Teaching Harry Potter: An Interview with Catherine Belcher and Becky Herr-Stephenson (Part Two))

One of your teachers faced pushed back from students that the Harry Potter series were books for white kids. Perhaps many readers are thinking the same thing. Yet your title stresses their value for the "multicultural classroom." So, what do the books offer for children of color? How does this approach to "multiculturalism" differ from approaches which seek to match students with writers from the same ethnic and racial background?

In the book, we talk about what we mean by "multicultural" education (all the students and teachers in Teaching Harry Potter are of color and therefore bicultural, meaning they negotiate their home and school cultures on a daily basis) and what we believe, and have seen, the Potter books contribute to the educational process within these settings. The first thing we question is the idea that the "whiteness" of the books negates their use in multicultural classrooms. The nature of the books themselves - their complexity and Rowling's willingness to take on difficult and contemporary issues such as racism, genocide, classism, and difference - make them uniquely valuable, and each of the three teachers illustrate this to great effect in their accounts.

We discuss three features that make the Potter books central to the teachers in our book: Harry's status as a "newcomer" to the Wizarding world - to which Sandra's largely immigrant students relate, a normalization of difference - utilized to great effect by Allegra with her special education students, and the opportunity for multiple interpretations of the text - particularly useful for Andrew's students, but employed by all three teachers. Again, teacher capacity and quality are paramount here. We're looking beyond a base reading of the text; the quality of the approach, interaction and reading experience makes all the difference. One can certainly read Harry Potter simply as a book about white kids in an English boarding school. None of the Teaching Harry Potter teachers took that route - which one might call the dark and easy path. Instead, they challenged their students to use Harry Potter to help them tackle difficult social topics and academic exercises, and to do this with the belief that there was definitely something in Harry's story they could use to help them grow as learners and people.

It's also important to note that we firmly believe in access to literature from multiple arenas; classics and books reflecting a diversity of authors, including those matching the students' background, are vitally important for young readers. But access to a particularly valuable popular work like Harry Potter is important because of its accessibility and all it has to offer. On another level, it is also important because so many white, middle to upper middle class kids DO have ample access to Potter and other popular series at home and at school. In many ways, building students' reading confidence, helping them discover that yes, they too can tackle a book of this length or "that style," whether they end up feeling it is ultimately for them or not, is the most valuable accomplishment.

What's striking about the teacher stories running through the book is the degree to which each adopted their instruction to the particular needs of their students, finding the Harry Potter books to be a highly flexible resource in that regard. How does this customization and remixing process differ from the standard ways that schools are thinking about curriculum in this age of No Child Left Behind?

Finding space for customizing/remixing curriculum was one of the biggest challenges the teachers in our book faced. By not following the standardized curriculum, they were doing something subversive--and, as their stories reflect, they often had trouble getting support from administration and colleagues. Despite the challenges they faced, however, each of the teachers featured in the book did a beautiful job of adapting Potter for their classrooms. Whether we are talking about Sandra, who read the book in Spanish with her ELL students, Allegra, who used the audio books to support her special education students' particular needs for reading support, or Andrew, who approached the book as an accessible gateway to challenging AP content, it is clear in each teacher's story that the needs of her/his students were primary influences on the decisions made around reading the books. In talking with the participating teachers, it seems that the rich stories in the Potter books provided unique opportunities for discussion, analysis, and connection with students' lives. Moreover, just the experience of reading an entire popular book together--as opposed to the excerpts and readers associated with the standardized curriculum--appears to have offered opportunities for deep, meaningful learning.

This kind of responsive teaching is radically different from the standardized curricula commonly found in schools, not because teachers prefer standardization (although some certainly must), but because standardization is thought to be more efficient and its results more easily measurable. As we discuss in more detail in the book, most current policy initiatives reward efficiency and demand accountability--and neither reward nor require responsiveness, flexibility, or creativity. All of this adds up to a demoralizing and frustrating culture for teaching in which teachers' expertise is put to the side in favor of standardized content and methods. Fortunately, the teachers featured in Teaching Harry Potter pushed back hard against these negative forces, instead focusing on how they could provide meaningful learning opportunities for all of their students, even when reading Potter meant working around (and/or subverting) the prescribed reading curriculum--and taking considerable criticism from colleagues and supervisors for doing so.

While each teacher had his/her own approaches to customizing the reading/learning experience, Allegra's story stands out as particularly salient to the topic of adaptation/remixing. A creative and dedicated teacher, Allegra wanted to support her students' developing reading skills and practices and felt that multimedia tools like the series' audio books could supplement the instruction and assistance she could provide for students one-on-one as well as to the class as a whole. As they worked through the first Potter book, Allegra's students moved fluidly between the printed text and multimedia by reading along with the audio books. The highly-engaging audio books provided students with a model for fluent reading as well as created a situation in which students could focus more attention on listening to and comprehending the story rather than struggling to decode every word themselves.

Allegra's story also stands out in relation to adaptation because Allegra was working with special education students. As discussed in Allegra's chapter, Harry Potter is a great book series for use in special education for a number of reasons, a key one being the prominence of "difference" as a theme in the series. All Hogwarts students are special in that they have magical abilities; some (like Neville) require more support for learning than others (like Hermione), and others (like Harry) seem to benefit from an alternative, customized curriculum. As Allegra notes in her chapter, seeing varied, positive representations of difference was beneficial to her students.

Harry Potter's status in the literary canon is still being debated and many teachers may see it as "mere popular culture" and not sufficiently literary to bring into school. Given the choices they face in schools with a diminishing focus on reading in any form, what's the case for why we should teach Harry Potter and not say Animal Farm?

Why not both? Granted, the limitations you speak of do exist and districts, schools and teachers must make increasingly difficult decisions about what to include, there are creative ways to include popular books in the curriculum. Andrew, who is the high school AP English teacher in our book, never actually reads complete Potter books with his students. Instead, he uses key excerpts from both the books and the movies to support teaching particular literary aspects. In using these regularly, his students gain a sense of the stories and many end up reading the books on their own. Sandra does read one book a year with her students, but it takes a great deal of planning to make it work, including framing her rationale for using the books. The key for all three of the teachers in our book is a set of very clear goals for their students around using Harry Potter. They don't just read Harry Potter because it's fun or the teachers like the books.

Each teacher uses the texts or movies to teach specific points in the curriculum, encourage habits of mind, or build stamina around reading. All three share the goal of building their students' confidence as readers; because Harry is accessible and also smartly written (it links to so many literary traditions, for example) each teacher uses it to catch his/her students by surprise - eventually each class realizes they've engaged the story, understand it, can connect it to other stories and text, and can discuss its merits and/or weaknesses, in many cases using high level academic language, as in the case of Andrew's AP English class. His students would certainly be primed to critically examine Animal Farm, for example. They hold a "literary confidence" not necessarily present previous to discussing/analyzing Potter.

The debate around including popular texts in school curriculum will certainly remain a constant, especially since debates around which "classics" to include in English courses seems never ending. But there is certainly a current wave of coolness around reading - prompted by Potter and sustained by such series as The Hunger Games - that if recognized, harnessed, and used could serve to help students connect to the "classic" texts that have actually influenced a great deal of popular works.

How do we measure the success of these teachers' attempts to use Harry Potter to engage with their students? And why do you think that school systems are so slow to recognize and reward this kind of success?

Measuring teacher success - successful teaching - is probably the biggest educational debate right now. The growth over time data we talked about above is one example of how teachers are increasingly measured by one of the few types of hard data that are produced by teachers and schools en masse. Otherwise, the criteria for "success" becomes more objective and therefore difficult to define and evaluate in large numbers. In the book, we include a list of 9 "shared commonalities" - characteristics the Teaching Harry Potter teachers hold in common that we believe serve as the basis for (and evidence of) their success. One of these does include standardized test scores, but that serves more as one criteria, not the central identifiable aspect of the teachers' success. To our mind, these commonalities are identifiable and clearly contribute to student success. However, we spent time talking with the teachers, getting to know their philosophy and role in their respective schools. It took time to identify the roots of their success, something schools and districts don't have a lot of to work with.

We also hold a particular view of what it means to be a successful teacher. For example, we believe popular culture and media are valuable in school and consider wise and appropriate use of them with students a mark of great teaching. Many would disagree, however. We could spend a long time arguing our point, which we've done, actually, and still not have any kind of consensus on the issue, let alone on how to measure what using popular culture successfully would look like. This is one of the major obstacles faced by each of the teachers in our book, they had to constantly justify their use of Harry Potter books and media and in some cases were actually allowed to use the books because of their successful testing records. So, in the end reading Harry Potter with one's students became the reward for the kind of "success" that could be easily and "objectively" measured - and that's where school districts and policy makers live right now.

Catherine Belcher works with LA's Promise, a nonprofit organization focused on improving schools and empowering neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. She currently serves as the Director of Teaching and Learning at West Adams Preparatory High School. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, where her work focused on Latino educational history and language access. She then served as a new teacher supervisor at St. Joe's University in Philadelphia and as an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University. A lifelong educator, Catherine taught social studies at both the secondary and middle school levels, and has served as a mentor, lead teacher, and curriculum designer. She has presented on the use of Harry Potter in educational spaces at several conferences, including Enlightening 2007, Azkatraz (2009), Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). Catherine lives in LA with her husband and 11 year old daughter, a Potter aficionado in her own right who proudly displays the Ravenclaw banner in her room, although some days she joins her mom in the Gryffindor common room so they can talk books and dare each other to try eating the grey Bertie Botts Beans.

Becky Herr-Stephenson is a media researcher focused on teaching and learning with popular culture and technology. She earned her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in 2008. She has been a part of several organizations and projects aimed at informing and inciting innovation in education, including the Digital Media and Learning Hub within the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Currently, she is working as a Research Associate with the Annenberg Innovation Lab through a partnership between USC and the Cooney Center. She is a co-author (with Mizuko Ito and others) of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (2009, MIT Press). Becky has presented papers on Harry Potter and youth culture at a number of conferences, most recently, Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). She lives in Los Angeles and is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her first child, who she hopes will be sorted into Ravenclaw (not Slytherin).

Teaching Harry Potter: An Interview with Catherine Belcher and Becky Herr-Stephenson (Part One)

Catherine Belcher and Becky Herr- Shepardson's Teaching Harry Potter: The Power of Imagination in the Multicultural Classroom is quite simply one of the most powerful and engaging books I've read about American education in a long time, and I strongly recommend it to the full range of people who read this blog -- those who are fans, those who are teachers, and those who care about the future of learning. Teaching Harry Potter tells a powerful story about the current state of American education, one which contrasts the enthusiasm many young people and educators feel towards J.K. Rowling's remarkable book series and the constraints which No Child Left Behind-era policies have imposed on how reading gets taught in the classroom. Reading this book produced powerful emotional responses--an enormous respect for the teachers described here who are battling to engage with their students in meaningful and timely ways and despair over some of the obstacles they must overcome in doing so. There's much to be optimistic here in the ways these teachers care deeply enough about their students to take intellectual and professional risks and much that is disheartening about the ways that the system crushes opportunities that all recognize are valuable but which do not fit within the formal "standards."

The two writers move back and forth between a nuanced reading of J.K. Rowling's books which considers how they represent the value of education, detailed accounts of what teachers have been doing with the books as they adapt them for a range of multicultural classes, and big picture considerations of educational policy and pedagogical practice. You can learn more about this book and its authors on Teaching Harry Potter's official website and on the authors' blog.

The following is the first installment of a three part interview with the writers, during which they use Harry Potter to pose some powerful critiques of what's working and what's not in contemporary American education.

Let's start with the question that frames your introduction -- Why Harry Potter? What does this book series help us to understand about the contemporary state of American education?

We chose to use Harry Potter to explore American education because of the powerful things the series has to say about teaching and learning. Even though the magical school system in the Potter books more closely resembles British schools (and, one might say, a particular, nostalgic view of British schools) than the American public schools we discuss in our book, we saw important parallels between how issues such as childhood and adolescence, power (both political and personal), knowledge, literacy, and even media and technology were discussed in the books and how they are discussed in contemporary education. For example, teachers we have worked with have often discussed the challenge of balancing students' informational needs with the school district's desire for "safety" (which can mean anything from approved book lists to highly-restrictive firewalls on school networks); a similar theme is evident in Harry's interactions with Dumbledore and other Hogwarts faculty who struggled with questions about how and when to share information with Harry and his classmates.

The Potter series also reminds us of the importance of looking carefully and closely at situations--as things are not always what they seem to be at first glance--and of the importance of listening to alternative narratives. Both of these things seem particularly salient in relation to the state of contemporary American education, which, when viewed as a whole, seems very much like a lost cause. Looking closer, however, it is apparent that there are great and creative teachers, committed administrators, communities dedicated to supporting their schools, and students who, when given the resources they need, do extraordinary things. It is unfortunate that these stories are so often drowned out by discussions of standardized policy and procedure, as they are important reminders of what is possible. The exclusion of the Harry Potter books themselves, or the "strangeness" of including them in school reading lists, speaks to this as well. The assumption that they are simple children's books belies so much of their meaning and potential.

Further, we love the spirit of learning in Harry Potter: students taking ownership over their own learning and teaching one another; reading books from the restricted section of the library; finding secret passageways to Hogsmeade. Hogwarts students seem to have a sense of autonomy, adventurousness, and wonderment that we wish for all students.

A few pages into the book, you have already framed it as a defense of teachers. Why do teachers need defending? Why do they deserve defending?

Teachers, great teachers, definitely need defending in today's climate. We realize that not all teachers are created equal, and that there is a great need to improve teacher preparation, hiring policies, evaluation, and retention in public schools, particularly in large, urban school districts. However in the book, we talk about how the current climate around accountability, measuring teacher quality by test scores, and the role of teacher unions in protecting ineffective teachers has created a situation where the voices and needs of high quality teachers are being drowned out. Can we really afford that? We felt it vital to draw attention to the work of passionate, highly skilled teachers, to make the counter argument that they exist and are indeed out there - and that they are innovative and current in their approach. We also thought it important to highlight the tensions these teachers deal with in trying to continue their work and grow as creative professionals under the current political climate.

We also believe it is important to discuss the fact that there is more than one way to talk about good teaching. Most of the public discussion today centers on measuring teachers in some manner, usually through their students' test scores, which in many ways make sense since those are the one set of hard, "objective" measures available. Scores also provide a quick and easy answer. But good teaching is about much more than test scores - as is evidenced by Sandra, Andrew and Allegra. We are straightforward about the fact that their students do indeed test well, but we don't focus on that particular aspect of their work. What becomes clear in these three teachers' accounts is that they do much more than test preparation in their classrooms. They work - and often struggle - with making their pedagogy more nuanced and layered as they strive to offer a richer experience for their students. It is also important to note that they work with urban, and/or high poverty students of color, who are more often "test-prepped" and remediated than their suburban counterparts. Do teachers such as these, who believe in their students and work against the grain to offer them a rich literary experience deserve defending? Yes, most definitely. The task is figuring out how to balance that need within a system that currently throws all teachers into the same pot, regardless of their track record with students.

Harry Potter is a series of books about education. What insights might teachers take for their own pedagogical practice from studying the various teachers and administrators depicted in the book?

One of the most important insights teachers might take from the characterizations of teachers and administrators in the books is an understanding of how students perceive them. The Hogwarts faculty members are, by and large, portrayed as archetypes: Minerva McGonagall (stern and confident), Severus Snape (bitter and cruel), Remus Lupin (caring expert), Gilderoy Lockhart (inexperienced and self-absorbed), Albus Dumbledore (wise sage), and so on. Because readers only learn about the teachers through Harry's experiences with them, we spend much of the series not knowing much about them, their backgrounds, or their motivations. Teachers in the series--like many teachers in American schools--knew much more about their students than vice versa. While we're certainly not advocating that teachers give up all rights to privacy, we do think that it's important to be aware of the fact that most students navigate schools with a very incomplete picture of who their teachers are as people--and that this lack of information can serve as an impediment to connecting with teachers, even those who are very skilled and willing to act as caring mentors.

For the teachers we profile in Teaching Harry Potter, the Potter books provided a way to share a bit of themselves with their students by sharing a piece of media about which they were passionate. Now, not all of the featured teachers were die-hard Potter fans (though several definitely would describe themselves that way), but all enjoyed the books, identified their value for their students, and went to great lengths to share the books in their classrooms. Their dedication to brokering access to the books for their students and to creating engaging reading experiences that recognized students' different needs and desires is admirable.

Another thing that teachers might take from the Potter series is the value it places on experiential education--that is, teaching and learning that is grounded in students' real lives, that gets them up, out of their seats, and interacting with one another as well as with people outside of the classroom. Take, for example, Professor Lupin's lesson on defeating Dementors with the Riddikulous spell--this exercise challenged students to use magic that was extremely relevant to their lives at that moment and, although the lesson itself was loud, rambunctious, and risky, it was also highly effective in teaching students a spell they could immediately apply outside of the classroom.

Moves toward standardization of curriculum are generally moves away from experiential learning, as experiential learning needs to be connected to specific contexts, moments in students' lives and in the schooling process. It takes a great deal of creativity and bravery for teachers to privilege this kind of learning in the classroom, especially in the current educational climate in the U.S.

Catherine Belcher works with LA's Promise, a nonprofit organization focused on improving schools and empowering neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. She currently serves as the Director of Teaching and Learning at West Adams Preparatory High School. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, where her work focused on Latino educational history and language access. She then served as a new teacher supervisor at St. Joe's University in Philadelphia and as an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University. A lifelong educator, Catherine taught social studies at both the secondary and middle school levels, and has served as a mentor, lead teacher, and curriculum designer. She has presented on the use of Harry Potter in educational spaces at several conferences, including Enlightening 2007, Azkatraz (2009), Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). Catherine lives in LA with her husband and 11 year old daughter, a Potter aficionado in her own right who proudly displays the Ravenclaw banner in her room, although some days she joins her mom in the Gryffindor common room so they can talk books and dare each other to try eating the grey Bertie Botts Beans.

