive:

  • Girl audiences of specific texts in defined ‘girlscapes’
  • Integrated approaches analysing texts and their production alongside their reception by girls
  • Methodologies for researching girls’ engagements with/in the ‘girlscape’
  • Girls’ participatory media practices/prod-usage
  • The political economies of audiences in the ‘girlscape’
  • The emotional and digital labour of girls/ girl fans online
  • Girls subverting/queering/evading the ‘girlscape’
  • Global/national/local ‘girlscapes’ and their audiences
  • Transmedia engagements in the ‘girlscape’
  • Girls’ engagements with popular feminisms in the ‘girlscape’
  • Girls’ navigation of streaming platforms
  • Girl prod-users on algorithms/ privacy
  • Girls as content creators imagining audiences

Submission Guidelines:

Authors interested in contributing to this special edition are invited to submit original research articles on the Section’s theme. We are happy to receive a range of contributions including creative responses to the theme, although we give priority to essays on actual audience and reception research. We welcome:

  • Empirical audience/reception studies 
  • Essays investigating industry practices/political economies 
  • State-of-the field reviews
  • Reviews of key books/essays
  • Interviews
  • Translations

Manuscripts should adhere to Participations submission guidelines. All submissions will undergo peer-review to ensure academic rigour and relevance. Please note we will adopt Participations’ model of cross-reviewing by others contributing to the Themed Section, and their principle of Open Refereeing, under which the names of authors and referees are known to each other.

Timeline

  • Submission of proposals/abstracts: 1st June 2024
  • Submission of drafts: 1st October 2024 (3 months)
  • Peer Review feedback: 1st December 2024 (2 months)
  • Revised Submissions: 1st February (2 months)
  • From Revised Submissions to confirmation and submission to journal: 1st April (2 months)
  • Publication: May 2025

References

Banet-Weiser, S. 2018. Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny. Duke University Press.

Bishop, S. 2019. Managing visibility on YouTube through algorithmic gossip. New Media and Society, 21 (1112), 2589-2606.

Cortés, Michelle Santiago. 2020. Charli D’Amelio now has more followers than anyone on TikTok. Refinery 29, 27 March. Available at: https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2020/03/9615235/charli-damelio-most-followers-on-tiktok

Florini, Sarah. 2014. ‘ Tweets, tweeps, and signifyin’: Communication and cultural performance on “Black Twitter”. ’, Television & New Media, 15:3, pp. 223–37.

Greene, D. T. 2021. (W) rites of passage: Black girls’ journaling and podcast script writing as counternarratives. Voices from the Middle, 28(4), 38-42.

Hall, Stuart. 1973. Encoding/decoding. In (eds) S. Hall, S., D. Hobson, D., A. Lowe and P. Willis, 2003. Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972-79. Routledge Hall,,pp. 128-138.

Heiss, S., 2011. Locating the bodies of women and disability in definitions of beauty: An analysis of Dove’s campaign for real beauty. Disability Studies Quarterly, 31(1).

Jackson, S., 2021. “A very basic view of feminism”: feminist girls and meanings of (celebrity) feminism. Feminist Media Studies, 21(7), pp.1072-1090.

Reynolds, C., 2020. “My zines, so far, aren’t as political as other works I’ve produced”: Communicative Capitalism Among Queer Feminist Zinesters. Communication, Culture & Critique, 13(1), pp.92-110.

Subramanian, S., 2021. Bahujan girls’ anti-caste activism on TikTok. Feminist Media Studies, 21(1), pp.154-156.

Taylor, Anthea. 2016. Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster. UK: Palgrave MacMillan

Yoda, Tomiko .2017. GIRLSCAPE: The Marketing of Mediatic Ambience in Japan. In M. Steinberg & A. Zahlten (Ed.), Media Theory in Japan (pp. 173-199). New York, USA: Duke University Press.

Wilson, K., 2018. Red pillers, sad puppies, and gamergaters: The state of male privilege in internet fan communities. A companion to media fandom and fan studies, pp.431-445.

Woods, Rachel, and Benjamin Litherland. 2018. “Critical Feminist Hope: The Encounter Of Neoliberalism and Popular Feminism In Wwe 24: Womens Evolution.” Feminist Media Studies 18 (5): 905–922.

