Up, up, and away! Transformative Works and Fan Activism

May the Fourth Be With You published on May 4, 2012 by thehpalliance.

Read Henry Jenkins' and Ashley Hinck's articles about the Harry Potter Alliance.

Many fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than the more overtly political term activism to describe their pro-social efforts. Our goal is not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices, social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking, mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement. [Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, 'Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism' [1.9], Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)]

Film Studies For Free is a very big fan of the open access journal of Transformative Works and Cultures, so it is delighted that there's a new issue out.

It's a themed collection of studies of transformative works and fan activism, edited by media studies superheroes Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova. Links to abstracts of the articles (and from there to the articles themselves) are given below.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012): Transformative Works and Fan Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, University of Southern California. 

Editorial

• Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova

Theory

• Fandom meets activism: Rethinking civic and political participation  by Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova
• "Cultural acupuncture": Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance by Henry Jenkins
• Experiencing fan activism: Understanding the power of fan activist organizations through members' narratives by Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, Chris Tokuhama
• Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom's integral connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance by Ashley Hinck
• The German federal election of 2009: The challenge of participatory cultures in political campaigns by Andreas Jungherr
• Wonder Woman for a day: Affect, agency, and Amazons by Matt Yockey

Praxis

• Fan activism, cybervigilantism, and Othering mechanisms in K-pop fandom by Sun Jung
• Being of service: "X-Files" fans and social engagement by Bethan Jones
• Fan action and political participation on "The Colbert Report" by Marcus Schulzke
• Even a monkey can understand fan activism: Political speech, artistic expression, and a public of the Japanese dôjin community by Alex Leavitt, Andrea Horbinski
• "Past the brink of tacit support": Fan activism and the Whedonverses by Tanya R. Cochran
• Nerdfighters, "Paper Towns," and heterotopia by Lili Wilkinson
• The absence of fan activism in the queer fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in Hong Kong by Cheuk Yin Li
• Too fat to fly: A case study of unsuccessful fan mobilization by Tom Phillips

Symposium

• Of snowspeeders and Imperial Walkers: Fannish play at the Wisconsin protests by Jonathan Gray
• On the ordinariness of participatory culture by Aswin Punathambekar
• Imagining No-place by Stephen Duncombe
• Fan activism for social mobilization: A critical review of the literature by Lucy Bennett
• Flash activism: How a Bollywood film catalyzed civic justice toward a murder trial by Ritesh Mehta

Review

• "Fan fiction and copyright: Outside works and intellectual property protection," by Aaron Schwabach: Review by Stacey Marie Lantagne

More about → Up, up, and away! Transformative Works and Fan Activism

On fans and fantasy: Matt Hills online

Ana Torrent as Ángela in Tesis (Alejandro Amenábar, Spain, 1996)

While Film Studies For Free was researching material for its last post - In-between-isms: Winnicottian film, media, and cultural studies - in which the work of media theorist Matt Hills figured strongly, it came across quite a few other freely-acessible, scholarly essays by and interviews with Hills, the links to which had not yet been collected in an online webliography.

So, below you can find a follow up links-list that does just that. Hopefully, it will be of use to those of us who appreciate Hills' unusual (these days) combination of film and media studies approaches in his work, which brilliantly draws both on psychoanalytic and sociological theories to explore audience or consumer attachments to popular media.

Online works by

• Matt Hills, ‘Gothic’ Body Parts in a ‘Postmodern’ Body of Work? The Hinchcliffe/Holmes Era of Doctor Who (1975-77)', Intensities Four, December 2007

• Matt Hills, 'Essential Tensions: Winnicottian Object-Relations In The Media Sociology of Roger Silverstone', International Journal of Communication 1 (2007), Feature 37-48

• Matt Hills, Whose "postmodern" horror? Alejandro Amenábar's Tesis (Thesis, 1996)', Kinoeye, Vol 3, Issue 5, 10 May 2003

• Matt Hills, 'Review of Lawrence Grossberg (2005) Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America's Future (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers)', Culture Machine, 2006

• Matt Hills 'Recognition in the eyes of the relevant beholder: Representing ‘subcultural celebrity’ and cult TV fan cultures', Mediactive, Issue 2, 2003 (scroll down to p. 59)

• Matt Hills, 'Review of Horror: Special Issue of Film and Philosophy, Daniel Shaw, ed., (2001)', Aesthetics Online, 2002

Interviews with

• Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, 'Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One):', Confessions of an Aca Fan, August 23, 2007

• Henry Jenkins, 'Triumph of a Time Lord (Part One): An Interview With Matt Hills', Confessions of an Aca Fan, September 28, 2006

• Henry Jenkins, 'Triumph of a Time Lord (Part Two): An Interview With Matt Hills', Confessions of an Aca Fan, September 29, 2006

• Matt Hills, 'Intensities interviews Henry Jenkins @Console-ing Passions, University of Bristol, July 7th, 2001', Intensities Two,

More about → On fans and fantasy: Matt Hills online