Becky Herr-Stephenson is a media researcher focused on teaching and learning with popular culture and technology. She earned her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in 2008. She has been a part of several organizations and projects aimed at informing and inciting innovation in education, including the Digital Media and Learning Hub within the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Currently, she is working as a Research Associate with the Annenberg Innovation Lab through a partnership between USC and the Cooney Center. She is a co-author (with Mizuko Ito and others) of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (2009, MIT Press). Becky has presented papers on Harry Potter and youth culture at a number of conferences, most recently, Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). She lives in Los Angeles and is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her first child, who she hopes will be sorted into Ravenclaw (not Slytherin).

Comics from the 19th to the 21st Century: an Interview with Jared Gardner (Part One)

Jared Gardner's Projections: Comics and the History of 21st Century Storytelling was the first book I read in 2012 and it was the ideal choice. Gardner makes an incredibly valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship within comic studies, tracing the history of American comics, from the early comic strips at the dawn of the 20th century, through new digital manifestations of sequential art, at the dawn of the 21st century. Projections combines critical analysis of key comics texts with close engagements with the history of their production and reception, making significant new discoveries around figures and events we thought we already knew, and expanding in important ways the canon of which comics justify our research. There are two elements here which are close to my own heart: First, the degree to which Gardner consistently understands comics as a medium (not a genre) and one which has to be understood comparatively in relation to the other modes of communication at the same time, so comics are discussed in relation to photography, cinema, television, newspapers, books, games, and other digital media, and we remain attentive to patterns of cross-influence across their history.

Second, Gardner makes some significant discoveries about the role of comic fans at key junctures in the evolution of the medium which help flesh out forgotten chapters in the history of participatory culture. His chapter on comics in the context of collector culture touches on some of the same authors and themes I want to explore in my own book project on comics and material culture, so I was delighted to have someone with whom I could bounce some of my ideas about retroconsumption against.

In the following interview, we discuss the relations of comics to other media and the role of fans and collectors in comics history, among a range of other topics. This was an interview I had to do. I kept jotting down questions as I read the book, eager to engage with the author, who surprisingly I did not know, and learn more about the thinking which guided this project. I hope you will enjoy his thinking as much as I have.

The book's subtitle, "the history of 21st Century storytelling," frames your account of the evolutions of comics as a medium in relation to the present moment, which you characterize in the book's conclusion as one of convergence and transformation. In what sense do you see comics as "21st century storytelling"? Is it possible that comics were also embodiments of 19th and 20th century storytelling at other moments of their evolution?

Absolutely! The title is in part an an appeal to scholars interested in narrative and media to take comics seriously as providing a century long history of engaging with transmedial and multimodal storytelling. Narrative theory has become increasingly interested in comics, particularly for the ways in which it complicates its traditionally text-based models and theories; but for media theorists comics often look decidedly "old media"--associated with forms (illustrated magazines, comic books, newspapers) that seem firmly rooted in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is in fact precisely the adaptability of sequential comics since its full development in the late nineteenth century that has contributed to some degree to this association. Sequential comics first developed in the pages of illustrated magazines in the U.S. & Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, the illustrated magazine was largely cannibalized by the Sunday newspaper supplement as pioneered by publishers like Pulitzer and Hearst, and as cartoonists moved over to this new venue their work was shaped by the new affordances of the weekly newspaper supplement: color, seriality, a larger and more cacophonous frame within which to tell their stories. As adventure comics in particular began to move into a new format in the 1930s--what would come to be called the comic book--the form again adapted, changing the ways in which it engaged with readers, told its stories, and explored the relationship between text & image, panel and page. So, as you say, comics have always found ways to adapt new media environments and to explore the possibilities of what we might somewhat anachronistically call an interactive, multimodal approach to storytelling from the 19th century on. One of the interesting questions with which I conclude is why, given this history, comics has been so very slow to adapt itself to digital environments in the 21st century.

Your conclusion really describes a crisis in the state of the medium, as comics may evolve away from printed form and become part of the digital landscape. What factors do you see speeding or slowing the dissolution of comics as a print based medium?

I do think comics as a medium are at a crossroads, but I am optimistic that comics will survive the translation into digital forms of production, distribution, and consumption--although what emerges on the other end will likely look as different from the comic book or graphic novel as the comics in the 19th-century illustrated magazine do when compared to those found in the Sunday newspaper supplement. So I guess I would not describe it as a crisis, but I do think that it is time for the best creators working in the form to step up and take more creative risks--and for some brave publishers to give them a safety net.

My biggest concern--and I have written about this probably too much in other venues--is that people involved in comics are understandably overwhelmed by the dramatic contractions of the traditional print mediums in which they have long worked and end up retreating into a kind of elitist stance, making expensive "art books" for an increasingly smaller, older and wealthier audience. That truly would be a crisis for comics, which is why I get anxious when I see, for instance, alternative cartoonists abandoning the traditional "floppy" comic book not for new digital platforms and possibilities, but for $20 hardcover comic books that have no hopes of bringing new readers and communities to comics.

But, I also understand the reluctance of comics creators--especially those who are established--to turn to new media platforms with their work. There are so few working models out there that demonstrate that comics creators, historically among the most exploited and underpaid of our modern storytellers, can hope to receive remuneration for their work on the internet. The big mainstream companies--especially DC and Marvel--are exploring digital distribution models both for the iPad and for personal computers, but for the most part these are simply bland digitizations of traditional comic books. And there is every reason to suspect that these digital comics will continue to diminish the viability of traditional comics stores and the communities they have enabled for the past forty years.

Don't get me wrong. I don't believe in the long run that the traditional comics store can or will survive the next twenty years, again with the exception of some well-placed boutiques. But as we see the loss of serial comics books and comic book shops, we see the loss as well of the spaces and the places for collaborative interpretation and shared ownership that is very much at the heart of comics. Certainly, this should be something the internet can find a way to replace, but I am not convinced that Disney (Marvel) or Time Warner (DC) have much interest in nourishing collaborative readers with a sense of shared ownership in their serial narratives. Which is why I don't believe, no matter how much revenue the big companies are ultimately able to move through digital distribution networks (and so far the jury is out whether they can make much at all), that the model represented by platforms such as Comixology on the iPad or Marvel's Digital Comics for the PC is one in which comics will thrive and grow as a form.

What we need are more creators ready to bring their best work to the internet in order to explore the possibilities of the digital environment: comics that break free from the limitations of the printed page--rolling out into an infinite ribbon or inviting new modes of navigation that open up the page to exploration in new dimensions and directions. But we also need new publishers ready to come in and create a place and a business model where this kind of experimentation can be rewarded and find new readers and new investments. Disney and Time Warner already largely see the comic book part of their business empires as loss leaders or promotional tie-ins for their Hollywood enterprises. We need instead a 21st-century Pulitzer or Donenfeld to imagine the business of digital comics in which a 21st-century George Herriman or Siegel & Shuster can thrive.

As you note, comics have never exerted so great an influence over the media landscape as they do at the present moment, yet they have rarely seemed so marginal as a medium in their own right.

In truth, in some way comics have less influence today than they have in the past century, despite their surprising visibility. Comics sales are down by any measure in almost every corner of the industry and the notion of a "comics scare" of the kind the nation experienced in the early 1950s is truly unimaginable today. The marketing and merchandizing of comics properties is up, of course, making a very few people wealthy and successful, but little in the vast majority of adaptations of comics on film suggests that Hollywood has any interest in learning from comics in terms of how comics have historically told stories and engaged with readers.

For better or worse, the current love affair between Hollywood and comics will likely cool, perhaps with this year's Avengers, which has so much money riding on it at a time when audiences and critics are growing restless with the decade-long tide of comics movies that it seems almost doomed from the start (then again, I loudly proclaimed the iPhone was going to be a flop, so I would not trust my powers of prognostication). And Hollywood has its own crisis to face, one which it has been kicking down the 3-D road for the past few years.

So while I am truly happy for any cartoonist who secures a retirement from a movie deal, outside of the success of scattered individuals I don't believe the future of comics lies with Hollywood. But they may belong with film. Independent films like American Splendor and even the rare Hollywood production like Scott Pilgrim point to the possibilities of comics and film listening to and learning from each other in ways they have not since their shared origins more than a century ago, but Scot Pilgrim of course was accounted a failure by any Hollywood metric. The best hope for comics and film going forward is to create new sites of convergence where creative success and the bottom line will be measured outside of the blackbox accounting of Hollywood.

You describe in your Coda the shifts which have occurred in film viewing as a result of having ready access to a digital archive of favorite films which we can watch and manipulate as we choose. This access to comics starts earlier, yet there has also been a dramatic increase in comics reprints over the past few years. How has this effort to preserve and represent early comics influenced your decisions about where to place emphasis in this book?

I don't think this book would have made any sense to write had it not been for what we affectionately call the golden age of comics reprints, a period of publishing that has seen long-lost newspaper comics and comic books returned to print. I am fortunate to have daily access to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum here at Ohio State, but until recently without such privileged access extensive reading in historical comics was virtually impossible. Of the comics I focus on extensively in the early chapters in the book--Happy Hooligan, Mutt & Jeff, Krazy Kat, Superman, Spider-man, R. Crumb's underground comix, etc.--almost all are now available in accessible reprint editions. The big exceptions here were Sidney Smith's The Gumps and Ed Wheelan's Minute Movies, pioneering serial strips from the 1920s, but I am now working with the Library of American Comics to get one and possibly both into an affordable reprint edition in the near future. Of course, this "golden age" will end long before we recover all of our lost comics history. In the long run, what we really need is a vast digital comics archive of the kind that licensing and copyright laws makes sadly impossible to imagine at the moment.

There has been an ongoing debate between film studies and comics scholars about how much early comics influenced early cinema. How do you characterize the initial relations between these two mass media, which gained public visibility at roughly the same cultural moment?

In the end, though, I see less evidence than do others of clear influence on the level of the fundamental grammar. Cartoonists and filmmakers ultimately learned to tell stories in unique ways as they explored the unique affordances of their respective media. But there is little question that comics helped provide early film with both a model of "celebrity" with the remarkable national success of early comic strip characters such as Happy Hooligan and Buster Brown and with a clear model for how graphic narrative could provide an opportunity to make knowable the often overwhelming experience of modernity.

As I argue, however, there were ultimately lots of reasons--both economic and formal--for film to go its own separate way very early, and it did. Despite their shared origins, comics and film ultimately did not interact a tremendous amount for much of the twentieth century, all of which makes their convergence in the beginning of this century more interesting--especially as that convergence has extended well into its second decade now, a lifetime in term of the half-life of Hollywood film genres.

Jared Gardner is professor of English and film at the Ohio State University, where he also coordinates the popular culture studies program. In addition to Projections, he is the author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature (1998) and The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (2012). He blogs (far too irregularly) for The Comics Journal and Huffington Post.

Help Time Lord Rocker Beat Justin Bieber on British Pop Charts

I know I signed off the blog for the year, but my imagination has been captured by a fascinating struggle which is taking place this weekend around the UK Pop Singles Chart. Specifically, I am excited by 22 year old Alex Day, who is gaining ground and British bookies give him a 1 in 16 chance of winning the competition, despite the fact that he has no record deals and has built his following entirely through his deft use of YouTube, Twitter, and other social media.

His catchy pop song, "Forever Yours," was released December 3 and his video, which playfully pairs a love song with images from superhero comics and zombie movies, has already been seen more than a million times. To win, he will need to best Justien Beber and Mariah Carey (not to mention the recent winner of the British X-Factor).

But, Day's certainly bringing on the grassroots support. Here's what he shared with me via a recent email: "'Forever Yours' is on sale as from today, became the second-highest trending topic on Twitter worldwide within eight minutes, and is so far sitting at number 96 on the UK iTunes Chart and rising about twenty places every time I refresh." This seems like a classic example of spreadability in action!

Apart from trying to turn the British pop world on its head, Day has been a key figure behind the growth of "Time Lord Rock," music inspired by Doctor Who, which has emerged as a grassroots movement in the spirit of the Wizard Rock associated with Harry Potter fandom. As a Time Lord Rocker, Day runs a website, Chameleon Circuit, which features such songs as "Blink" and "Exterminate Regenerate."

Check it out and if you feel so inclined, do what you can to help him beat Justin Bieber. Whatever happens, this is a fascinating example of how grassroots media and participatory culture is starting to impact the operations of the commercial mainstream.

This story came to me from Andrew Slack from the Harry Potter Alliance.

Futures of Entertainment 5: The Videos (Day One)

A few weeks ago, I made the trip back to Cambridge, MA to participate in the fifth iteration of the Futures of Entertainment conference. This conference emerged from the work we did at MIT through the Convergence Culture Consortium. The goal of the conference is to provide a meeting ground for forward thinking people in the creative industries and academia to talk with each other about the trends that are impacting how entertainment is produced, circulated, and engaged with. Through the years, the conference has developed its own community, which includes alums of the Comparative Media Studies Program who see the conference as a kind of homecoming, other academics who have found it a unique space to engage with contemporary practices and issues, and industry leaders, many of them former speakers, who return because it offers them a chance to think beyond the established wisdom within their own companies. Our goal is to create a space where academics do not read papers and industry folks don't present prospectus-laden powerpoints or talk about "take-aways" and "deliverables," but people engage honestly, critically, openly about topics of shared interest.

Read by these criteria, this year's event was arguably our most successful venture ever, ripe with sometimes heated debates about the nature of the "crowd" (and of the relations between artists and consumers within crowd sourcing models), about the struggles over privacy, piracy, and self identity which shape everything from our relations with location-based entertainment to children's media, about the ways that global perspectives complicate some of the assumptions shaping American media practices, and about the ways that grassroots control over circulation complicate established business models.

On a personal level, I was deeply proud to see so many of the CMS alums in their new professional identities, showing that they have continued to grow in intellectual stature and cultural authority after leaving MIT, including Sam Ford who has taking over as the primary person in charge of the event and of our newly renamed Futures of Entertainment Consortium. I was delighted to see so many of my new friends from the west coast fly to Cambridge to join us for this year's event, including Ernest Wilson, the Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism. Formally, Futures of Entertainment is the sister conference to Transmedia Hollywood, which we host here in Los Angeles, swapping years between USC and UCLA. But this was the year where the two families mingled with each other and the bridges between the two conferences were strengthened. By the way, I've gotten lots of questions about the next Transmedia Hollywood conference: there's not a lot of information to share yet, but it will be held on April 6 2012 at the USC Cinema School, if you want to save the date. Watch this blog for further announcements.

Finally, I was deeply proud of the diversity we achieved in our programing this year, making further progress in a long struggle to get greater gender balance on our panels, and making a huge step forward in terms of bringing transnational perspectives into the mix. We welcome recommendations for speakers at our future events in general, but we especially welcome recommendations for female, minority, and international speakers.

I am also proud that we continue to maintain a tradition of making webcasts of the conference available free to all. I am posting the videos of the Friday events today and next time, of the Saturday events. We will end the week with a focus on a special event on Global Creative Cities, and with some further reflections of our announcement of a new partnership with the City of Rio.

Check out this very thoughtful response by Jonathan Gray to the conference's focus on "crowdsourcing" and collaborative production.

While I was at MIT, I dropped by my old stomping grounds at the Comparative Media Studies Program and had brunch on Sunday with the newly arrived crop of Masters Students and some of the Program's Alums. What a smart group! After several years of regrouping, CMS has come back strong as ever, has maintained strong standards in terms of the quality and diversity of the community. I wish them all the best.

Introduction (8:30-9:00 a.m.)

William Uricchio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Ilya Vedrashko (Hill Holliday)

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society. (9:00-10:00 a.m.)

How are the shifting relations between media producers and their audiences transforming the concept of meaningful participation? And how do alternative systems for the circulation of media texts pave the way for new production modes, alternative genres of content, and new relationships between producers and audiences? Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green-co-authors of the forthcoming book Spreadable Media-share recent experiments from independent filmmakers, video game designers, comic book creators, and artists and discuss the promises and challenges of models for deeper audience participation with the media industries, setting the stage for the issues covered by the conference.

Speakers: Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California), Sam Ford (Peppercom Strategic Communications) and Joshua Green (Undercurrent)

Collaboration? Emerging Models for Audiences to Participate in Entertainment Decision-Making. (10:15 a.m.-11:45 p.m.)

In an era where fans are lobbying advertisers to keep their favorite shows from being cancelled, advertisers are shunning networks to protest on the fans' behalf and content creators are launching web ventures in conversation with their audiences, there appears to be more opportunity than ever for closer collaboration between content creators and their most ardent fans. What models are being attempted as a way forward, and what can we learn from them? And what challenges exist in pursuing that participation for fans and for creators alike?

Moderator: Sheila Seles (Advertising Research Foundation)

Panelists: C. Lee Harrington (Miami University), Seung Bak (Dramafever) and Jamin Warren (Kill Screen)

Creating with the Crowd: Crowdsourcing for Funding, Producing and Circulating Media Content. (12:45-2:45 p.m.)

Beyond the buzzword and gimmicks using the concept, crowdsourcing is emerging as a new way in which creators are funding media production, inviting audiences into the creation process and exploring new and innovative means of circulating media content. What are some of the innovative projects forging new paths forward, and what can be learned from them? How are attempts at crowdsourcing creating richer media content and greater ownership for fans? And what are the barriers and risks ahead for making these models more prevalent?

Moderator: Ana Domb (Almabrands, Chile)

Panelists: Mirko Schäfer (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), Bruno Natal (Queremos, Brazil), Timo Vuorensola (Wreckamovie, Finland) and Caitlin Boyle (Film Sprout)

Here We Are Now (Entertain Us): Location, Mobile, and How Data Tells Stories (3:15-4:45 p.m.)

Location-based services and context-aware technologies are altering the way we encounter our environments and producing enormous volumes of data about where we go, what we do, and how we live and interact. How are these changes transforming the ways we engage with our physical world, and with each other? What kind of stories does the data produce, and what do they tell us about our culture and social behaviors? What opportunities and perils does this information have for businesses and individuals? What are the implications for brands, audiences, content producers, and media companies?

Moderator: Xiaochang Li (New York University)

Panelists: Germaine Halegoua (University of Kansas), Dan Street (Loku) and Andy Ellwood (Gowalla)

At What Cost?: The Privacy Issues that Must Be Considered in a Digital World. (5:00-6:00 p.m.)