Zhao, E. J. 2021. Reconfiguring audience measurement in platform ecologies of video streaming: iQIYI’s pivot toward data-driven fandom and algorithmic metrics. International Journal of Communication, 15, 21.

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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

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CFP: From Robson Green to Sean Bean: Mapping Northern Stardom on Popular British Television

September 10, 2014

Special dossier for the Journal of Popular Television

Edited by Beth Johnson (Keele University) and David Forrest (University of Sheffield)

We invite contributions that explore the stars of the North of England on contemporary British television. Considering and examining the intersections between stardom, Northern places, spaces and identities, the purpose of this dossier is to argue for the existence of a Northern consciousness on television that is characterized through the figure of the Northern star. In particular, this dossier is to explore how the public and private personas of Northern stars are frequently merged when such performers enact or perform Northern characters. Accordingly, we would like to receive proposals for full length articles/case-studies of specific Northern television stars. In particular, we encourage proposals (though proposers are not limited to these) on the following:
         
Robson Green         
Sean Bean       
John Simm          
Sue Johnston          
Ricky Tomlinson          
Caroline Aherne         
Karl Pilkington        
Sarah Lancashire         
Chris Bisson          
Lesley Sharpe       
Maxine Peake         
Ant and Dec         
Christopher Eccleston          
Gina Mckee

Please submit an extended abstract of 500 words to b.l.johnson@keele.ac.uk and d.forrest@sheffield.ac.uk (entitled Northern Stardom), by 30th September 2014. Please also include a brief biographical note.  

We plan to complete evaluation of abstracts by the end of October.  Those accepted will be asked to submit completed article, to a maximum of 8,000 words, by the end of March 2015. Articles will then be submitted for peer review.

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CFP: Media, Fans, and The Sacred: Neoreligiosity Seeks Institution‏

June 7, 2012

The deadline for submissions for this issue is August 1st, 2012

Kinephanos’ fourth issue aims to explore the relationship between the sacred, the mythological motifs in modern popular fictions, and fandom. Our goal is to understand how the sacred, a pure human emotion, is disembodied from the ‘official’ religious institutions – at least in the Western countries – in order to be reinvested in secular cultural activities like ‘going to see a movie’ or ‘playing a video game’. Eliade wrote: “Movies, a ‘factory of dreams’, are highly inspired by countless mythological motifs, such as the struggle between the Hero and the Monster, battles and initiation ordeals, figures and exemplary patterns” (freely translated from *Le sacré et le profane*, 174). These mythological stories, highly symbolics, exist since ancient times. However, we would like to address the following issue: how the immersive experience in a work of fiction, now facilitated with various technological media forms (movies, videogames, television shows, etc.), changes our own relationship with the emotion of the sacred sparked in people’s life. We propose to identify this emotion with the term “neoreligiosity”. An English scholar of fan culture, Matt Hills, says in this regard: “Neoreligiosity implies that the proliferation of discourses of ‘cult’ within media fandom cannot be read as the ‘return’ of religion in a supposedly secularised culture” (*Fan Culture*, 2002, 119). Indeed, putting side by side the experience of the fan with the religious experience might seem appropriate. Due to a lack of words, needed by fans to describe their own affective experience with their favourite movies, the use of religious terminology seems logical, without calling upon religious institutions structure. Hills quotes Cavicchi: “(…) fans are aware of the parallels between religious devotion and their own devotion. At the very least, the discourse of religious conversion may provide fans with a model for describing the experience of becoming a fan” (2002, 118). This issue of Kinephanos proposes to explore how the sacred, the religiosity, and the neoreligiosity play out in modern popular fictions, and with those who experience it: the fans.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to;

– Sacred and reappropriation (fans creations : fanfics, fanfilms, etc.);
– Social network, sharing interests through Internet;
– Reception, modern and contemporary myths (Star Wars, Matrix, Lord of
the Rings, etc.);
– Cinema and religion, displacement of the sacred;
– Videogames, replayability as a tool of self-exploration (Mass Effect,
Heavy Rain, morality system, etc.);
– Revelation, epiphany, and the fan’s experience;
– Cinema and videogames, mythological motifs between the lines;
vestiges of the sacred;
– Repetition viewing as a ritual, ‘cult fandoms’ and television shows
(Star Trek, Doctor Who, etc.);
– Archetypal figures in the modern mythologies (Order and Chaos,
Lovecrafts’s Great Old Ones, the hero’s journey (monomyth) in Hollywood
movies, etc.).

