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

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Race and Ethnicity in Fandom - Transformative Works and Cultures' Call For Papers

FSFF ♥ Nyota Uhura, (Nyota meaning 'Star' & Uhura meaning 'Freedom') originally played by Nichelle Nichols, is a character in Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series, the first six Star Trek films, and the 2009 film Star Trek.

Film Studies For Free likes to circulate calls for papers for online, Open Access, film and media studies related journals. So, here's a very worthwhile CFP for the very wonderful e-journal Transformative Works and Cultures. All relevant details are given below.

By the way, while putting together this post, FSFF came across another great, related, website: Fandom Research - very much worth exploring.

Race and Ethnicity in Fandom

Transformative Works and Cultures, an online-only, peer-reviewed journal focusing on media and fan studies, broadly conceived, invites contributions for a special issue on race and ethnicity to be published in summer 2011. Academic scholarship on fan cultures and fan productions over the past few decades has focused primarily on gender as the sole category of analysis. There has been little published scholarship on fan cultures and productions that incorporates critical race theory or draws on the rich array of methodologies that have been developed during the past century in both activist and academic communities in order to incorporate analysis of the social constructions of race and ethnicities in fandoms.

In contrast, fan activism and fan scholarship (at cons, workshops, and on the Internet) has produced a growing body of work (personal narratives, essays, carnivals, and in recent months, a press) focusing on not only analyzing but also confronting hierarchies of race and ethnicity and their relationship to gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Submissions by academics, acafans, fan scholars, and fans are encouraged. In all categories, people of color are especially encouraged to submit.

The deadline for completed submissions is October 1, 2010.

The editors would like to encourage pre-proposal abstracts and drafts for early feedback by March 1, 2010.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

Online activism and the circulation of critical race theory and women of color feminisms in fan communities, in particular the relationship between fan online discourse and other online activist communities.

Critical analysis of the instantiation and critique of racial hierarchies in fan communities and the surrounding cultural productions.

Racist and antiracist issues in commercial transformative works (comics, film, mashups, remixes, machinima, etc.), especially recuperative race readings (e.g., Randall's The Wind Done Gone, Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea).

Race concerns in source texts (characters of color and their fannish reception, fandoms for work by authors of color, writing fannish original characters, etc.) and fannish responses (such as the Carl Brandon Society, Verb Noire, and other panfannish and professional projects).

Intersection of race and ethnicity with gender, sexuality, class, and ability in fannish contexts in fan works and fan communities (pre-Internet, Internet, conventions, vids, fan fiction, artwork, etc.).

Complete information available in PDF form here:

US letter paper:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-race-cfp-2009-04-30-us.p
df

A4 paper:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-race-cfp-2009-04-30-a4.p
df

The announcement on TWC's site is here:

http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/9

More about → Race and Ethnicity in Fandom - Transformative Works and Cultures' Call For Papers