The vast range of new experiments to facilitated greater audience participation and more personalized media content bring are often accomplished through much deeper uses of audience data and platforms whose business models are built on the collection and use of data. What privacy issues must be considered beneath the enthusiasm for these new innovations? What are the fault lines beneath the surface of digital entertainment and marketing, and what is the appropriate balance between new modes of communication and communication privacy?

Participants: Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard University) and Helen Nissenbaum (New York University)

Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part Three)

This is part three of a five part series by transmedia designer and theorist Brian Clark.

A HANDFUL OF BOTTOM UP MODELS

by Brian Clark

In the prior two installments, we looked at what might drive the next wave of innovation in storytelling and dissected the patronage business model that dominates the transmedia space today. In this installment and the next, I want to dive deeper into ten different alternative business models that we know work from other media movements in the hopes that they provide some inspiration to other entrepreneurial storytellers. The first handful treats funding and sustainability as the primary challenges: if you don't have access to millions of dollars, just how much capital do you really need? Do you need any at all?

No Budget

Some artists and art movements solve the business model problem by assaulting the very need for capital funding. They might treat funding as unnecessary (such as Theater of the Oppressed in the 1950s, the Dogma 95 film movement of the late 1990s or the subsequent Mumblecore movement of the early 2000s that embrace no budget as a choice) or might literally treat capital as the enemy (such as the dÈtournement of the Situationist International movement of the 1950s or modern Anonymousí physical and digital hacktivism). In the context of business models, their solutions look something like:

1. FUNDING: Is a distraction from making art.
2. RETURN: With no funders, there is no distraction of returning investment.
3. SUSTAINABILITY: My project is not about having a sustainable career as a creator.
4. AUDIENCE: A community to awaken or empower.
5. PROMOTION: Through provocation, controversy and guerilla tactics.

No budget movements are a healthy part of any artistic form: things get made all the time without having business plan justifications. The Internet and digital creative trends amplifies these kinds of models disproportionately because of the constant increase in tools that decrease the costs of production towards free. Sadly, it isn't decreasing the cost of your food, rent and healthcare towards free and no budget artists typically have more traditional jobs that pay those bills -- which might be, in part, why Lars von Trier doesn't still make films under the Dogma 95 model.

Grassroots

Sometimes, not having funding isn't an active choice but is definitely a current reality. This is familiar territory to independent artists and publishers, from pulp fiction zines of the 1930s through the punk D.I.Y. ethic of the 1970s to the Internet tradition of "grassroots alternate reality games" of this century -- you embrace your limitation as a virtue and make the most of it. For this "D.I.Y. ethic" style of grassroots, the business model solve might look like:

1. FUNDING: Beg, borrow, and elbow grease.
2. RETURN: The expectation of paying them back isnít very high on either side.
3. SUSTAINABILITY: Iíll at least live to fight another day.
4. AUDIENCE: People who are looking for something different than the mainstream.
5. PROMOTION: Through provocation, controversy and guerilla tactics.

Rather than being entrepreneurial, the funding in grassroots efforts is ad hoc, doesn't really set revenue goals for sustainability and leaves little funding for promotion. Sometimes, for the artists, the connection and affirmation of an audience is still enough reward to make them want to do it again.

Research & Development

Hopefully, creating always involves learning new things, but sometimes the point of making it in the first place is to learn. The R&D arms of giant companies share this business model with entrepreneurial garage tinkers and both work in prototypes and proofs-of-concept. Some creators, most notably Lance Weiler, have started talking about "story R&D" as the explicit value to their experiments -- learning how to tell stories across all these new platforms and opportunities in relatively low capital risk environments. An R&D business model solve might look like:

1. FUNDING: Angel capital (including my own).
2. RETURN: Something new that will require a new business model solve.
3. SUSTAINABILITY: Iím increasing my capabilities and chances for future success.
4. AUDIENCE: I wonít necessarily need a large one.
5. PROMOTION: Through provocation, controversy, partnerships and guerilla tactics.

The most inherent challenge in R&D models is that you're entrepreneurially deciding to push the return on your investment and sustainability to some future date. It requires some confidence (at least on the artist's part) that those kinds of R&D results are a predictable yield and tends (by necessity) to push the work into more experimental territory (because there is very little R&D yield in doing things you already know how to do).

Fan Incubation

Most artists will tell you that a fan is more valuable than a customer -- a fan base is a renewable resource for a sustainable career. Fans buy the next album, they subscribe to the series, they evangelize their passion bring in new fans, and they camp out in lines overnight before the opening. In the past, fan development was slow (for example, the way fan correspondence saved H.P. Lovecraftís works from disappearing) or physical (like the "make record and tour college towns" model of independent musicians like John Vanderslice). The age of the Internet has revolutionized the ability for creators and fans to have rich, meaningful interactions that have led to successes like The Blair Witch Project and innovations like the distribution strategy for Four-Eyed Monsters. Whether a small indie or a big company, fan incubation business model solves look something like:

1. FUNDING: Angel capital and sweat equity.
2. RETURN: A motivated audience for a forthcoming work.
3. SUSTAINABILITY: I'm increasing my chances for success (and return) on some other product.
4. AUDIENCE: My growing fan base.
5. PROMOTION: The efforts of the fans themselves, supplemented by owned (maybe even paid) media

This is essentially the same model I critiqued in the prior installment, but with a key difference: you've become your own patron, you've become your own client, and you're leveraging the tactical usefulness to your own potential benefit. Like the research and development model, that means you've pushed off revenue and sustainability to some future product those fans want that has its own business model as an investment in a renewable resource.

Fan Funding

Speaking of the power of fan bases, if you already have even a residual fan base, there are ways to replace funding with those fans. In the classic models, you'd call this pre-sales -- collecting money for a product you haven't made yet to fund the creation itself (often incentivized by some exclusive value add), a model quite common now in the videogame industry but also the classic underpinning of why magazines and newspapers offer annual subscriptions. The Internet's capabilities for crowdsourcing have made this an even more attractive model for independents, whether you're harnessing fans as angel capitalizers with a system like Kickstarter or selling a product that was manufactured "just in time" via a platform like Lulu. The business model might look something like:

1. FUNDING: From your fan base as pre-sales or angel capitalizers.
2. RETURN: A special copy of the work, a credit in the finished piece, etc.
3. SUSTAINABILITY: My fans will support me because theyíd like to see more work.
4. AUDIENCE: My growing fan base.
5. PROMOTION: The efforts of the fans themselves, supplemented by owned (maybe even paid) media.

The scale of this model is directed tied to the size of the fan base: George Lucas will always pre-sell more than you do, but a smaller group of fans could dramatically change the way a grassroots project might operate. Many creative properties (large and small) leverage this business model in serial with fan incubation -- when you're not pre-selling something, grow the overall size of the fan base as an investment in your next cycle of fan funding.

In the next installment, we'll look at another handful of models that solve from the opposite direction: maximizing revenue instead of minimizing investment.

Brian Clark is the founder and CEO of GMD Studios, a 16-year-old experience design lab based in Winter Park, Florida. He lives in New York City and occasionally tweets as @gmdclark

"The Revolution Will Be Hashtagged": The Visual Culture of the Occupy Movement

Since September 17, the Occupy Wall Street movement has produced an overwhelming array of visuals, offering a significant lens on the movement itself, its ties to history, its divergent voices, perspectives and styles, as well as its multiple distribution channels from mainstream outlets to social media. Despite the criticism from experts who do not necessarily see much potential in Occupy's "brand," the visual aspects of the protest clearly have impact and traction. Although it would be impossible to fully assess this rich visual output, this blog post attempts to understand its emergent themes as well as the potential uses and value attached to visual commentary and protest. Throughout history, visual culture has played an important role in protest and social change. Although "high" art had long been used to venerate political figures as well as members of the upper classes, with the revolutionary tides of the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America, we see a shift and an increase in pictorial depictions of political resistance. These historical examples demonstrate the way visual culture has been fundamental to the politics of protest. They serve as witness and document. They can incite and instigate action.

Thus begins a rich, compelling, and timely post over at the blog maintained by the USC Civic Paths Research Group. Dr. Alison Trope, Clinical Associate Professor, and Lana Swartz, PhD Student, both in USC Annenberg, have assembled an amazing archive of images drawn primarily from the Occupy rallies from around the country and across the globe.

As this opening suggests, their primary emphasis is on visual media -- the signs, costumes, spectacles, which have been deployed to define the terms of the debate. Given the visual rich nature of their post, I can't cross-post it here, so I can only send you there to examine it more closely. But, believe me, it is worth hitting the link...

The Civic Paths team has been studying alternative forms of activism, especially those which involve the intersection between popular culture, participatory culture, and youth, for more than two years. We are affiliated with a research hub focused on Youth and Participatory Politics funded by the MacArthur Foundation and led by Mills College's Joe Kahne. Our own involvement stems from my long-standing interest in fan activism, the theme of a special issue our group is editing for Transformative Works and Culture, which will come out early next year. But, our interest has grown far beyond this.

Our current case studies include work on the young activists who are working to pass the Dream Act to give greater educational and citizenship rights to undocumented youth (Arely Zimmerman), research on youth involvement in Libertarian politics (Liana Thompson), research on Nerdfighters, the Harry Potter Alliance, and Imagine Better (Neta Kligler-Vilenchik), and research into Muslim-American politics post-911 (Sangita Shreshtova). Along the way, though, we have also been looking closely at a broader range of case studies -- from Racebenders to labor organizing in Madison, Wisconsin. This site looks at some of our preliminary examples, which helped pave the way for our current research. Altogether, we have nearly 20 PhD and Masters students contributing to this research, many of whom have posted some preliminary insights through the Civic Paths blog, so if you come to visit the Occupy archive, stay around and check out some of their other contributions.

I was lucky enough to have been able to pay a visit to Washington Square, the home of Occupy Wall Street, a few weeks ago, when I was in New York for the Mobility Shifts conference. An army of people in Zombie costumes, many of them from Zombiecon, a horror fan convention, had arrived at the Park just a few minutes before I did, and they were mingling with folks dressed up like characters from Game of Thrones and carrying signs warning that "the Winter is Coming." Elderly tourists were stopping them and seeking to better understand why they were dressed the ways they were and how they were connected with the Occupy moment, resulting in a series of exchanges which would further spread awareness of the protest. And that's part of the point.

Occupy is not so much a movement, at least not as we've traditionally defined political movements, as it is a provocation. If the mainstream media has difficulty identifying its goals, it may be because its central goal is to provoke discussion, to get people talking about things which our political leadership has refused to address for several decades now -- the profound shifts in economic wealth which have created conditions of gross inequality in opportunity, the role of what Sarah Palin has called "crony capitalism" (and which is really an indication of the role of capital in shaping our political process), and especially the degree to which economic policies under both Republican and Democratic presidents have been written with more regard for Wall Street than Main Street.

The values that Occupy represents are shared by the vast majority of Americans, if recent surveys are any indication, yet they are rarely expressed by mainstream political leaders or the mass media. So, part of the point of these protests is to provide what Stephen Duncombe might call an "ethical spectacle" as a means of focusing attention. And the old women who are asking Zombies questions are part of that process, no doubt sharing what they saw with their friends back home, and thus providing yet another chance to talk about what's been going on here.

The blurring between fan and activist that I observed demonstrates a different relationship between popular culture and politics than we saw in previous protest movements. The Popular Front in the 1930s sought to influence the development of popular culture, giving rise to Aaron Copeland, Norman Rockwell, Frank Capra, and many others, whose work shaped our current image bank of what democracy looks like. The protest movements of the 1960s sought to tap into the language of popular culture -- especially those of rock and comics -- to create an alternative culture, one which was implicitly and often explicitly critical of corporately-owned media and which sought to express the worldview of a younger generation. The protest movements of the early 1990s embraced a DIY aesthetic, giving rise to the Indie-Media movement, and helping to fuel talk of a digital revolution which might democratize access to the channels of communication.

The Occupy movement, by contrast, has laid claim to the iconography of existing popular culture as a set of cultural resources through which to express their collective identities and frame their critiques. Thus, we see a much more playful style of activism, one which owes much to the traditions of fan culture, one which assumes that images and stories from superhero comics or cult television series are shared by many of the participants (and will be understood by a larger public which has not yet joined the protests). So, they are dressing up, designing signs which re-ascribe meanings to familiar characters, creating their own videos, and sending them out into the world, where they will be seen by many who are not going to go to Washington Square, Los Angeles City Hall, or any other site of occupation.

This is protest media designed to spread through social networks -- one which has the homemade qualities of the DIY movements of the past (thus, as Trope and Swartz note, the cardboard signs), the high tech qualities of digital activism, and the playful engagement of fan activism, all rolled into one heady combination. These tactics are not without their contradictions -- Trope and Swartz note that the Guy Fawkes masks, inspired by Alan Moore's V for Vendetta and now symbols of the Anonymous movement, are based on IP owned by Warner Communications who profits for everyone sold in this country.

But, it does seem to reflect the way we are conducting politics in the early 21st century. We saw some of these same images "test marketed" as it were during the pro-labor protests in Madison, as Jonathan Gray noted a while back, and we are seeing these tactics play out on an even bigger stage with Occupy.

There are many other aspects of the Occupy movement we recognize from our ongoing research. More and more contemporary political movements are decentralized, claiming loose affiliations with each other, yet playing out on very local levels, often with significant differences between the various chapters. This approach has proven highly effective for the Dream Activists, for example, where the struggle shifted from Federal to State and Local levels when Congress failed to pass the national Dream Act. These activists have tapped into social networking tools in order to be able to quickly learn from each other, allowing images, messages, and tactics to evolve rapidly. If traditional immigrant rights groups tended to observe ethnic, racial, and national boundaries, these young people have formed coalitions across different immigrant populations, and something similar is going on with Occupy, where many different ideological interests are organizing around the shared frame which Occupy offers.

These groups are refusing to create a simple unified message of the kind that are familiar from "disciplined," hierarchical, and established political movements. Rather, they seek to multiply the messages and to expand the range of different media framings so that they may speak to a broader range of different participants. No one piece of media reaches everyone; rather, media is produced quickly and cheaply and spread widely so that each piece of media produced may speak to a different set of followers.

As Sasha Costanza-Chock, a recent transplant from USC to MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, wrote in his thesis about the Los Angeles Immigrant Rights Movement:

Effective transmedia organizers are shifting from speaking for movements to speaking with them. Transmedia mobilization thus marks a transition in the role of movement communicators from content creation to aggregation, curation, remix and circulation of rich media texts through networked movement formations. Those movement formations that embrace the decentralization of the movement voice can reap great rewards, while those that attempt to maintain top down control of movement communication practices risk losing credibility.

Occupy, if anything, pushes tactics of transmedia mobilization even further. Refusing to anchor a singular meaning behind the movement keeps the conversations alive, allows for more people to join and help reshape the message, enables quick and tactical responses to outside challenges, and supports creative responses from all participants. As they chanted in the 1990s, this is what democracy looks like. Or as Trope and Swartz write, "The Revolution Will Be Hashtagged."

In the case of the Harry Potter Alliance and the Nerdfighters, there has been a move away from single issue activism to create structures that can be quickly deployed in response to a broad range of concerns and participatory structures that allow local chapters or even individual members to identify and take action around their own issues.

All of this can be confusing to media that keeps looking for the one cause, the one message, and the one spokesperson. Such efforts also compound some of the division within academic thought, since the message of Occupy seems to come from the realm of Critical Studies and Political Economy, where-as much of the tactics and imagery reflect the domains of Cultural Studies.

All of this suggests that we need to rethink the ways we've discussed the relations between politics and culture in the past. That's a central goal of the Civic Paths research group and we invite others to join us in researching not simply the Occupy movement but the ways it illustrates the nature of political engagement in a networked culture. We'd welcome hearing about what other research groups are doing to document and analyze the Occupy protests in their local areas.

Acafandom and Beyond: Concluding Thoughts

Louisa Stein: I feel the need to start off by saying I never wanted or felt we needed a referendum on the term "acafan"; when I initially proposed the "Future of Acafandom" workshop at SCMS, I had in mind that we'd talk about the practices of acafan methodology and pedagogy, and perhaps also the shifting terrain for acafan scholars in graduate school and on the job market. But it became clear in that conversation that the term mattered to people, that the term itself was fractious, and that we couldn't engage with the concepts inside the term, so to speak, without poking at the term itself. I found myself asking why the term was so fractious; indeed, we originally talked about wanting these conversations to be dialogues rather than the debate structure of the Fan Girl vs. Fan Boy debates, hence the three participants, and yet it seems like we've found ourselves back in debate territory. I still don't feel like I have a full answer to this question: why is the term acafan something people feel so strongly about, or that causes discomfort? I've come away from these conversations, both the in person ones and the blog dialogues, with an increased sense of the power of terms, of the way in which internalized definitions can link ideas and the people thinking through those ideas, but can also prevent dialogue and create miscommunication. So if acafan means one thing to me--and I say so and say it visibly, that doesn't mean others will embrace my definition over theirs (and indeed, why should they?) and may indeed continue to read my work from within their definition of the term. To make this more concrete: for me acafan is all about emphasizing the necessary synthesis of academic and fan--it's never been an exclusive term (again, to me), nor a term meant to raise rational academic discourse on fandom above emotional, non-academic fandom (indeed, quite the opposite!) But if acafan signifies these things to others, then those meanings may frame my work if I use the term.

But does that mean that I should give up the term? To me the answer is clearly of course not (I know, I'm sure everyone's very surprised about this!) because it still has methodological and personal resonance, and still offers the power to connect networks of scholars and fans. But perhaps more centrally, for me it still comes down to the fact that like it or not, the term is here with us, in the present if not the far future.

We can't just declare language dead--despite my spurious blog post title about "not-hosting the workshop that killed Acafandom." No single workshop could ever have that power. Spurred by the conversation between Jason, Alex, and Abigail, I googled acafan (why had I never done this before?) and found that in colloquial online use, the term bridges silos and boundaries. Yes, most of the first page of hits are Henry's blog, with Ian Bogost's declamation of acafan positioning making an appearance as well. But there's also fan fiction--a Sherlock Fan Fiction, no less, entitled "The Affair of the Asphyxiated Acafan" (!) And there are blog posts, twitter accounts, a fan lore entry, livejournal posts, delicious bookmarks, podcasts, etc. with varying levels of academic and fannish affiliation. To me there's a value in all that boundary crossing, and moreover it demonstrates simply that the term has a cultural life, and it's up to each of us to perform and model it as we see fit, in multiplicity, rather than to proclaim a single definition.