While Kinephanos privileges publication of thematic issues, we strongly encourage writers to submit articles exceeding the theme which will be
published in each issue.

How to submit?

Abstracts of 1000 words including the title, the topic and the object(s) that will be studied. Please include bibliographical references, your name, email address and your primary field of study.

Send submissions (in French or English) by August 1st, 2012 to: mmarc.joly@umontreal.caail and vincent.mauger@arv.ulaval.ca

Following our approbation sent to you by email (2-3 weeks later after deadline), please send us your completed article by December 1st, 2012.

Editorial rules

Kinephanos is a peer-reviewed Web journal. Each article is evaluated by double-blind peer review. Kinephanos does not retain exclusive rights of published texts. However, material submitted must not have been previously published elsewhere. Future versions of the texts published in other periodicals must reference Kinephanos as its original source.

Production demands

All texts must be written in MLA style. 6,000 words maximum (excluding references but including endnotes) with 1.5 spacing, Times New Roman fonts 12pt, footnotes must be inserted manually in the text as follow : … (1), references must be within the text as follow (Jenkins 2000, 134), a bibliography with all your references, and 5 keywords at the end of the text.
For the editorial guidelines, refer to the section Editorial Guidelines http://www.kinephanos.ca/politique-editoriale/

Kinephanos accepts articles in French and in English

Kinephanos is a bilingual web-based journal. Focusing on questions involving cinema and popular media, Kinephanos encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The journal’s primary interests are movies and popular TV series, video games, emerging technologies and fan cultures. The preferred approaches include cinema studies, communication theories, religion sciences, philosophy, cultural studies and media studies.

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New issue of Transformative Works and Cultures

March 15, 2012

The new issue of TWC, Fan/Remix Video, is now available to view online. You can find it here: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/issue/current

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Digital Icons: Digital Fandom and Media Convergence

March 9, 2012

Special Issue

Issue editors: Natalia Sokolova (Samara University) and Sudha Rajagopalan (Utrecht University)
Deadline for submission: 1 August 2012

While the history of fandom is long and storied, never before have fans (of television, cinema, games, sport or celebrities) operated in such a hypermediated environment as exists in the contemporary world. Just as cultural texts use multiple medial platforms, so too do their fans have access to and utilise this multiplicity of platforms to reify and display their commitment to the objects of their fandoms. As scholars, it is crucial to analyze digital fandom in order to understand the various processes in modern culture and the new media sphere, by virtue of fans’ active attitude to mass media, their practice of community formation and their engagement in the media industry. It is a truism, but it pays to reiterate that in this age of digital fandoms, the distinction between producers and consumers is no longer sacrosanct. Fans not only participate in debates about the media text(s) that are the objects of their fandom, but they also create cultural texts of their own—particularly, videos, fiction, games—that further the original text either by corresponding to it or deviating from it in imaginative ways.

In the years since Henry Jenkins pioneered the study of fandom, Anglo-American approaches to researching fandom have moved from a celebratory, romanticizing pitch to more measured analyses that examine the inherent tensions, particularly the politics and hierarchies, of fan communities. While these studies have investigated various aspects of (mostly) American fan cultures, this special issue of Digital Icons seeks to give fandom research in the region of Russia, Eurasia and Central Europe, a young and growing field, fresh impetus. This special issue on fandom in a new media environment invites not only textual analyses of fan production in the region, but encourages an examination of the digital affordances that engender fan practices. Further, the issue intends to address the local and transnational contexts of media production and economy in which these digital fandoms thrive.

