Fan studies: Grappling with an ‘Undisciplined’ discipline

Abstract

As part of the Journal of Fandom Studies exploration of the field more than 20 years after the publication of Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (which has been widely cited as one of the first major works paving the way for this area of study), this piece looks back at Textual Poachers’ approach to studying fandom, examines the dialogue that has taken place within fan studies over the past six years, and raises areas of consideration for fan studies to consider in the years ahead. In particular, the piece advocates for the need to continue to evolve the types of fandoms explored by fan studies scholars; to challenge ourselves to examine the field’s tendency to prioritize some forms of active audience engagement over others based on the media format or level of technical mastery the audience uses or the type of media text on which the engagement is focused; and to further explore what more widespread interest in, acceptance of, and adoption of the model of engagement from fandom means for our field.

Opeth not metal: making sense of the symbolic boundary work in the leisure spaces of musicians and fans

“…Fan studies theorists argue that being an active fan means shaping one's identity and exercising one's power in a transmedia culture, underpinned by a postmodern world (Bennett 2014;Ford 2014;Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 2017). That is, fans are not passive consumes of popular culture, as Adorno would have it, nor are they merely recipients of mass culture fed to them by Gramsci's hegemonic sleight-of-hand (Altheide 1994;Gramsci 1971).…”

The A-Z of Creative Technologies

“…Undisciplinarity has been associated with a number of fields that share characteristics with Creative Technologies, namely a set of activities that are not a discipline. Such fields include urban planning [63], fan studies [64] and marine conversation [65] to name but a few. Nearly all fields that are described as an "undisciplined discipline" typically exhibit five characteristics of issue-driven interdisciplinarity: being problem-based, integration, interactivity and emergence, reflexivity, and strong forms of collaboration and partnership [66].…”

The moral economy of crowdfunding and the transformative capacity of fan-ancing

“…Jason Mittell (2013) notes that, when fans donate to these campaigns, they’re inevitably “entering into a commercially facilitated, serialized one-way relationship with a mass media text and its production crew—which is a pretty good definition of fandom in general.” I would contend it is a pretty good definition of the media industry’s limited understanding of fan engagement, which is decidedly one-way, rather than dialogic, more affirmational than transformative, and compliments rather than challenges pre-existing power dynamic between media creators and consumers. The demarcation between affirmational and transformative modes of fan engagement, originally outlined in a 2009 blog post by fan obsession_inc, has since been widely adopted by fan scholars (Busse, 2013; Ford, 2014; Pearson, 2012; Scott, 2013a; Tosenberger, 2014) to consider which forms of fan engagement are “sanctioned” or “non-sanctioned” by media industries within convergence culture. Obsession_inc (2009) describes “affirmational” fans as overwhelmingly male, and primarily interested in reaffirming the source material, attempting to divine authorial intent, or debating textual elements within the established “rules” of the fictional universe.…”