I want to close by building on Alex Doty's concluding point about the value of acafandom for teaching. For me, this is absolutely key, and a way my individual acafan perspective manifests every day. Depending on the course context, I don't necessarily spell this out to my students (because again, the label isn't all or even most of what matters here) but I am most acafan when I model to my students engaged critique and critical engagement. And no, we don't need the term to define this synthesized position, but the terms serves as a thread connecting my work to my teaching, and reminds me of what I value in media culture as a whole, as a scholar and a teacher, and for that matter as a student of media and fan culture who still has much to learn.

Henry Jenkins: I am not sure what I expected when I opened this particular can of worms. In many ways, I found the resulting exchanges fascinating -- especially hearing the diverse ways that contributors positioned themselves in relation to both academia and fandom, the ways that those relationships did or did not inform their work, and the other ways they were taking up some of the issues which for me are central to the use of the aca-fan concept -- especially those having to do with our subjective experiences as consumers and participants always implicated in the popular culture we study, one way or another, whether or not we want to admit it.

Progress has been made on some of the issues which spawned the term, but not others. I still hear about students who are hurt and confused when teachers write "too fannish" on their papers, with the implication that they do not demonstrate the appropriate amount of distance and rationality, that they are too emotional invested, and therefore, the chain of assumptions goes, that they are not sufficiently critical. I still get questions which imply these things when I speak outside of circles where Fan Studies has become a long accepted paradigm, as happened to me during a recent talk at Indiana University, where someone in the audience wanted to know in what sense a fan could be a critic.

This is no doubt part of what we mean when we talk about the pedagogical value of the term, that it allows certain kinds of work to be done, that it allows students and teachers another way of addressing these issues, that it allows students, especially those who may not have mentors involved in fan studies, an identity to rally behind and a means of justifying the work they want to do. For that reason, if for no other, we should hold up a banner for the acafans. It's so easy to feel isolated, the odd one out in those circumstances, and if acafan may offer too easy an affiliation as some have suggested, that is still better than no affiliation at all.

The post that has had me struggling the most with my own assumptions was John Campbell's critique of the essentialism implicit in refering to oneself as a fan rather than as "a fan of." We come at this question from such a different place, yet with such shared values, that this one got under my skin and I am still scratching at it. Most early writings about fans sought to essentialize them by defining them in terms of their singular relations to particular texts. So, a "Trekkie" (rarely a Trekker for such writers) was someone who loved Star Trek. There was no sense that they might be interested in other texts, that their biography might connect across a range of fan communities, that fan culture might have a tradition that extends beyond the single text, and so forth. In Textual Poachers, I stressed that fans were nomadic, that they "traveled across" texts much as De Certeau describes readers as "traveling across" lands they have not cultivated. The nomadic dimensions of fandom keep getting dropped from accounts of the book in favor of the concept of poaching -- titles do shape readings, after all -- but it is key to imagining the reader as structuring their relationships with texts and each other through choices made about which materials to borrow.

To me, going back to the "fan of" formulation means ascribing too much authority to the text, not enough authority to communities. I get John's points that there is no essential fan, that we are never just fans, that fans are not alike, etc., and these are useful correctives to our current use of the term. But, for me, when I speak of fan, I am thinking of being a fan as a subcultural identity, one defined through loose affiliations and shared traditions, as well as by shared debates and tensions, which run through the history of fan practices. There is not just one fan community, but most fan communities, in some ways, tap into the shared traditions of fan culture as they are defining themselves in relation to particular texts in particular social and technological contexts. I am not sure I have fully resolved the issues John raises (and I would welcome his response), but in many ways, this was one of the posts that most pushed the conversation forward.

In terms of my disappointments, I think the biggest one was that we did not make more progress in exploring in productive rather than dismissive ways the relationship between the identity of the acafan and that of the gamer-as-scholar. Most of the gamers here seemed to come into the conversation with very strong defense mechanisms against really entertaining that parallel and often with certain stereotypes about what it meant to be a fan. Some of those defense mechanisms emerged from the experience of stigmatization which surrounds the concept of being a gamer, stigmatizations which in some ways parallel those surrounding the fan, except that the gamer stereotype is often hypermasculine while the fan stereotype is so often feminized.

I had been struck by the essays in Drew Davidson's Well Played series, where gamers describe very specific play experiences which they had with specific titles: the argument is that there is no game text, only game experiences, and thus, criticism of games needs to preserve the process of playing them. As you do so, the player's own experiences are brought forward and with them, the player's own subjectivity, their identity, their history as players. I see strong parallels here with the trajectory of fan studies and the identity of the aca-fan. And I think the two movements have much that they can learn from each other. So, why do fans and gamers end up talking past each other, as I think has generally occurred here?

Drew, I would really love to get your reflections on this dynamic which occurred not only here but also in the discussion in Ian Bogost's blog which helped to inspire this one. Having tried and failed to bring the two groups together through this series of exchanges, I want to use my parting shots here as, well, a parting shot to push one more time to see if we can explore the similarities and differences between these two forms of cultural criticism and academic identity.

Drew Davidson: This has been an interesting experience, particularly since I wasn't deeply familiar with the term "acafan." And during the round of discussions in which I participated, I think all three of us were concerned about a lack in this regard, which we worried we had kept our conversation scratching at the surface of the ideas involved. And to be honest, due to lack of time, I followed the other rounds obliquely at best. That said, even at a high level I believe we all felt a resonance between the idea of being a fan and being a gamer, maybe the sense of defensiveness came from struggling to articulate the connections, but I don't think any of us felt overtly defensive (looking back I can see how it reads that way though).

Thinking of Henry's question, I think it comes from this lack. As with any academic field, acafan has developed a deep and rich set of issues and terminology that in some ways can become a barrier to newbies. Similarly, gamers-as-scholars are developing as a field (and it's an area where newbies would feel barriers in the terminology as well as playing ability). And so, I agree with Henry in that there is an opportunity to learn a lot from each other (and regret that it seems like we were part of the sense of talking past each other).

That said, it brings me back to the sense of a lack of time (the most finite of things). When this whole idea kicked off, there were bigger plans and more people involved, but as the reality of life set in, people dropped out here, got busy there, and a different thing evolved than initially was planned. For our round, we ended up having to squeeze in our discussion as we had wildly divergent schedules, and we weren't sure what to say really. Regardless, it seems to have inspired all involved to think anew about ideas and assumptions, so I think it's been an overall success. But it is easy to see how we will now scatter back to our daily schedules and pursuits, and having the time to better make and articulate connections across fields is a real challenge. But one worth striving for.

Just in the way Henry articulated why he was interested in inviting some gamers to join this discussion got me to think in a new light about what we've been doing with the Well Played series, and how the act of playing a game, and trying to discuss that act, is full of interesting agency on several levels. And it got me thinking about how I'm an acafan of Henry (and by extension his work), and that's why I joined in on this conversation (and often is how connections can be made).

Also, Henry's comments on how John discussed the distinction between being a "fan" and being a "fan of," got me thinking of how it can be both, particularly in terms of acafan. I think I am an acafan in general (in terms of approach), and I'm an acafan of videogames (in terms of expertise). Like Louisa notes in her closing comments, I think I'm most acafan when I'm engaged and modeling the agency in interactions with students and colleagues. And being an acafan resonates for me as an honest stance through which to consider the media and games that I both study and enjoy.

Kristina Busse: In psychology, there exists the concept of confirmation bias, which describes the informal fallacy whereby more information confirms our entrenched belief rather than expand our minds. This is a quite depressing concept for academics, because mostly our modus operandi dictates that more facts, more opinions, more positions are better and open our minds.

Sadly, I feel a bit like this reading over the acafandom conversations this summer. Personally, I came into this discussion wanting to narrow the term rather than expand it: to me acafans describe actively in the community involved fans who, at the same time, also do academic work on these very communities. Unlike Louisa, for example, I wasn't deeply invested in the larger concerns of and for the discipline but instead was quite happy to narrow the term and employ different concepts for other aspects of fan studies. The difficulties of the acafan to me were the negotiation of following competing rules of dissimilar community norms; it was the decisions of whether it was worth the CV line to expose one's friends' embarrassing debates; it was the constant explanation of fandom to academics and of academia to fans.

And yet we never really seemed to get to these difficult decisions and negotiations: Should we consciously create a canon of academically-approved fanworks that, in turn, will affect the value of these texts within fannish spaces? Do we (ab)use our role as fans when we exploit our fannish connections for academic work? Or do we, in turn, do a service to fandom by telling the better story? And do we compromise our role as academics when we focus on certain things but not others, pick the more accessible story, the more traditionally aesthetic vid, the classically trained artist's piece? Do we compromise our role by focusing on the good over the bad and ugly? And do we do harm by talking about one show and its fandoms rather than about others? What unconscious fannish and academic biases do we bring to our work, and where do the two cancel one another out and where do they amplify each other?

Those were the questions and moral dilemmas I had hoped we'd address and yet I felt we mostly were stuck in Acafandom 101: Hadn't we all agreed sometime in the nineties that academics exhibited clear fannish behaviors--that those folks at Faulkner and Hemingway and Woolf conferences clearly were quite affectively invested in their chosen writers? At the same time, hadn't Hills a decade ago convincingly argued that we can't facilely project our academic values onto fans, foregrounding the behaviors we recognized and valorized and overlooking those that were less like our own? Finally, did we really need to dismiss fannish behavior and communities in a conversation on acafandom?

The two things that most struck me was the resistance of several of the game scholars to embrace the questions and ideas that they might, in fact, be acafans and the willingness of various queer scholars to interrogate these positions and questions I raised above--even as they clearly weren't acafans in the more traditional sense.

Which brings me back to the original SCMS conversation and some of the more convincing arguments I heard there: to some, one of the strongest objections to the focus on acafans seemed to be the erasure of other central questions and the danger of studying a limited group of texts at the expense of equally culturally important ones. Then, my personal solution to that was to narrow the term down to the point where not every watercooler convo analysis, not even every user-generated YouTube response would automatically be about fans and, by extension, acafandom would define a subset of fan studies only (which, in turn, would be a subset of media studies only).

Reading Doty and Halberstam in particular, however, I wonder whether an alternative answer might not be to open up acafannishness to the point where indeed every academic is a fan (of sorts) and every fan (on some level) an academic. Borrowing from the amorphously defined and ineluctably changing concept of queerness, I wonder whether acafandom might not be better thought of as a set of parameters that circumscribe descriptors and questions and behaviors and identities while nevertheless avoiding certainties and resolutions. Because these initial questions I raised deserve not one answer but demand repeated revisiting. they are important questions, whether we are deeply embedded in a tightly self-defined and self-described community or analyze YouTube vids we stumble upon.

And maybe that made this conversation both difficult and frustrating. We tried to discuss these issues in the abstract but possibly they can only ever be presented in media res. If I take anything away from these conversations, it is my renewed investment in addressing this self-reflexive meta level of acknowledging and investigating the methodological and ethical concerns of studying fans and fan texts in everything I write. Not only can I not take anything for granted, I shouldn't assume that yesterday's procedures and theoretical framework still hold today. Just as fandoms and fans are changing, my own approach as a scholar must continue to interrogate my position and role within the academic and the fannish communities I inhabit.

Karen Tongson: Although I've taught introductory courses on fan cultures and fan studies in a general education context since graduate school--making some of the rudimentary, but necessary links between "fans" and "critics" that Kristina rightly insists we move beyond--I've never really considered myself a true fan studies scholar. Nor have I really identified as an acafan; at least not until this series of conversations transpired. In part, I think my reticence has to do with my own sense of the tremendous expertise and commitment that attends to "true" acafandom and vigorous involvements in participatory cultures. In other words, I had a sense (as both Louisa and Kristina gestured to) that the terms were narrower, or had reached the point of naming a more specific set of procedures, practices, and archives.

I also think my "primary academic orientation"--if there can be such a thing--as a queer studies scholar, kept me immersed in different conversations about affect and participatory engagements, even though I always felt and understood the tremendous overlap between acafan practices and queer cultures. All this to say that my familiarity with fan studies from the 80s onwards offered a particular lens for me to view queer studies, and vice versa. Yet my own disciplined docility to the concept of "expertise" and commitment to other identificatory practices kept me from assuming the subject position of the acafan in ways that I ultimately understand, through this summer's conversations, were rather unnecessary. In fact, it wasn't until I read this same reticence in some of the responses from my own colleagues in queer, ethnic and American studies (I'm thinking in particular of Christine Bacareza Balance's, Jack Halberstam's, Jayna Brown's and Sarah Banet-Weiser's pieces), that I realized how cordoned off many of us have been from the expansive possibilities of acafandom wherein, as Kristina phrased it, "every academic is a fan (of sorts) and every fan (on some level) [is] an academic."

More than anything, I valued this summer's conversation, and the invitation to consider in greater depth some of the practices we either rightly or falsely assumed belonged to the rubric of acafandom from an "outsider's" perspective. It brought to the surface how even certain, more established interdisciplinary fields (like the ones I listed above), are still very bounded, insular and unconsciously averse to the multiplicity of identifications. Acafandom, as I've come to understand it through this series generously hosted by Henry on his blog, is not simply a subset of Fan Studies, or Media Studies, but an orientation of sorts--at once methodological and affective--that can inform practices otherwise situated firmly within other disciplinary formations and their imperatives. I'm heartened by the extent to which emerging young scholars like Alexis Lothian and Suzanne Scott understand their work as part and parcel of the formations of both their "home" disciplines and acafandom in ways that shed the residual hang-ups (for lack of a better word) that continue to hold some of us back.

Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of gender and generation. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal and the Flow TV anthology (Routledge, 2011). Louisa is co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. Louisa is also Book Review editor of Transformative Works and Cultures.

Henry Jenkins blogs...here. He is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Art, and Education at the University of Southern California. He has recently completed Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, due out in 2012. His current fannish interests include comics, Disney, silent movies, The Walking Dead, Castle, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who...

Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories across texts, comics, games and other media. He is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center - Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University and the Editor of ETC Press.

Kristina Busse

Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures.

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press), is forthcoming in August 2011. She is co-series editor for Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins (NYU Press), and is also co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) with Gustavus Stadler.

Acafandom and Beyond: Will Brooker, Melissa A. Click, Suzanne Scott, and Sangita Shreshtova (Part Two)

Will Brooker: Here's the problem, for me. I like reading about Sangita's sari pleats and Suzanne's Nerf battleaxe, and recognising similar fan experiences from different fan communities, but those enjoyable moments, those connections and those stories don't make me feel more able to answer the broader questions posed by Melissa. I don't feel entitled to, and I don't feel inclined to.

Somehow, in the last ten years, I've gone from being a kid who couldn't believe he was actually writing a book about Star Wars to some middle-aged man of fandom who gets reverently approached by PhD students, telling me they were inspired by that book I couldn't believe I was getting away with. I'm happy to give advice, but I don't feel comfortable telling anyone what to do, except: do what you want to do, do what you love.

I have my own answers to Melissa's questions -- I feel entirely open-minded about different types of media fandom, I feel anti-fandom is a love-hate variation on traditional fandom, and I have few hang-ups about 'quality' versus 'camp' -- I studied 1960s Batman in the 1990s, and got over those snobberies a long time ago. But these are just personal opinions, as far as I'm concerned. I don't like the words 'geek' or ''nerd' because I feel they describe what would be simply called scholarship, expertise or ability in most other areas of life; I don't like the word ''fen' (why are we adopting this twee, sub-Elven term when we have the word 'fans'?), and 'squee' makes me squick. 'Squick' makes me squick, too. I don't feel we're helping our cause, such as it is, by using baby-talk and sleepover squealing. But then, for all my love of Legally Blonde, I'm a straight white guy, and as enough of our official vocabulary is decided by straight white guys, I don't want to make any rules for fandom's vocabulary based on my own preferences.

I don't feel it's for me to make rules or recommendations about anything in fandom or aca-fandom. To be frank, I don't know if any of us should be deciding what 'we' should do. Are we even a coherent community? For all our pleasurable connections -- the recognition of love for a text, a story and character, and the recognition of having that love mocked or derided -- I think the differences between us are more obvious, and perhaps more interesting, than the similarities. Deciding on labels, rules and titles risks making something that was always inherently a lot of fun, born out of passion and enthusiasm, into just another departmental committee meeting.

So, drawing up an agenda and writing the minutes of aca-fandom isn't for me. But if that was what everyone else wanted to do, I'd book a room, bring the coffee and offer my advice.

Melissa Click:

I think I know where Will is coming from. We were both on the 2011 SCMS panel organized by Louisa Stein on "Acafandom and the future of fan studies." Some on the panel (and some in the audience) were taken aback by the idea that some "fan scholars" don't particularly identify with and/or use the term "acafan" when describing their own work. That panel spawned this blog series and though I have found the discussions invigorating, I feel most of the entries in this series have raised more questions than they've answered--and given the minimal comments on each entry, it doesn't seem like many feel as though they wish to engage with this topic (which I think itself is interesting). While these questions can be productive, they can also leave one wondering what use or relevance "acafan" has in fan studies, especially when its boundaries aren't particularly clear.

That said, we did agree to discuss the term and its relevance in this forum--and I think the variety in our responses suggests the difficulty (or perhaps futility?) in pinning "acafan" down. However, it seems that despite wanting to make proclamations about acafans and what "we" should be doing, Will's made quite a few, particularly gendered, proclamations here, for example, calling some scholars' use of fan slang in academic discourse "baby talk and fan squealing." It strikes me that it's this dismissal of the melding of the fannish and the academic (also in conjunction with gender) that gave rise to acafan identity--so while Will suggests the term is unnecessary for him, he also demonstrates why it might be useful for others.