With this in view, several questions will serve to underpin this issue: are fandoms in the region the rich participatory and democratising world of Jenkins’ vision? In what ways does fan production – art, remix videos, fiction, games – augment, reinforce or radically alter the products of media industry? To what degree are digital fandoms rooted in regional cultural traditions – can we speak of ‘global’ fandoms and if so, what does such a distinction imply? In what ways and to what extent is media convergence in the region a reality? What is the impact of fan practices on media convergence, including convergence of media platforms, convergence of consumption and production, as well as global media convergence and various transmedial phenomena? How does the media economy affect fan engagement? How do digital fandoms affect the parameters and substance of stardom and celebrity? What does digitalfandom tell us about the relationship between online and offline worlds? How do fans/audiences act as publics if/when traditional public spheres appear unstable, particularly in post-communist states? How do fans engage with history and build upon cultural memory? What impact do social media have on fans` interaction and communication? What kind of new perspectives and approaches can the researcher utilise to study digital fandom in the region? These are just some of the important inter-disciplinary questions that can serve to guide submissions.

We invite contributors from a wide range of disciplines to submit research articles and interviews, and reviews of relevant books, events, courses, platforms and projects. We also invite fans in the region to contribute meta-fandom texts, which are submissions that involve introspective, self-reflexive observations on being a fan in the region in the age of digital media.

To find out more about Digital Icons’ editorial practice and submission guidelines, visit our Information for Authors page

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Networking Knowledge: American Telefantasy

March 3, 2012

Television schedules are currently rife with Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror programmes. Whereas the re-launched Doctor Who continues to lead the charge of contemporary British telefantasy (Merlin, Being Human, Misfits et al), US shows attract large audiences, extensive media coverage and – since Peter Dinklage’s Emmy win for Game of Thrones – mainstream awards.

Established programmes such as True Blood, Fringe and Sanctuary offer a continued presence on primetime schedules; while cable shows such as The Walking Dead and Falling Skies have had demonstrable ratings success. However, is the demise of previously dominant franchises such as Star Trek, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica representative of an uncertain future? Or will the genre continue to thrive thanks to high-profile newcomers with celebrity showrunners like JJ Abrams’ Alcatraz, Steven Spielberg’s Terra Nova and Kevin Williamson’s The Secret Circle?

The prevalence of contemporary anxieties centred upon (and within) television Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror appear to indicate an opportune time to consider how US telefantasy might be understood, examined and contextualised.
Papers of between 6,000 and 8,000 words are invited from postgraduate students and early career researchers across the humanities and social sciences for this special edition of Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

Historical case studies
Franchises and/or Authorship
The role of technology in science fiction television
Representing (in)human subjectivities and/or identities
The aesthetics of Fantasy television
Constructions of utopia/dystopia
Genre and/or narrative theory
Marketing television Horror
Performance and/or Stardom
Issues of reception
Telefantasy and realism

Proposals of approx. 250 words should be directed to the issue’s guest editors Rhys Thomas at rothomas@gmail.com or Sophie Halliday at smhalliday@gmail.com by 6th April 2012. If accepted, completed articles need to be submitted by 1st June 2012. For any further information, please contact Rhys, Sophie or NK general editor Tom Phillips at knowledge.networking257@gmail.com.

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Participations: Exploring the methodological synergies of multimethod audience research

March 3, 2012

Guest editors: Kim Christian Schrøder, Uwe Hasebrink, Sascha Hölig and Martin Barker

Special issue concept

The Special Issue aims to develop a candid and constructive dialogue between different scholarly approaches to the exploration of audience practices. We seek contributions which reflect on and implement multi-method approaches to all aspects and dimensions of the practices and sense-making activities of media audiences and users. One particular area of interest is the exploration of cross-media audiences with mixed methods, but the Special Issue is open to other kinds of audience research which have adopted a multi-method approach.

The purpose of the Special Issue is thus to demonstrate and discuss how precisely dialogues between research paradigms within audience research may contribute to enhance the explanatory power of theory-driven fieldwork studies of contemporary media audiences. It will bring together representatives from different research paradigms (such as behavioural, cognitive and sense-making approaches), in order to explore the complementarity and synergies of the different methodological paths taken.