The questions I raised in my provocation were not intended to have us decide what others should do, they were intended to provoke discussion about the application and relevance of a term. I am under no illusion that we've been asked to tell everyone else to do--instead we've been asked to join a conversation about work that we all do. Though the questions raised in this entry of a bigger conversation about acafandom may feel like a departmental meeting to Will, I do believe that some feel it is an important conversation to have. I still think there's a lot for us to learn about the work we do and what we bring to that work--and I'd like to focus on that discussion, if possible!

Will Brooker:

I don't really see a contradiction in what I say above, Melissa. It's because I know I have personal preferences and prejudices that I don't want to make any broader proclamations. You're right that the behaviour I mentioned tends to be gendered, but I feel equally, if not more alienated, by the codes and conventions of male sports fans: I could have railed against those, but the truth is, they're further from my experience and feel alien to me, whereas my resistance to squeeing, shipping and geeking out is more complex, and more bound up with trying to deny that aspect of my own fandom.

This wasn't meant to be a dismissal of certain types of expression; more a demonstration of why I'm in no position to suggest rules for other people, because fan studies is so bound up in the personal, and I (like all of us, I expect) have irrational likes and dislikes. A lot of mine, I'm sure, are a complex love-hate dynamic that, despite my attempts at honesty, I haven't fully admitted to myself: I was in happy, secret, silent tears during the first act of Legally Blonde, which no doubt counts as a kind of squeeing.

I'm under no illusions that what works for me will work for anyone else, which is why I hope I made it plain that I welcome and support the continuation of these discussions, for what my support is worth. And you're right to suggest that I was unfair to compare it to a committee meeting. I was just getting bored of my own voice in monologue. Your response and your challenges make it into a conversation, and remind me that it can still be fun, as it should be.

I should also admit to myself that I'm very bad at shutting up.

Sangita Shresthova:

As I have not tended to think of my work as based in fan studies, I come to this debate with less knowledge about the acafandom discourse. I do, however, find it extremely useful as I consider current work being done on Bollywood audiences and fans. I am, in particular, struck by the unintentional hierarchies of fandom that Melissa brought up. When does a dance choreographed by a Bollywood fan become "worthy" of study (as opposed to many, many others) and what expectation does this place on other fans who may encounter the scholarly analysis of this fan production? As my work connects Bollywood dancers in disparate parts of the world, who may or may not have encountered each other otherwise, I am especially conscious of the power dynamics that are associated with my role as a researcher of cultural practices. In fact, I would dare say that being an acafan becomes akin to a research method - one that allows a researcher to establish a subjectivity based on rapport without compromising academic integrity.

Suzanne Scott:

I don't think that any of us are interested in codifying acafandom to the extent that it sucks the fun out of the term, or to the point that it alienates some modes of fan scholarship and canonizes others. I'm certainly not interested in policing language, or methodology, or taste. Still, my gut response to some of the gendered language in your response, Will, echoed Melissa's, particularly the bits on "baby talk and sleepover squealing." We all have our personal "squicks" and "squees" when it comes to fan discourse and scholarship, but from where I'm standing what will really hurt our cause is a failure to embrace the inherent diversity and subjectivity of the term, or consider its applications beyond classifying a body of literature. The expansions that Melissa initially proposed are just one possibility.

To attempt to tie some of these threads together, and to root this in a quick anecdote, one of the chapters of my dissertation focuses on the 2009 "Twilight ruined comic-con" protests. Full fannish disclosure, I absolutely loathe Twilight. Attending comic-con as a fan that year, I was alternately annoyed by the frequent conflation of "fangirl" and "Twi-hard," horrified by the thinly veiled sexism that underpinned the protests, and disappointed that I, too, felt compelled to distance myself from those genres and texts that comprise our cultural "pink ghetto."

As a scholar, my autoethnographic reflection on these anxieties openly informed my analysis of comic-con as a microcosmic reflection of the fanboy's place of privilege in this industrialized space, and the re-marginalization of the fangirl within media convergence. My initial resistance towards writing about Twilight was equally indebted to both sides of my acafan identity. I was terrified of having one of those closed-throat moments Sangita describes. I didn't want to be mistaken for one of the "squealers," and I didn't want my work (especially as a scholar fresh on the market) to be dismissed or trivialized. Just as Sangita rightly notes the need to be aware of the power that accompanies our roles as cultural researchers, I became acutely aware as I wrote that chapter of the residual power that my fan identity affords me (as someone with more stereotypically "masculine" taste in media texts, modes of engagement, and so on).

All of that said, it was important for me to write that chapter, both as a fan and a scholar, and I bring it up because it (hopefully) speaks to these intersecting issues of taste, shame, professionalism, and power that accompany the "unintentional hierarchies" that exist within our field and beyond it. I'm an avid reader of aca-fannish work on Twilight precisely because work like Melissa's forces me to confront my own anti-fan biases and interrogate them. I may hate the franchise, but I will defend its fans to the bitter end. I recognize their affect, even if I don't always understand what motivates it. Collectively, I can acknowledge their importance, even if their individual expressions of fandom don't resonate with my own.

I think a similar logic motivates my staunch defense of the term "acafan." I have always viewed acafandom as an extension of the mentorship and communal support that we've always celebrated in fans. And, just as in fandom, tensions and fissures, debates about the canon or about codifying a scholarly identity, will always be a part of that. We might find that we're no longer interested in a media property, or a piece of terminology, and move on to a new one. But I, for one, am still shipping aca/fan, and will always be happy to debate its significance, its boundaries, and its limitations.

Will Brooker:

I feel like I've been duly schooled, which is good and how it should be -- thanks Suzanne. I may have taken 'provocation' a bit too literally above, and I could have tempered my language, although again, it was meant as an example of why I don't think I'm in a position to make any broader recommendations. This is a good example, like your Twilight story, of why it's more helpful to try to engage with the tensions in our fannish identities (that is, I'm probably embarrassed by shipping because I recognise it in my own approach to narrative and character, and snobbish about squeeing because I'm jealous of it as a shared emotional response that I find it hard to admit to) than to go with initial and more superficial, perhaps defensive reactions, as I did above.

Suzanne Scott:

To briefly contextualize my own moments of defensiveness here, I think how we approached the provocations says a great deal about the stages we're at in our respective careers. I feel like I'm still cementing what sort of acafan I want to be, or coming to terms with the fluidity of that identity and its applications outside of fan studies. Part of my excitement about how we might realize the participatory and transformative ethos of fandom in our own work, or apply those ideas to an interdisciplinary discussion about pedagogy and scholarly communication, is because I'm just starting out. And, I know that in a year I'll be back on the market, where my acafan identity will intrigue some institutions and alienate others, and I'm personally and professionally invested in proving its worth. Reading Sangita's provocation, it's clear that there are spaces where that work still needs to be done, and without question part of the reason I refuse to shut up is because I'm not in a position to do so yet.

Melissa Click:

Perhaps without meaning to, we've just performed one form of utility "acafan" holds for fan scholars as our field of study grows and shifts. One important component/use of the term is to understand how our fan identities/preferences inform our scholarship. Will, Sangita, and Suzanne have all demonstrated how our affiliations and preferences can inform our work and the positions we take in relation to others' work. I think it's really important to try to find linkages/overlaps in our work as well as noting where our differences lie. Will's initial response suggested a feeling that our work and positions were too disparate to warrant further discussion, but I think that the ensuing discussion has pointed out that in fact it is our differences that fed our discussion and (hopefully) helped us come to a more complex sense of how our own positions affect what we study and how we evaluate others' work.

Will Brooker:

I thought I knew where I stood, and what I felt, but this discussion has challenged me in a very interesting and valuable way -- as a scholar and as a fan. So, thanks very much to the three of you.

Melissa A. Click is an assistant professor of Communication at the University of Missouri. She is co-editor of Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media and the Vampire Franchise. Her work on media audiences and messages can be found in Popular Communication, Women's Studies in Communication, Transformative Works & Cultures, and in NYU's anthology Fandom.

Will Brooker is Director of Research at Kingston University, London. His work on popular culture and audience includes Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, The Audience Studies Reader and The Blade Runner Experience. His next book is Hunting the Dark Knight.

Sangita Shresthova is the Research Director of Henry Jenkins' Civic Paths Project at USC. A Czech/Nepali dancer/choreographer and media scholar, she holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. Sangita's book on Bollywood dance (Is It All About the Hips? Bollywood Dance Around the World) has just been released.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning and Research at Occidental College. She currently serves as a symposium editor for the journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and her work has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica and The Routledge Handbook of Participatory Cultures (forthcoming). She blogs on fandom, the politics of participatory culture, and teaching fan studies at suzannescott.wordpress.com.

Acafandom and Beyond: Will Brooker, Melissa A. Click, Suzanne Scott, and Sangita Shresthova

Will Brooker:

Why I Spoke About Myself, and Why I Shut Up

I identify as male, white, straight and middle-class. Anyone who has read my first monograph, Batman Unmasked (2000) will know that, as I helpfully pointed it out in the introduction. I also included extracts from my diary, reproductions of a story I wrote when I was seven years old, and a history of my own involvement with Batman. 'I love that man,' I wrote. 'I love Batman.'

In 2011, I wrote another book about Batman, called Hunting the Dark Knight. In this new book, I have barely mentioned myself or my fandom at all. This short piece tries to explain why I spoke about myself, and why I shut up.

As a white, straight, heterosexual, middle-class man, I can't help feeling that white, straight, heterosexual, middle-class men have enough chances to speak about themselves, and that we hear enough from them. But I'll need to talk about myself a little more here, before shutting up again.

Why I Spoke About Myself

Batman Unmasked was originally my PhD thesis. Part of the research process was, therefore, about learning the traditions of my discipline, and situating myself within those strands and approaches: becoming aware of a heritage, demonstrating that awareness, choosing an affiliation, and identifying as a scholar.

My declaration of identity was shaped and inspired by the Cultural Studies work I particularly liked or aspired to, from the previous decades: Janice Radway with her romance readers, Paul Willis and his school-lads, John Fiske and his unembarrassed enjoyment of 1980s trash culture. I was encouraged by Fred Pfeil's White Guys, with its Nineties-New-Man self-examination, and provoked by Andy Medhurst's opening statement, in 'Batman, Deviance and Camp', that he was gay, thirty and not a particularly devoted follower of the Dark Knight. It was Medhurst's (then) youth and his bold anti-fan position that prompted me to interrogate his work so doggedly in my own thesis: at 26, I saw him as someone I had to take on, a contender to challenge.

And that's another reason for the foregrounding of my own identity in that book. I was 26 when I started it. With hindsight, that seems not much more than a teenager, with a potent mix of anxiety and arrogance driving me to make my own mark on the world. Batman Unmasked was my brand: it was my first, and for all I knew, my only chance to stamp my name somewhere on scholarship. So it's not just got my name on the cover; it's got my personality all through the text. It was my first book, and I thought it might be my best book or my last book, so it became personal: a missile of the self, carefully aimed, and designed to become a small monument.

Why I Shut Up

A few years after the publication of Batman Unmasked, I was asked to review Scott Bukatman's book, Matters of Gravity. I knew of Scott Bukatman; he was young, smart and successful, an academic superhero. I was envious that he had a collection of his miscellaneous articles published, and while part of me was thrilled and energised by his roller-coaster writing and laser-sharp thought, another part was perversely glad to find so many self-congratulatory asides and personal confessions. No doubt I recognised in Bukatman something I disliked in myself. Grouped together in my review, and joined up through my sardonic, ungenerous commentary, his autobiographical reflections looked pretty self-indulgent. Soon afterwards, I received an email from Scott Bukatman. He wasn't happy. He said it seemed I had liked the book, but didn't like the person who wrote it.

It doesn't matter now who comes out best from that exchange. I don't think I come out well. It was a faintly pathetic spectacle: two geeks locked in superhuman combat, like Bruce Banner battling Peter Parker. 'If I KILL YOU... I DIE!' By squabbling with Scott, I was only knocking myself.

In Hunting the Dark Knight, I mention once, early on, that I'm a fan. I do it for much the same reason I foregrounded my fandom in my work on Star Wars audiences, and in the questionnaires I circulated for this recent book: to reassure my respondents and fan-readers that they're in safe hands, and they - and the things they love - are going to be treated with respect. That I still feel a need to do this is, I guess, a reflection on the shoddy way that popular journalism still treats popular culture and its followers: decades after Trekkers were mocked on Saturday Night Live (Jenkins, 1992), we still have to let people know they're not going to be satirised and belittled for enjoying something.

But the truth is, I don't have to tell people I'm a fan, and that I love Batman. It's there on every page. Any Dark Knight devotee reading my discussion of Red Robin, Kathy Kane, Owlman and Bat-mite will know they're in safe hands, that I'm one of them. Just as Coleridge doesn't have to declare 'I love that man: I love Shakespeare' at the start of his essays, because his devotion and understanding speak from every word of his analysis, so, arguably, our work should be steeped in respect and commitment to our objects of study. As in so many loving relationships, the bond can come across subtly as a constant presence, and doesn't have to be shouted aloud, like a teenage crush.

I want to end this piece with a quotation.

This dress needs to seal the deal

Make a grown man kneel

But it can't come right out and say bride

Cant look like I'm desperate or

Like I'm waiting for it

I gotta leave Warner his pride

So bride is more implied...

Elle Woods, 'Omigod You Guys', Legally Blonde: The Musical (O'Keefe, Benjamin, Hach, 2007)

I can quote all of that song from memory: I can sing all the different parts, though not very well. I don't have to tell you that I love that musical, or how many times I've seen it and listened to the soundtrack. I don't have to tell you what kind of white, straight, middle-class guy I am. The fact that I can recite Legally Blonde word for word surely tells you enough.

To paraphrase Harvard scholar Elle Woods: the 'fan' can be more implied.

Sangita Shresthova:

I come to acafandom from a slightly tangential, yet to me, closely connected perspective. I am a dancer (one trained predominantly in Indian classical dance) and a media scholar who has spent many years studying Bollywood dance. I also boldly claim my affinity for the energizing stories and shimmies that, to me, define Bollywood dance that I have had many occasions to indulge in as an audience-dancer, dance instructor, and on the now very rare occasion, even as a performer. Mixing academic research with fannish practice has not been easy, or even welcomed, in some of the scholarly company I have kept over the past years. That said, I want to open my provocation on aca-fandom with a brief excerpt from an article I wrote for Pulse Magazine (a South Asian dance magazine published out of the United Kingdom):

"As I run towards the studio, the sound of chanting fills the early evening air. I glance at my watch and sigh. I am late again. I change into my dance sari, and hurriedly check that my pleats allow for a full Aramandhi (a classical pose). Cautiously, I pull back the sliding door and step into the a room filled with dance students stamping in unison to the driving commands of their Bharat Natyam (Indian classical dance) teacher, Viji Prakash. I settle into a position in the back of the room, rush through my salutation, and prepare to join the class. But just then, the sequence ends and the students disperse briefly. Viji-auntie, as she is deferentially called by her students, looks at me with a teasing smile. "Miss Bollywood is here," she exclaims. Several students snicker and laugh. "No seriously, she is writing her Ph.D. on Bollywood," Viji-auntie explains. An incredulous student in her late teens asks me, "Is that right?" I nod, suddenly very preoccupied with my sari pleats. I am angry at myself for feeling embarrassed by this superficial, playful exchange. "You should show us some Bollywood some day," another student comments teasingly. "Well, Bollywood dance does actually have a very interesting history..." I begin to justify myself. Viji-auntie laughs as she moves her hips side to side looking to the side seductively. The class convulses in a burst of laughter. I smile but feel my throat tighten ever so slightly. I have been once again singled out as a Bollywoodized Bharat Natyam dancer. So, why would a Bharat Natyam dancer take Bollywood seriously and even (gasp) admit to enjoying some of the choreographies?" (Pulse Magazine 2010)

Re-reading this introductory paragraph as I collected my thoughts about acafandom, I was once again overcome with the profound sense of discomfort I faced in my Indian dance class that day and how that feeling really followed me throughout my research on Bollywood dance. I initially embarked on my research on Bollywood dance as a graduate student the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT where I was allowed to explore Bollywood as the natural symbiosis of my areas of interest (dance and media) and my own mixed-race South Asian background. The fact that I actually took great pleasure in watching (re-watching), discussing and choregraphing movements to Bollywood songs - to me clearly defining me as an acafan in this space - was seen as definite plus. I left MIT with a conviction that aca-fandom was a welcome breath of fresh air to the largely dismissive scholarship on Bollywood dance that pre-dated my work. Sharing my enthusiasm, my friends joined me in starting a largely fan-driven Bollywood Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic.

In the years that followed, I have gone through a series of battles around my enthusiasm and willingness to foreground my Bollywood fandom. Very early into my dance-based doctoral program at UCLA, I was told that I would have to "put my love of Bollywood aside to write well about it." In translation, this implicitly suggested that the best way to approach Bollywood dance was to critique it for its commercial nature and underpinnings, rather than engage with the fandoms it inspired. This stance contrasted starkly to the much more importance that was afforded to my classical Indian dance training and the ties and investments I had to that community as a result. In retrospect, it was this training in Indian dance (not my years of attention to, and experience with, Bollywood dance) that allowed me to position myself as a credible scholar in this field in the department and beyond. This is also probably why I no longer fully identify as a dance scholar. As I progressed towards completing my dissertation and sought to establish myself as a scholar in dance studies, I often found myself foregrounding my classical dance training when presenting at conferences and otherwise sharing my work. I was often silent about my own affinities towards Bollywood (unless explicitly asked).