Although multimethod audience research is not a new phenomenon, we believe that with the emergence of the ‘mediatized’ society characterized by media digitization and convergence, the need to cross-fertilize scholarly paradigms has acquired a new urgency. In the Special Issue we wish to address this urgency by inviting articles which combine a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, and which do so by combining practical analysis and solid empirical experiences with epistemological, theoretical, and methodological reflection.

Rooted in different research traditions – from a more behavioural ‘media choice’ perspective to a more sense-making ‘mediatized worlds’ perspective – the contributors to this Special Issue will in a manner of speaking compare notes, based on their different disciplinary frameworks, their different but overlapping foci (or knowledge interests), the scope of their empirical work on different kinds of audience practice, their objectives, and their preferred methodologies. Conceivably, the dialogue thus opened up could develop into an ongoing debate in this and other journals, and perhaps to cross-approach collaboration.

 

Submission and selection process

Contributors are invited to submit long abstracts (600-800 words), in which they carefully describe a (completed or close to completion) audience research project which has explored in a methodologically reflective way the benefits of using a multi-method approach to cross-media audience practices or other aspects of the experience and/or use of print, broadcasting and digital media.

We recognise the complexity of arguments in this domain.  For this reason, we plan to take advantage of Participations’ status as an online Journal, which permits both greater length of submissions (working to a proposed limit of 12,000 words), and no fixed limit on numbers of submissions we will be able to accept.

Deadline for submission of long abstracts: 15 December 2011.

Selection of contributors to write a full-length draft article for peer review: 15 January 2012.

Deadline for submission of full-length draft articles for peer review: 15 June 2012

Participations has long followed a practice of open refereeing.  Adopting this for this Special Issue, we propose that submissions will be cross-evaluated among those who will be contributing, to a shared set of criteria developed for this purpose.

 

Contact information

Please send your proposal by email to the guest editors:

Kim Christian Schrøder, kimsc@ruc.dk

Uwe Hasebrink, U.Hasebrink@hans-bredow-institut.de

Sascha Hölig, sascha.hoelig@uni-hamburg.de

Martin Barker, mib@aber.ac.uk

Submissions (as Word attachments) should contain, in addition to a separate abstract, a page with the title of the presentation, the name of the Special Issue, and the name(s) and contact details for ALL authors.

For submission guidelines and rules for article manuscripts, please visit:

http://www.participations.org/submission_guidelines.htm

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TWC: Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books (March 2013)

March 3, 2012

Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books (March 2013)

Edited by Matthew Costello

Special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (http://journal.transformativeworks.org)

Manuscripts due April 1, 2012

Action Comics #900 included a short story in which Superman, confronted by the US State Department for causing an international incident by supporting Iranian prodemocracy protestors, decides to renounce his US citizenship to become a citizen of the world. This brief story was reported by most major news services and garnered much attention. This was far from the first time that comic book characters addressed and engaged with major social or political topics. The late Republican Senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, used to wear an Incredible Hulk tie for votes he considered important. Various groups use comic books to help define themselves, whether it be fans of the Hernandez brothers creating and sharing their own Love and Rockets artwork, LGBT groups offering queer readings of Green Lantern, or Sacramento manga fans organizing events, including a cosplay contest, to raise money for Japan.

As these examples suggest, people appropriate, reinvent, and transform comic books to create visions of themselves, their groups, and their relation to broader society, both national and global. This is neither a recent nor a national phenomenon. Comic books have always been appropriated by their audience, from Captain America’s Sentinels of Liberty in World War II to Ted Stevens’s Hulk tie. Comic fandom in the United States and readers of manga in Japan have been actively organized since the 1960s. More recently, the Internet has allowed the wide dissemination of comic book cultures, connecting fans more closely to each other and to comics’ creators, both nationally and internationally.

This special issue seeks theoretically informed essays that explore how dedicated fans as well as the broader public have appropriated, interpreted, and transformed comic books and comic book characters to define themselves and their societies.

We welcome submissions dealing with, but not limited to, the following topics:

* Case studies of how particular characters or books have been used by their reading communities to engage in civic action.

* Discussion of transformative works, such as fan fiction, fan art, and fan vids.

* Transformations across national borders through the globalized comic market.

* Analyses of how fans affect characters and books through commentary and migration into the professional ranks.