It has taken me quite a long time to get past this disconnect, but its resolution finally came last year when I was invited to curate and speak at a Hindi film dance symposium convened by Akademi, one of, if not the most, prestigious Indian dance institutions in the United Kingdom. Speaking there, I took a bold step and decided to starkly differentiate Bollywood from Indian dance, positioning Bollywood as a hybrid rather than Indian dance form. To do this, I drew on my own early experiences with Bollywood, once again, best summarized by an excerpt:

My first introduction to Hindi cinema took place many years ago at my cousin's pirated video rental store in Kathmandu (Nepal) where I would, on occasion, watch anything that was playing on the VCR. Most of the time, it was some Hindi movie. As the plots and stars slipped by me, it was the dances that were etched in my memory. As the product of a Czech/Nepali mixed marriage, my childhood was defined by a constant, at times painful, cultural negotiation. Born in an era that preceded the current more tolerant approaches to interculturalism, my life was littered with constant reminders of my outsider status in both Nepali and Czech societies. Strangely, it was in watching Hindi film songs and dances that a world of cultural mixing first welcomed me into its midst. In the remorseless blending of movement sources and costume-styles, I found a messy, yet appealing, reflection of my own scattered cultural identity. (Pulse 2010)

To my surprise, my approach to Bollywood dance as a hybrid dance form struck a cord among a generation of younger scholars and dancers, who have felt constrained by the restrictions of Indian classical dance practice and discourse. But it was really my position as both a scholar and a fan, as someone who both studied and experienced Bollywood dance, that allowed me to get to this moment. Clearly my research on Bollywood dance would not have been possible without the personal connections I was able to form with dancers around our shared experiences in this space. At the same time, it was my ability to downplay my fandom as foreground my training in Indian classical dance that allowed me to get to where I am now. So to me, the term acafan is at times a support, and at other times a challenge. It is, however, always relevant.

Melissa Click:

I'm a bit ambivalent about whether I'd use "aca-fan" to describe myself. If I were to use the term, it would be only in the most limited of applications to denote that I am an academic who studies fans. To be clear, my ambivalence stems from the ways comparison to transformative cultures diminishes my fan practices. I am what Anne Kustritz describes as an "as-is" fan, not a "creative fan," and I usually study "as-is" fans as well. Because of this distinction, I often feel (in both aca and fan circles) as though my interests and behaviors are too vanilla to signify "true fandom." Indeed, Kustritz's distinctions, though instructive, demonstrate the value normally given to (or removed from) particular fan practices--who wants to be the "as-is" fan?

My work on Martha Stewart and Twilight fans further separates me from my fellow fan scholars. I don't study "quality" media texts or groups of people deemed particularly interesting. My topic choices, as a result, offer me little credibility in academic or fan circles--adult women obsessed with Stewart's homekeeping advice and teenage girls who debate the merits of vampires and werewolves are seen as dupes who waste their time on lowbrow (and feminine) texts, and my interest in studying them, as a result, is dismissed as inconsequential and uninteresting.

That said, my ambivalence about the term should not signal that I am not doing many of the things this discussion has pointed out that aca-fen do. What I find most useful about "aca-fan" is the focus on self-reflexivity and the insistence on maintaining a dialogue between our aca and fan selves and communities. I think a discussion about the role of value and taste in our work is long overdue. In this spirit, I wish to reflect upon some areas I hope we can discuss about the ongoing application and function of "aca-fan":

* Is there a way we can recognize the distinctions among fans as differences of kind and not value? If we can agree that there are different kinds of fans, might we too have different kinds of aca-fen?

* How can we (should we?) expand our work to incorporate different kinds of fans? How might anti-fan studies and anti-aca-fen contribute to the study of fans?

* How do taste and value affect the kinds of texts and fans we study and the terrain of the field? What might be gained from studying fans of texts that aren't viewed as "quality" (or at least campy/ironic)?

Our field began in defense of fans ridiculed in mainstream culture, and to support our arguments about fans' value and activity, fan scholarship has focused on fan creativity and invention--but it seems that by selecting the fans we deem most interesting for study, we have created hierarchy a new, leaving fans we deem uninteresting to be derided as too ordinary, too dim-witted to appreciate quality texts, and too uninteresting to be worthy of study. Underscoring our dedication to reflexivity, I think we need to ask ourselves how aca-fan identity impacts the scholarship we produce and value, and what is lost when our scholarship overlooks fans who are not like us.

Suzanne Scott:

I come to this conversation at an interesting professional juncture, but a fitting one considering the topic. Last year, I completed my dissertation, which broadly focuses on the demographic, representational, professional and academic "revenge" of the fanboy within convergence culture, and the potentially marginalizing effects this has on fangirls. I also braved my first pass at the academic job market. Suffice it to say, I have spent the bulk of the past two years contemplating, writing about, marketing, explaining, and (occasionally) defending my scholarly identity.

"Acafan" is a label that I embrace, and one that I will always remain deeply indebted to professionally, pedagogically, and personally. It has granted me access to a network of brilliant scholars I'm lucky to also call my friends. Acafandom has allowed me to connect with my students and assure them that affect is not the arch nemesis of critical thought and compelling analysis. I think it has helped my work embody the qualities of immediacy, accessibility, particularity, and situationalism that Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc called for in their manifesto for a new cultural studies. Perhaps most importantly, it has helped that work travel outside of the walls of the academy and attract a wider readership whose feedback I've found invaluable.

It also helped me get a job (and may have lost me a few along the way...a Nerf battleaxe did make a regrettable appearance in the background of a video conference interview).

This July, I began a two-year appointment as a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow at Occidental College's Center for Digital Learning and Research. This was not a conventional tenure track position, and accordingly the interview process was far more transparent. I was given a list of questions to consider for my Skype interview, so that we might have a more substantive dialogue about what I would bring to the position. In addition to the usual suspects (tell us about your teaching, research, etc.), I was asked to consider the "possibilities for hybrid academic careers." The question stuck out because I hadn't ever heard anyone ask it before, but also because hybridity was already so deeply embedded in my scholarly identity. I had, for better or for worse, approached prior interview questions about acafandom with Admiral Ackbar echoing in my head. I recognized immediately that, this time, it was not a trap; it was a call to think about acafandom in more expansive terms.

Henry wondered in his post whether the term "acafan" is still useful, and the contributors to this series have been thoughtfully tackling that question. But I have to wonder if that question ultimately misses the point. I personally consider the term to be useful, but I'm ultimately more interested in developing and discussing new uses. Instead of calling for the discontinuation of the term, shouldn't we be discussing how we might deploy it in new ways? If, as Karen Hellekson has argued here, the term's "power lies in the academic's power; the fan gains little or nothing from its deployment," then shouldn't we begin thinking about how to empower fans (or our students, or other scholars) though its use?

Sam Ford noted that he longed to "see the insights of media studies academics reach audiences outside journal readership and media studies conference attendees." In my experience, acafandom has facilitated this sort of outreach. In 2007, I served as the chair of programming for Phoenix Rising, a massive Harry Potter symposium designed to draw in a mix of academics, professionals, and fans. We offered both academic and exploratory (fan creativity oriented) programming tracks, and I found the conversations and collaborations that emerged out of that space to be richer and more rewarding than the bulk of academic conferences I've attended. In 2009, I joined the symposium editorial team of Transformative Works and Cultures, a section of the open access, peer-reviewed online journal designed to promote a dialogue between academic and fans. Has my involvement and labor in these participatory, acafannish spaces made me more attractive on the tenure track job market? Would they count towards tenure once I landed a job? The answer at most institutions might still be a resounding no on both counts. But that doesn't mean they aren't valuable.

In my current corner of #alt-academia, a hybrid identity is no longer something to be defended, but desired. A fannish sensibility isn't a quirk that must be concealed, but something that can be wielded strategically to think about how to model transformative scholarship, or design more participatory pedagogical models. Am I being naïve? Will I ultimately have to cautiously explain or subtly veil the "fan" component of my acafan identity when I go back out on the tenure track market in a few years? Perhaps, on both counts. But I also get to spend the next two years in a place that actively expects my aca-fan identity to shape my work and how I share it. So, while I completely agree with Will that we don't need to continually pronounce our fan credentials, and instead allow them to permeate our work, I also feel lucky to be in a position where I'm not expected to shut up about it.

Melissa A. Click is an assistant professor of Communication at the University of Missouri. She is co-editor of Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media and the Vampire Franchise. Her work on media audiences and messages can be found in Popular Communication, Women's Studies in Communication, Transformative Works & Cultures, and in NYU's anthology Fandom.

Will Brooker is Director of Research at Kingston University, London. His work on popular culture and audience includes Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, The Audience Studies Reader and The Blade Runner Experience. His next book is Hunting the Dark Knight.

Sangita Shresthova is the Research Director of Henry Jenkins' Civic Paths Project at USC. A Czech/Nepali dancer/choreographer and media scholar, she holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. Sangita's book on Bollywood dance (Is It All About the Hips? Bollywood Dance Around the World) has just been released.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning and Research at Occidental College. She currently serves as a symposium editor for the journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and her work has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica and The Routledge Handbook of Participatory Cultures (forthcoming). She blogs on fandom, the politics of participatory culture, and teaching fan studies at suzannescott.wordpress.com.

Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part Two)

Conversation Jason:

In reading over Alex and Gail's excellent provocations, I find myself reading fairly fannishly - not because I'm an admirer of their work (although I certainly am), but because even though they each present arguments that might seem to contradict my own stated position, I highlight and (to evoke our host) poach the moments and examples that confirm my own ideas. In Alex's post, I see evidence of the usefulness of writing what you believe and feel without a label - he might be framed as an acafan fore-parent, but the work that inspired so many of us didn't need that label to forge a model.

And his post points to another example of a slippery term that has had much more semiotic utility than either acafan or postmodern: queer. As we all know, this was not a term coined for academic convenience or trendiness, but rather a reclamation of an already powerful signifier that has come to define a field in seemingly (for a sideline observer like myself) coherent, pragmatic and politically efficacious ways. The semantic history of queer proves that terms can matter, but suggests that we should also engage with terms that already matter and fight the important fights, rather than coining and squabbling over new ones.

Both Gail and Alex's posts highlight the role of affect in writing about culture, and the importance of owning up to our personal engagements. But while Alex chose to "inject the I" into his work through both political and emotional investments, Gail chooses to speak Vulcan over Klingon, tempering affect while foregrounding her taste and identity. I'm sure that adherents of the term acafan would allow for both styles of fannishness under its rubric, but that points to challenges of the concept: either you must delineate the category in a way that excludes some significant modes of engagement, or you create a large umbrella that loses its explanatory power. I'm left unsure why labelling either of their approaches, or those of the many others who have participated in this series, as "acafan" helps us understand or justify the resulting work.

So I'm left with a question for both of my esteemed co-provocateurs: what would be different for the type of work you do without the term acafan to categorize it?

Gail:

Oh, quite simply, I think of myself as an "acafan" because Henry employed that term. He could have called it "lorax" and I would have said, "Yes, that's what I'm trying to do with my work, with my career. I'm trying to be a lorax!" As Alex is the fore-parent of so much great cultural studies and queer studies work, so Henry is the fore-parent of so much great work in fan studies. (Thus it is so great to have these two strands of genealogy touch points through this conversation, though of course their work has always been relevant to each other's.) I came into fan studies through the Henry route, and so Henry's terminology is mine.

But actually I would like to take up the question of using "queer" as a possible descriptor for "acafan." I know that's not literally what you suggested, Jason, but I have often wondered about drawing a connection between the two terms. On the one hand, "acafan" "queers" both academic and fan, Henry has explicitly referenced the origins of his early fan studies work in the emergent queer studies movement, fans generally use terms like "outed," there is something real at stake for those of us who are academics who "come out" as fans, and one of Henry's landmark contributions was showing that it could be done with respect to popular media, that one could and maybe MUST "out" oneself in academic work as a fan.

On the other hand, earlier in this discussion, John Edward Campbell asked "those who identify as 'acafans' to be a bit more reflexive about comparisons of fans to sexual minorities," emphasizing rightly that the dangers for people who "out" themselves as sexual minorities are far more acute and severe than for people who "out" themselves as fans.

If either of you has any thoughts on the intersections of "queer" and "acafan," as two terms that could be brought to bear on one another or may support or serve one another, or as two terms that are and must remain very distinct and separate, I would be really interested in them.

Alex:

I'll begin with Gail's provocation about how she tries to have her academic work speak critically about fandom and things she is a fan of rather than have her speaking as a fan, and how this particular positioning as an acafan (one I think most acafans take on) runs the risk of reinforcing "the old equivalences" of fan with "irrationality" and "overemotionalism" and academic with "rationality" and critical "distance." I agree with you, Gail, that this positioning may be a matter of "tone," and I will add "degree," rather than a wholesale denial or repression of emotion, but I have always been frustrated by how deploying this position always seems to demand we "control" our expressions of enthusiasm because they are, somehow, antithetical to the intellectual work we do. Is it really be impossible to conceive of a piece of work that veers between Photoplay and "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," and that is taken seriously in the academy?

Jason, you really are being a provocateur when you ask if we would really lose anything in terms of how we go about our business without the term "acafan" (or "postmodern"). I suppose I would say "no" and "yes." No, in the sense that those of us who were/are intent on combining "the personal is the political" type investments in our work would have proceeded (and did proceed) without a concept to work within or under.

But, yes, in the sense that it is handy to have a term like "acafan," or the earlier "scholar-fan," to indicate a "performance" option (as you put it, Gail) for scholarship. Once a term like this is established, it can provide some added weight to the struggle to legitimate certain types of scholarly performance. (I know, even while writing out "legitimate" I was cringing, but a girl's got to eat, so. . .) While, as Jason points out, this term (whether applied to a person or to a product) can mean many things to many people, it does gesture toward a group of people (self-identifying and not) and body of work that has attempted to expand and complicate just what constitutes a "scholar" or a piece of "scholarly" or "academic" work. And I do feel a kinship with these folks and with this project--though I guess don't really need a term to describe all this, I suppose. How's that for equivocating?

As to understanding acafandom, the acafan, and acafan production as "queer" somehow, I don't see why not, for the reasons Gail outlines, primary among them the impulse to critique categories with an eye to deconstructing them. Following this line of thinking, then, the queer goal of acafandom should finally be to trouble the categories of "fan" and "academic" (and academic and fan discourse) so much that we are left with exactly what Jason is calling for--a space that allows "our arguments and ideas to speak for themselves" no matter what their approach, methodology, for form. So, Jason, maybe you can just wait a while for acafandom to do its queer work!

Jason:

I appreciate that both of you equivocate about my question, and even though I'm skeptical of the term, I'm similarly on the fence. Such labels certainly have their uses for community-building, group identification, and signalling a set of sympathies so that others can find like-minded fellow travellers - I imagine that on some social network like Academia.edu, tagging yourself as an acafan could be useful (as would tagging ourselves as Loraxes for that matter!). But as academics in the critical humanities, we need to be careful in how we use our labels, as today's marker of convenience is tomorrow's site of political factioning or terminological warfare: when will we see articles positing that we are now in the era of post-acafandom, to be followed by neo-acafandom?

To pull out another term that emerged from the theoretical stew of postmodernism (but I'd argue need not be labeled as such to be useful), what I think is going on around these acafan conversations is a form of strategic essentialism. There is a tactical utility for scholars, especially in vulnerable untenured positions, to be able to grasp onto a term like acafan and highlight how prominent figures in our field like Henry & Alex embrace it - it helps situate ones work & identity within an area of study that has validity and legitimation. But what happens when a hiring or review committee asks "so what does that mean?" I think it's most useful and honest to be able to embrace labels not just for their pragmatic utility, but because they actually help explain what it is you do and how you do it.

As for the queer question, I get the parallel in terms of issues of visibility and categorical instability, but echoing John Edward Campbell's point that Gail cited, I fear that it might unintentionally belittle the huge power differentials between being a fan and being a sexual minority. The odds that someone would suffer tangible discrimination or violence for being a fan are so much less than for being queer, and the fandoms that would probably carry the greatest stigma are themselves already queered. In other words, nobody's going to care that I "outed" myself as a sysop for a Lost fan wiki, but a scholar who writes BDSM slash fanfic has legitimate reasons to keep that aspect of her fandom closeted - but I'd argue that's less because it's a fan activity than because it's a queer type of fandom. Might a strategic use of the term acafandom would help her by validating such activity within an established community? Perhaps, and if so, that's as good of a justification for the term as I could imagine - although my skepticism about the incoherence of the category remains.

Gail: Jason, you're such a hater! It's awesome - I like the "hater" position and use it very frequently myself (cf. Jonathan Gray's outstanding work on "anti-fans" and "non-fans"). You're a non-fan of the "acafan" term and an anti-fan of the potential for terms like "post-acafan" (!) and I respect that. I actually don't use the term "acafan" to refer to myself in any promotion review-type situation, or to define myself or my work to non-acafen, but I do *think* of myself as an acafan and I like that a term exists as a "tag" that other scholars use so that I can find them and their work and understand something about their methodologies and what their goals are.

"Acafan" works well for me as a kind of search term (though I've never typed that into Google) - if someone is called an "acafan" or refers to themselves using that term, even in passing, it's helpful for me to recognize them as someone whose work may have some relevance and importance to my own work.

But just going back to the lorax example quickly, I am also fine with other tags like "fan studies scholar," "scholar-fan," "fan theorist," "fan cultures scholar," etc. And that circle of terms can widen outward quickly to "cultural studies scholar," "media studies scholar," "digital culture theorist," "Amy Pond who studies online communities," etc. I just find terminology useful for a quick assessment of whether someone's essays or books or blog entries or LiveJournal posts or conference papers are worth time and attention - Are they working on projects that are of interest to me, or not? Are they using approaches and frameworks that I might want to learn about, or not?

But I do think that as the acafan approach gets to be more and more common, with new generations of scholars emerging for whom the question of whether or not they should declare their fandoms is not even a question, that the term may become specific to a time frame. "Some scholars and fans in the late 1990s and early 2000s, sensing commonalities and overlaps in their theoretical and critical work, used the term 'acafan' to define themselves. Today, it is well-known that everyone who studies media of any kind is a fan, a non-fan, or an anti-fan, and that anyone who thinks that passion and emotion are not integral to media criticism and analysis is an idiot." (from the Future Encyclopedia of Media Studies, copyright 2042).

I do hope, though, that if and when "acafan" goes away, that we who were acafen remember that academics and fans can and should talk to one another, that they/we are not that different from one another, that the "meta" done in fandoms and the "studies" done in academia are similar kinds of work. I am especially concerned here about fans' possible marginalization from future academic discussions, since academics have access to (some) institutional legitimacy and research funds that many fans do not.

Thank you both, Alex and Jason, for weighing in on whether "queer" can or mustn't be thought of as pertinent to "acafan." Both of you suggest that much acafan work can do, and is already doing, queer work - and so inspires discomfort and encounters disapprobation because of its queerness, not because of its acafanishness. To me, that means that it is useful to think about "acafan" and "queer" together, and to articulate their relationships, but that in any discussion of the two concepts together, it is crucial not to mistake the social positioning of one for the social positioning of the other.

Alex: Well it looks as if I am bringing up the rear (to coin a phrase). It seems as if where we are leaving "acafan" is understanding it as a concept that might have certain uses for academic fans if not for "civilian" fans (sorry, I was an Army brat) when it is used carefully and strategically--but that it may have a shelf life, so we shouldn't get too attached to it. I think that between and among them, our provocations and responses have compellingly suggested some of the potential benefits of using "acafan" as well as some of its limitations or problematic aspects.

Reading both of your follow-up comments on "acafandom" and/as "queer," I realized that I probably sounded a bit flippant in my last response on this. As a queer and an acafan--yes, I will hold onto that label for a while longer though I don't really need it to do what I do, even though I still think it helps explain what I do to some extent, although Jason is correct in suggesting that sometime you need to define "acafan" for people before talking about your specific acafan work-- I agree that while as concepts they can be interestingly compared to each other, this should not suggest that "open" acafans leave themselves open to anything like what "open" queers do--except, possibly, as Jason suggests, when the acafan/acafan work is itself queer.

I like Gail's encyclopedia entry for "acafan(dom)," especially the final sentiment, which is an interesting reversal of what many undergraduate students think: that analysis and criticism have no place in expressions of (their) fan enthusiasms. That is, they will no longer enjoy (or enjoy less) popular culture texts or personalities once they have certain (academic) critical and analytic tools. Hey, this might be something else the concept and products of acafandom are useful for--showing students that you can simultaneously think critically and emote when you watch a film, listen to a song, contemplate a celebrity, etc. etc. etc. A carefully selected acafan article or two--along with a general discussion of "acafan(dom)"--have done wonders in my undergraduate classes along these lines.

Abigail (Gail) De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a joint appointment in the Berkeley Center for New Media (http://bcnm-dev.berkeley.edu/) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (http://tdps.berkeley.edu/). Her current LJ userpics are: The Beatles, Don & Peggy, Starbuck & Apollo (Kara & Lee), Rogue, Blair Waldorf, Torvill & Dean, Lisbon & Jane, Tony & Pepper, Daniel & Betty, and Mal & Zoe. At this time, she's looking for a good Arya Stark icon.

Alexander Doty is Chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University and a Professor in this department and in the Department of Gender Studies. He has written Making Things Perfectly Queer and Flaming Classics, co-edited Out in Culture, and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas. An old fogey, he is currently not active in any web-based fan communities, but in the past he has been known to put his 2-cents up on broadwayworld.com, and to indulge the consumer side of his fandom by buying risque postcards of 1920s stars George O'Brien and Ramon Novarro on Ebay--and, yes, he will end up writing something on at least one of them in order to justify these purchases to his "aca" side.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College, and a Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen, Germany, for the 2011-12 academic year. As an aca, he's written Genre & Television (2004), Television & American Culture (2009), Complex TV (in process) and the blog Just TV (ongoing). As a fan, he's been active in the Lostpedia community, transforms Wilco songs for the mandolin, and calls his fantasy football team The Heisenberg Helmets.

Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)

Alexander Doty: Reading through the posts, I realized that some of my earlier work is considered part of the pre-history of acafan(dom). It is not really self-reflexively working at the intersection of scholarship and fandom, but it gestures towards this space by making a case for lesbian and gay and queer reception of mainstream film and popular culture as an intense and conflicted "fannish" site for articulating marginalized identities and communities, as well as a site within which to challenge notions of (fixed) identity and (unified) community.

This early work suggests that LGQ film and popular culture enthusiasms were also almost always what might now be called acafan-like as they simultaneously negotiated pleasures while generating critiques from positions that were at once inside and outside the dominant culture that produced these film and media products. As the sometimes "gay," sometimes "queer," sometimes "femme," sometimes "butch" scholar and fan considering all this, I was also articulating an approach to film and popular culture that I hoped to deploy in my own writing.

Inspired by Robin Wood's "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic," I wanted my academic work to more clearly and consistently reveal my "personal-is-the-political" gay/queer investments in film and popular culture. As I moved in this direction, I discovered that the addition of "gay" or "lesbian" or "queer" or "bisexual" to even legitimated academic approaches to film and popular culture--such as auteurism, genre studies, film history, etc.--resulted in this work often being considered unscholarly and unsubstantiated "wish fulfillment" or "fantasy. In effect, a gay reading of any film or TV show that didn't represent gay men in "obvious," denotative ways was a subcultural fan reading to many in the academy. Things are somewhat different now, though I find that the academy still frequently asks LGBTQ film and media acafans to go the extra mile in order to overcome resistance to what might be perceived of as doubly fannish positions.

I suppose I got so tired of attempting to inject aspects of the autobiographical (-as- political) into my scholarly writing only to have it rejected or patronized, that I returned to my English Department roots and hid behind close textual readings that were theoretically, culturally, and historically informed, but largely devoid of any obvious sense of personal investment or enthusiasm--unless you sensed it in the sometimes breathless and colorful prose stylings, or, read my first book's introduction. A (re)turning point for me involved Henry Jenkins and one of the other co-editors of Hop on Pop, Jane Shattuc, who said my lesbian reading of The Wizard of Oz was all well and good, but where was I in all this? That is, what brought this particular gay fan and queer academic to this particular lesbian understanding of the film?

Forced to fess up, I examined my personal and professional "archives" and discovered that a longtime sense of fluid gender and sexuality, combined with annual (or bi-annual) viewings of The Wizard of Oz since childhood, combined with teaching the film in various contexts, combined with lesbian feminism, combined with queer theory, combined with a particular drag performance I attended involving "Judy Garland" and lesbian fans, led me to see the film as a lesbian coming of age (if not coming out) story.

In short, my whole life had led me to that piece on The Wizard of Oz. Only by drawing together aspects of autobiography, fandom, pedagogy, and academic training could I express (and, for some, justify) my "queer reception" love for the film, while also recognizing its ideological lapses--largely centered on the butch Elmira Gulch/the Wicked Witch of the West, I might add.

So, while I have previously used the term "scholar-fan" to describe the kind work I do--or that I prefer to do--I am now ready to drop the hyphen that separates these two terms, take up "acafan," and deal with the tensions and negotiations that might arise from this hybrid term (though I did notice that Henry's blog does use the hyphenated "aca-fan" in its title--what gives Henry?). Yes, being and acafan and doing acafan work can be somewhat "elitist" as some have pointed out, but it can also be a site for meaningfully mingling the academy and "the streets." I know I never felt that my life was more consistently integrated than when the queer film/media scholarship and teaching I was doing as a post-doc at Cornell were being fed by actions I participated in as a member of ACT-UP and Queer Nation--and vice-versa. When is the next time that my Nancy Sinatra fandom will express itself as part of a City Hall protest done to the tune of "These Boots are Made For Walking," or when most of my students will be integrating their activist art and video-making into term projects that deploy "high theory" and cultural studies approaches to contextualize and analyze their work?

P.S. I apologize for this Me-centered opening statement. My plan was to go over all the posts before our groups' entries and cherry pick ideas with which to engage. But after landing on comments that positioned some folks in my academic cohort as the foremothers and forefathers of the acafan, I got nostalgic--and you got this aca-autobiographical opening statement. I hope you can forgive it as a form of Grandpa Simpson-like ramblings about the (not-always-so-good) old days. I will resist further Memory Lane wanderings in our subsequent conversation.

Abigail De Kosnik:

Firstly, I would like to say that I am an "acafan" of many of the participants in this wonderful debate (is that correct usage of the term?), and my enthusiasm for the work of Alexander Doty is one of the longest-lasting fandoms of my life. Alex's scholarship - the kinds of interventions that he describes in his "provocation" above - were key inspirations for me to seek out training in cultural studies, queer studies, and media studies, none of which were taught in any deep or concerted way when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1990s. Therefore, you can imagine my excitement at being assigned to his group! Along with Jason Mittell, whom I consider a friend and colleague, and whose work I also think of as foundational to my media studies training. What luck!

This is one of my favorite rewards of academia: sometimes the structures and operations and networks that academics create and operate (I am thinking of public performances of academic-ness such as conferences, symposia, and Henry's blog - Henry's blog being more consistently entertaining than the former two formats) put you (me) in direct contact with the objects of your (my) fandom. I mean, I remember the first time that Henry Jenkins saw me and remembered my name. I had introduced myself to Henry a couple of times at conferences to say that I was a graduate student who was a huge fan of his, but the first time Henry greeted me by name, I thought, My God, Henry Jenkins KNOWS WHO I AM.

Today, as an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, I actually *arrange* for fannish encounters with senior scholars on campus under the auspices of academic events. In other words, I totally "acafan" (I'm using that as a verb now) Linda Williams, Judith Butler, and others. I put myself into academic situations where these luminaries are basically forced to read my work and give me feedback. And after I have met another star in my constellation, I have this wonderful moment of "Wow. Judith Butler just gave me notes on my paper."

But you know, I contain my fannishness. I don't gush. Or I limit my gush to two sentences, when speaking to my academic idols, and when speaking to my colleagues about my academic idols. And in my scholarly writing, I also attempt to contain "the squee." In my scholarship, I try not to be too sycophantic to any one theorist, too beholden. My fandoms come across anyway. Everyone knows, after attending one of my seminars or just speaking to me about any of my fields, who "my people" are, whose work I draw upon the most. But I try (not always sure if I succeed, but I do try) to not write with a "fannish" voice, to not let my emotional investments and deeply felt affinities be the starting point of my analyses of cultural phenomena.

I am an acafan with a set of rules, applicable (as far as I am concerned) only to myself. My personal brand of acafandom is one that says, that even announces/proclaims, "I am a fan," but dispassionately. If a student or colleague or audience member at an academic conference wants to know about my fandoms, I will gladly list them, an entire litany. I have many, many fandoms, of every media format and nearly every historical period and many geographical regions. I will talk films if you want to talk films, I will talk astrolabes if you want to talk astrolabes, I will talk Atari or medieval bestiaries or printings of The Communist Manifesto. My fandoms are innumerable, and I am happy to discuss them. But - at an academic event, or in an academic context - I will speak of my fandoms not from the perspective of a fan, but from the perspective of an academic.

That doesn't mean that the "academic I" aims to appear devoid of passion, but she (the "academic I") does aim to appear to be somewhat Spock-like: the rational is what meets you right away, up front; the emotional is there, but buried deep. Spock's emotions inform his decisions but he tries not to get lost in them, and keeps them out of others' sight as much as he is able. The feeling, the affective power, of my fandom, fuels all of my academic work - I could not bear to delve deeply enough into any given topic or text without a kind of fannish devotion to, obsession with, it - but I try to keep the knowledge, the information, the analysis, up front, and leave the feeling out, for the most part.

In other words, I conceive of "acafan" as a term that designates a certain professionalism, a certain demeanor (a "seeming") of critical distance, a certain coolness and calmness in discussing all the many facets and valences of fandom. This does not mean denying, covering, or burying my personal fannish affinities - for those affinities are fact, they exist, and I will gladly state them at every turn - rather, I am speaking here of performance, of attitude, of tone. I think of myself as an "acafan" insofar as I say, everywhere I go, "I am a fan," but in Vulcan rather than Klingon.

Why my emphasis on tone, attitude, performance? Not only because I am housed in Berkeley's (Theater, Dance and) Performance Studies Department, but also because frankly, an even tone is what makes it possible for academics to communicate with one another. Keeping open channels of communication - keeping one's listeners and readers receptive - is so crucial when one is speaking or writing about topics that might be balked at as ridiculous, marginal, or unworthy of academic study. I have taken on this concept of "acafan" for myself completely because of my straddling a number of disciplinary fields, and almost never being a total "insider" to any one academic field. As a media studies person, I am an outsider to performance studies; as a Marxist cultural studies person, I am an outsider to new media studies; and so on. My experience in academia, traveling across many disciplinary borders and constantly visiting academic territories that are more or less foreign territories, has taught me that, if I want to talk about fandom, if I want to talk about texts and topics that are (still) somewhat unsettling to my audiences, that I must at least sound like "one of them" - like "one of us" - which is to say, I must sound/seem/perform like "an academic."

Once again, this does not mean that I am advocating a shift away from the personalization of theoretical, scholarly writing, in which Alex was a pioneer. In fact, Alex's work is a fantastic example of how fannish writing can be deeply serious academic work, and be taken seriously, received as significant and meaningful. I also have an essay coming out soon in an anthology (edited by Bill Aspray and Megan Winget of UT-Austin's School of Information) advocating that, in the digital age, we need more humanities writing that is theoretical and highly personal at the same time - the essay is called "Personal Theory" - because most of our students are learning most of what they know in media (social media/online communication) that emphasizes first-person perspective, that applies the "I" as a lens to almost every subject matter.

I am only sharing my personal incorporation of the subject position of "acafan" in my life, which is to be openly a fan, writing plentifully about fandom, and presenting myself and my work with the most professional affect I can muster. If this reinstates or simply reinforces the old equivalences between fan and irrationality and overemotionalism, and the opposition of fan and academic, and the equivalences between academic and rationality and distance, well then, I suppose I still live in this world, and must do my best to navigate and negotiate it. But if I try not to "seem" a fan when I speak or write in an academic forum, I do aim to argue for fans and fandom - not for their inherent goodness or creativity, but for their interestingness, for their value, for their importance.

Funny, these arguments are of the same bent as the arguments I am currently making for academics in the humanities: they are interesting, they have value, they are important. Fans are not nothing; they are so many things, they are significant. Same with humanities scholars. And as Karen Hellekson said so well earlier in this conversation, academics are nothing if not fans. So ironically, though I really believe that academics and fans are the same, they do not seem the same. Performing "fan" is (still, still) so so different than performing "academic."

But you should see me when I get home. Or when I am on LiveJournal. Or when I am in a mostly- or all-fan space (online or f2f). In those sites, I squee and squee.

Jason Mittell:

I should begin my "provocation" about the concept of acafandom with a caveat that I don't feel particularly provoked or provocative about this topic. I do have a take on the debate, but don't feel like I have much of a stake in it. While I certainly align myself with both of the categories fused in acafan, I don't feel like the term speaks to or about me.

Instead, I find myself looking on this debate as an outsider, asking pragmatic questions about the terminology and semantic politics: Who uses this term beyond the people participating in this discussion? Does this term do something useful that other more established labels do not? And what would be lost without it? And I'm left with the answers "not sure", "not really", and "not much".

The parallel that comes to mind is the term "postmodern," a label with much broader academic currency than acafan but that similarly leaves me feeling ambivalent. While most humanists for the past twenty years have probably spent time immersed in various theories of postmodernity, postmodernism, and postmodern conditions, I'm not sure to what end. That's not to say that great work has not been done under the rubric of postmodernism - it certainly has - but now that it is less liberally applied to every example of contemporary theory or culture, I'm left thinking that the term has probably done more harm than good (except perhaps to the major academic presses in cultural studies, who certainly boosted sales through the strategically applied use of "postmodern" in book titles).

Because there was no academic consensus on what "postmodern" meant (by design, I believe), the label obscured rather than illuminated, marking academic work as "cutting edge" without hinting on what was being cut or doing the cutting. Looking back on seminal scholarship focused on various flavors of postmodernism, I think we could eliminate the fuzzy label and strengthen our understanding of the core arguments and analyses without losing much of intellectual value.

I'd argue the same is true about acafandom. While that term will certainly never have the transdisciplinary currency of postmodernism, I do feel like the time spent debating what it means, what it does, who it includes (and excludes), and why it matters could be better spent doing the scholarly work that each of think matters most. And while that work may very well explore the intersecting identities and practices of academia and fandom, I do not think labeling it acafan research helps situate it in a larger conversation or subfield in a productive way. Instead, I'd contend that avoiding using a term that means such different things to so many of us would allow our arguments and ideas to speak for themselves, rather than being labeled in a way that can be easily dismissed or marginalized (or kneejerk embraced since the author is "part of the club").

So my ultimate provocation, to which I welcome debate: we should not hide our investments in the structures and identities of either academia or fandom, but we shouldn't hang our identities on a such a slippery signifier as "acafan."

Abigail (Gail) De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a joint appointment in the Berkeley Center for New Media (http://bcnm-dev.berkeley.edu/) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (http://tdps.berkeley.edu/). Her current LJ userpics are: The Beatles, Don & Peggy, Starbuck & Apollo (Kara & Lee), Rogue, Blair Waldorf, Torvill & Dean, Lisbon & Jane, Tony & Pepper, Daniel & Betty, and Mal & Zoe. At this time, she's looking for a good Arya Stark icon.

Alexander Doty is Chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University and a Professor in this department and in the Department of Gender Studies. He has written Making Things Perfectly Queer and Flaming Classics, co-edited Out in Culture, and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas. An old fogey, he is currently not active in any web-based fan communities, but in the past he has been known to put his 2-cents up on broadwayworld.com, and to indulge the consumer side of his fandom by buying risque postcards of 1920s stars George O'Brien and Ramon Novarro on Ebay--and, yes, he will end up writing something on at least one of them in order to justify these purchases to his "aca" side.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College, and a Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen, Germany, for the 2011-12 academic year. As an aca, he's written Genre & Television (2004), Television & American Culture (2009), Complex TV (in process) and the blog Just TV (ongoing). As a fan, he's been active in the Lostpedia community, transforms Wilco songs for the mandolin, and calls his fantasy football team The Heisenberg Helmets.

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Rhianon Bury and Matt Yockey (Part Two)

Matt Yockey: Rhiannon, I very much enjoyed reading your thoughtful post, especially since you come to this topic from a very different background than I do. You say that earlier in your academic career you identified as a feminist but also say that you don't consider yourself an acafan because you resist labels. Assuming that you still identify as a feminist, this suggests that in academia we remain very much invested in labels that carry a certain cache, diminishing the potential value of other labels.