* Analyses of how various groups use comic book characters to define their relation to society in fan fiction and other activities.

* Examinations of commentaries on political or social issues relating to characters in letter pages and Internet forums.

* The development of comic shop infrastructure and its interrelation with comic fan communities.

* Popular reactions to events in comic books, such as the death of Captain America or Superman’s decision to renounce his American citizenship.

* Interviews with comic creators and/or fans focusing on creator/fan interactions.

Submission guidelines

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. Contributors are encouraged to include embedded links, images, and videos in their articles or to propose submissions in alternative formats that might comprise interviews, collaborations, or video/multimedia works. We are also seeking reviews of relevant books, events, courses, platforms, or projects.

Theory: Often interdisciplinary essays with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offer expansive interventions in the field. Blinded peer review. Length: 5,000–8,000 words plus a 100–250-word abstract.

Praxis: Analyses of particular cases that may apply a specific theory or framework to an artifact; explicate fan practice or formations; or perform a detailed reading of a text. Blinded peer review. Length: 4,000–7,000 words plus a 100–250-word abstract.

Symposium: Short pieces that provide insight into current developments and debates. Nonblinded editorial review. Length: 1,500–2,500 words.

Submissions are accepted online only. Please visit TWC’s Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines, or e-mail the TWC Editor (editor AT transformativeworks.org).

Contact

We encourage potential contributors to contact the guest editor with inquiries or proposals: Matthew Costello (costello AT sxu.edu)

Due dates
Contributions for blinded peer review (Theory and Praxis essays) are due by April 1, 2012. Contributions that undergo editorial review (Symposium, Interview, Review) are due by May 1, 2012.

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TWC: Fandom and/as Labor (March 2014)

March 3, 2012

Edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

It has long been recognized both within academia and in the various communities organized around fandom that the practice of being a fan does not merely consist of passive consumption. Rather, fans are also productive: they generate interpretations of their favorite television shows, extratextual products like fan fiction and fan videos, and data about their own consumption habits and those of their peers that will be used to market new products. Whether labors of love or value extracted from unaware fans, this productivity is rarely conceptualized as labor.

Given recent events like the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests, however, broader questions of labor and fair compensation have been reinvigorated, such that taking these productive fan activities seriously as labor seems to be particularly vital in the current moment.

In this special issue on Fandom and/as Labor, we invite contributions that ask after how labor relates to fandom, how labor happens in fandom, and what happens when we reconceptualize fandom as labor.

We welcome submissions dealing with, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Case studies of how fans negotiate/conceptualize the labors that they perform.
  • Analyses of the ways in which popular texts present/narrate the labor involved in participating in fandom.
  • Examinations of how fan labor is gendered, raced, classed, and/or related to sexuality, ability, and nation.
  • Analysis of the monetization of existing fan labor and/or the production of profitable new types of fan labor.
  • Theoretical or experiential accounts of the tension between freely given fan labor or the fan gift economy and exploitation through the extraction of surplus value.

Submission guidelines

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. Contributors are encouraged to include embedded links, images, and videos in their articles or to propose submissions in alternative formats that might comprise interviews, collaborations, or video/multimedia works. We are also seeking reviews of relevant books, events, courses, platforms, or projects.

Theory: Often interdisciplinary essays with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offer expansive interventions in the field. Blinded peer review. Length: 5,000–8,000 words plus a 100–250-word abstract.

Praxis: Analyses of particular cases that may apply a specific theory or framework to an artifact; explicate fan practice or formations; or perform a detailed reading of a text. Blinded peer review. Length: 4,000–7,000 words plus a 100–250-word abstract.

Symposium: Short pieces that provide insight into current developments and debates. Nonblinded editorial review. Length: 1,500–2,500 words.

Submissions are accepted online only. Please visit TWC’s Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines, or e-mail the TWC Editor (editor AT transformativeworks.org).

Contact

We encourage potential contributors to contact the guest editors with inquiries or proposals: Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis (fandom.labor AT gmail.com)

Due dates

Contributions for blinded peer review (Theory and Praxis essays) are due by March 1, 2013.

Contributions that undergo editorial review (Symposium, Interview, Review) are due by April 1, 2013.

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