Yes, any label will to some degree homogenize but they remain a necessary mode of understanding ourselves and engaging with the world (and certainly "feminism" as a label has had a long history of homogenizing and excluding). And this is not pick on feminism, as I identify as a feminist. I don't see this identification as allowing me a certain privileged position with women, any more than being queer-friendly allows me to fully affectively understand the experience of being queer. But both labels define who I am, both inside and outside of academia. So the label is important to me as a means of overcoming the schisms produced by the public/private divide

Love the Shatner SNL reference. I remember laughing hysterically with my Trekkie friend Mike in college when that first aired. It allowed some easy disavowal but also identification. For me, since then, I've grown increasingly invested in making meaning out of and between the things that move me, which have always been good ideas, whether they come in the form of a smart science fiction film or a really good cultural theory book.

All the various labels indicate the composite nature of my larger understanding of self, which is always in conversation with a larger public sphere. That hybridity of self is very important to acknowledge, I think, because it helps us engage with the complexities and contradictions of other individuals and the public sphere.

Rhiannon Bury:

Good on you Matt for calling me out on my own contradictory use of labels, specifically my troubling of 'acafan' just after my seemingly straightforward embrace of 'feminist'. Of course the latter has been questioned, challenged and critiqued since the early 1990s by anti-racist and postmodern and postcolonial scholars for privileging the issues and experiences of white, western, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied women. And yet while I recognize the importance of an intersectional analysis and the incommensurable differences among women, the identification of feminist' is still meaningful and necessary to me at a time when women's rights are being continuously eroded by neoliberal and globalization agendas.

I found compelling your honest discussion of academic work and affect. (I am a Buffy fan but fear not; I do not hold your dislike of the series against you!) Affect is a dirty word in the academy, with pressure continuing to be exerted on those who study popular texts and fans regardless of whether they label themselves acafans or not. I recall one (former) colleague's facial expression change from puzzlement to relief when I answered his inquiry about whether I wrote fan fiction in the negative. Yet to be a writer in an English Department is a creative pursuit that is highly valued.

If I am totally honest, I distance myself, in part, with the acafan identification because of my desire to be taken seriously not only by my direct colleagues but by the feminist scholarly community where the study of female fan communities seems rather trivial when measured up against the more "pressing" issues of violence against women or other oppressions and resistances.

Matt Yockey:

I agree that in many circles within academia, the kinds of study scholars such as you and I engage is placed at the margins, making for a oftentimes uncomfortable sense of our own value as academics. I too have sometimes felt the need to somehow gloss over what exactly it is that I study. I have taken this up as a challenge to more explicitly engage with the political capacity of fandom in my work (for example,

considering the progressive interventions made by fans via their fan object - a recent piece I did looks at fans' use of Wonder Woman as a vehicle for supporting womens' shelters and for promoting gay rights). Perhaps the old saw, 'the personal is the political' is ultimately what I'm on about here but I think the notion has real value in considering why I am affectively and professionally invested in fandom.

Rhiannon Bury:

It is interesting how we adjust our rationales depending on the discipline. With colleagues in English, it is a matter of demonstrating that we have not lost our "objectivity" and our ability to distinguish "quality" texts from "popular" texts. In feminist, Marxist and/or or queer scholarly communities we justify our work, consciously or not, by emphasizing its political relevance-- in your case the progressiveness of Wonder Woman fans and in one of mine, the heterosexism and homophobia of Six Feet Under fans.

Matt Yockey:

The essential liminality of the acafan label works for me because of this need (and desire) to exercise mobile identity formations. But those moments in which the aca and the fan more directly intersect (as at the recent conference where I presented my work on Wonder Woman) are the most affectively satisfying. I only wish I had those moments when I am engaged with a non-academic fan community. In those situations I often feel that underlying suspicion and hostility that others have commented on here. I suppose that utopia I was speaking of would be characterized strongly by a real dissolution of that wall between academics and non-academics.

Rhiannon Bury:

You draw an interesting connection between your fandom and utopian ideals. I have never thought of fan spaces in this way as a fan and/ or as a scholar. In Cyberspaces of Their Own, I conceptualized female fan spaces as potentially heterotopic. Foucault specifically states that the heterotopia is not a utopia but a space of inversion or reversal of normative spaces.

Matt Yockey:

Foucault's notion of the heterotopia works for me but really as a means of thinking about the processes of utopian desire, as opposed to utopian plans. I think that this desire is instrumental to the affect of a lot of fandom, the process of becoming someone better while acknowledging that such a project can never be completed and is suffused with contradiction. In this way I certainly see the value of considering fan spaces and fan subjectivity as, at their best, working out the meaning of and working toward a notion of the utopian. It is this which gives me a sense of home, in that it is a space that allows me the freedoms to be a fully contradictory, ever-striving person.

Rhiannon Bury:

Interesting. When I think about it, I did feel "at home" with members of the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades who joined the listserv I set up for my first ethnographic case study. As one of the participants noted, it was like "hanging around someone's kitchen shooting the breeze." So this home was a very much a domestic, gendered space.

I would like to go back to the earlier comment you made about the parallels between academic communities and fan communities. I'd go a step further and say that scholarly communities are the ultimate fan communities, with deep emotional investments in their particular objects of study that are hidden under the veneer of objectivity. While I do not study the fan practices that surround every text that I am a fan of, it is unlikely that I would study those surrounding texts in which I have no interest or actively dislike. For instance, I think the study of reality tv is important on an intellectual level in terms of the representations and performances of race, class and gender as well as the pleasures it produces. When I was in a Communications Department, I would never dream of not including a discussion of it in a television or media class. But like you said Matt, my heart is really not in it enough to pursue anything further.

Matt Yockey:

I couldn't agree more regarding scholarly communities as fan communities. I find it difficult to understand the desire to study a text if one does not already have some degree of appreciation for it. I do think we get too hung up in academia being apologetic about actually having an emotional investment in what we study. For me it simply carries over into my affective investment in teaching and when I teach I'm not really being objective at all - I think the media texts that we study in my classes all matter because representation matters and we should care about their consequences.

Rhiannon Bury is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently analyzing survey and interview data collected for her current research project, Television 2.0: Shifting Patterns of Audience Reception and Participatory Culture. Updates coming soon via www.twitter.com/television2pt0.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Toledo. He has published articles in Transformative Works and Cultures, The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, CineAction, and The Velvet Light Trap. His book on the Batman TV series is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Rhianon Bury and Matt Yockey (Part One)

Rhiannon Bury: It has been a bit of a challenge putting together this "provocation" in the final weeks of the Acafan and Beyond debate. I hope I have succeeded in responding to the original set of questions without covering too much of the same ground as earlier posts. Let me start by saying that I really am an accidental fan studies scholar. As late as 1995, when I was doing my PhD in Education with a focus on Cultural Studies, I was still heavily invested in the high/low culture binary. I whole heartedly agreed with William Shatner's "get a life" cri de coeur to fans. I identified strongly as a feminist so my "discovery" of the three David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades (DDEBs) while surfing the web for X-Files information and subsequent engagement with some of the members forced me to interrogate and reevaluate my elitist attitudes. Sixteen years later and an academic career made possible by the kindness and generosity of participatory fans, I do not consider myself an acafan or even a fan-scholar (overlapping but not interchangeable terms).

My reservation is in part a discontent with labels and their effects. As others have already remarked, they serve to homogenize the heterogenous, to constrain and erase difference and to draw boundaries that mark out who is an insider and who is an outsider. To be fair, "acafan" gestures openly to its hybridity and instability as a category but as the discussion over the weeks has made clear, it has historical linkages to a particular set of fan practices that involves the production of secondary texts such as fanfic or vids. Despite fannish interests in a number of primary texts and a number of professional and personal relationships with fanfic writers and vidders, my highest level of non-academic participatory engagement has been reading and posting a few comments on Television Without Pity for Battlestar Galactica (reimagined) and Dexter. As much as I like the idea of making a vid, I just don't have the creative commitment to follow through.

Drawing on queer studies and activist discourses while recognizing the dangers in doing so, I am mulling over another term that might be a better fit for me and perhaps others: fan-ally and, by extension, an acafan-ally. As previous contributions to the debate have indicated, being an acafan may be a fraught, complicated, even contradictory identification but its legibility and legitimacy must ultimately be determined by those who articulate it. I suspect a good number of those who identify as acafans are also on the margins of academia-- as women, as students, and/or as contingent, independent or untenured scholars. "Objective" criticisms and dismissals from those who do not identify as acafans but hold positions of authority can have a silencing effect, even if unintentional.

The other issue I wish to touch on is the issue of self-defined acafans "sitting too close" (Jenkins, 1993). I agree to a point with Nancy Baym's statement that the inability of acafans to distance themselves critically "is a failure of their academic training, not of their being fans." Part of this "failure" may be attributable to graduate degrees in the humanites not the social sciences. I had an MA in CompLit and was fortunate to have had a linguistic anthropologist on my thesis committee in addition to taking a qualitative methods course as part of my doctoral coursework.

Working out of a critical paradigm, I strongly believe that the location of the researcher, not just training, affects knowledge production. Being an insider both enables and disables certain forms of knowledge production. The same is true for the outsider. Researchers who put themselves in the frame of the research are not being subjective; they are being responsible knowledge producers.

Matt Yockey:

Responding to these provocations has proven much more challenging than I originally anticipated, perhaps in large part because it requires the kind of candor and reflexivity I've tried to dodge in my own work on texts of which I am a fan. The problem for me is my own struggle with identifying as a fan, as if this some sort of monolithic construct. For similar reasons I've often resisted the label of academic. The acafan label limits my identity as an academic (I do more than study texts of which I would consider myself a fan) and as a fan (I don't perform academic analyses of many objects of my fandom, such as the Red Sox, Robyn Hitchcock, or The Rockford Files). Curiously, however, the designation acafan has both emphasized my ambivalence regarding such labels and reconciled some of the problems I've had with them.

I don't explicitly identify as an acafan but the term is important to my sense of self; I keep it as a reminder of my own (perceived) liminality. Yet it also allows me access to certain communities when I choose to, or need to, use it for such a purpose. This was brought home to me by a recent trip to Australia. My trip was purely academic in purpose: I researched a comic book archive at the National Library and presented a paper on Wonder Woman fandom at a conference on the female superhero at a university in Melbourne. In the first instance I found a perfect commingling of my academic and fan selves, as I not only found valuable research information but quickly bonded as a fan with some of the staff members who enthusiastically brought out box after box of comic books and volunteered their own fannish interests to me.

I found a similar rapport at times with my fellow attendees of the conference, where the term "acafan" was never spoken but was certainly realized on every panel about Xena, Buffy, the Powerpuff Girls, etc. As with any conference, I found that my level of engagement with the presentations waxed and waned according to whether the paper was intellectually engaging and/or the topic was of general interest to me. For example, when panelists presented papers on Buffy, I listened attentively (and even took notes and asked questions), but my heart wasn't really in it because I actively dislike that show (and by admitting this, I know I've now alienated 75% of the academics reading this).

The trip confirmed for me why I am both an academic and a fan: because in academia and fandom I can engage with a community that confirms my own sense of self and legitimates my own utopian desires. I suppose the academic side of equation simply intellectualizes the affective fan side of it, for I'm compelled to turn to theorists to explain myself. Cornel Sandvoss, in particular, comes to mind when he writes in Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: "Fandom best compares to the emotional significance of the places we have grown to call 'home', to the form of physical, emotional and ideological space that is best described as Heimat" (64).

Sandvoss argues that the fan sense of Heimat as fluid is different from the traditional understanding of home as a stable signifier. I would argue that what attracts me to academia is its potential (much less often realized than in fandom) to confirm a sense of Heimat through an individual, affective response to a text (in the case of the academic, an object of study and/or the theory applied to an analysis of such an object).

I say less often realized because in the "acafan" equation, the academic side is the one that I most frequently find wanting. Academia is as suffused with its own coded jargon, internal hierarchies, and privileged texts as the most pathologized fan community. In fact, I use my fandom to more comfortably take on the role of academic. And I am an acafan because I believe that, at its best, my affiliation with an academic community offers as much potential for utopian transcendence as the fan communities with which I identify.

The (ideally) perpetual intellectual pursuits of academia mirror the ongoing, transformative engagements fans make with texts. Both are motivated (at least for me) by the utopian pursuit of Heimat, an affirmation of my identity through a group affiliation. And Heimat is mobile because I am always searching for the utopian ideal away from home and only by separating myself from home can I then re-imagine home as potentially utopian. It's my own fort/da game with self located within the fluid structures of academia and fandom. The term acafan has allowed me to bridge the gaps produced within this dynamic and be more comfortable in my own skin(s).

Rhiannon Bury is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently analyzing survey and interview data collected for her current research project, Television 2.0: Shifting Patterns of Audience Reception and Participatory Culture. Updates coming soon via www.twitter.com/television2pt0.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Toledo. He has published articles in Transformative Works and Cultures, The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, CineAction, and The Velvet Light Trap. His book on the Batman TV series is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.

Acafandom and Beyond: Jonathan Gray, Matt Hills, and Alisa Perren (Part Two)

Jonathan Gray: Perhaps I could start with this issue of definition that all of us touched upon. I think it's interesting that, albeit in different ways, both Matt (from wholly within the realm of acafandom) and Alisa (feeling outside of it) note that the term may have calcified around a set group of people with a set group of interests. Matt suggests that's a "misreading," and that there are many types of acafans. But I guess my question is whether we need to rescue the term, or whether the ideas can run free of it.

A considerable problem with the term is best illustrated by some of Alisa's understanding of the calcification. Her concern, for instance, that the industry might co-opt acafans is far-fetched if applied to many of those who self-identify most clearly as aca-fans, given that a good number of this community engage in fan practices that the industry doesn't want to have much to do with, such as writing slash and/or long critiques of the racism or sexism within the text. But some of that community share Alisa's concern that another group of academic fans are too in love with user-generated content and with servicing The Man. And my sense is that in the media studies community at large, "aca-fan" has simply come to mean "an academic who is also a fan" (for sure, I don't mean to wag a finger at Alisa for getting the "wrong" definition of aca-fan, as I think her definition is commonly shared by those who don't call themselves aca-fans), and by this definition, aca-fans are all those with Buffy and Lost journals, yet another Something Popular With Upper Middle Class White Americans and Philosophy book, and squee aplenty, all of which should definitely make us worry about co-option.

This might seem to back up Matt's point that there are many acafandoms. But they're still being conflated by a wider community of media studies scholarship as a whole. Thus, we might need to realize that the term has grown up and is associating with a different crowd than we as its parents would prefer. Some of the behaviors and practice of those regarded as aca-fans, moreover, are directly in contrast to the critical mission of aca-fandom. If it originally had a referent assigned to it by Henry and co., then, it now has a whole bunch of other referents attached to it by those who aren't aca-fans. Hence my belief that the critical mission of aca-fandom could be much better taken up if the term itself is left behind. The term may have become too "polluted."

Let me turn that into a question, though, to Matt and Alisa, especially since they come from very different standpoints here. Has the term become polluted, and if so can or should it be rescued?

Matt Hills:

I find myself agreeing with much in Jonathan and Alisa's opening arguments, although all three of us are approaching acafandom from quite different perspectives. With Jonathan, I too would like to see a greater encouragement of reflexivity in all media studies, not just in something called acafan writing. And with Alisa, I absolutely share the concern that acafandom has led to a restricted set of textual objects becoming unhappily canonised in TV Studies, because those happen to be the shows that many academics enjoy watching and writing about. I think that acafandom does have a responsibility to cover shows that go beyond rather limited taste cultures and demographics, as well as covering a wider range of fan practices and activities (as I suggested in my own opening statement). As I said, I think we should be looking to encourage a wider-ranging, more diverse, and ever more critically reflexive acafandom, in relation to both 'aca' and 'fan' experiences.

Jonathan quite rightly raises one perennial question haunting acafandom - what does the 'fan' part actually refer to? If it means having a certain liking for something, then yes, perhaps all scholars are acafans, whether they are studying television or quantum mechanics. Scientists passionate about their specialism would be acafans, on this account. However, this seems like a curiously attenuated definition. Jonathan's argument seemingly defines acafandom into redundancy - using a massively inclusive definition that doesn't fully engage with the sociological and discursive history of (media) 'fandom'.

I do think that defining fandom only as community-oriented is problematic, but even lone media consumers who self-define as fans are still likely to engage with fandom as an imagined community, or a "constellated community" in Rick Altman's terms. So, for me, fandom retains a degree of social, communal and discursive specificity which means that not all academics would be acafans, as I understand the term.

In fact, if one leans towards at least minimally articulating fandom with community - whether this is inhabited in a participatory sense, or aligned with in an imaginative sense - I think there remains something distinctive about acafandom, since it involves the simultaneous engagement with two (differentiated) interpretive communities focused on the same textual object(s). A critical TV scholar writing about Doctor Who who had no fan affiliation or identity could still "like" and enjoy the TV show they were analysing, but they would have no awareness of the reading protocols, hierarchies, ways of understanding the show's history and characters etc, that fan culture would bring.

Acafandom is thus interpretatively distinctive, I would say, because it brings communally-shaped and communally-patterned systems of meaning-making into dialogue with similar systems of meaning-generation in the academy, as well as moving between and potentially destabilising the value systems at work in these terrains. If one defines acafandom purely as liking something and then studying it, then these hermeneutic and axiological questions fade away somewhat - rather prematurely, I feel.

Unlike Jonathan, then, I think acafandom remains useful for the ways in which it can identify, and draw on, and reflexively engage with, audience communities and their understandings of texts. My current work on Torchwood, for example, poses a number of challenges to academic textual analysis on the basis of fans' readings of narrative and character, as well as challenging fan readings which decode the show for textual coherence/continuity. If acafandom was 'just' about liking Torchwood then it would lack a focus on how we are likely to read the show as a TV Studies community versus how other communities would and have read the series.

Moving on, and responding to Alisa's point about possible complicity between acafandom and the TV industry - yes, I find this to be a worrying possibility and a worryng development. After all, I'm the author of a book called Triumph of a Time Lord! But the book works to critically theorise the show's production, and the ways in which its producers othered fan audiences - even describing them very negatively - while also drawing on specific fan discourses. It is not a celebration of the industry processes involved - it is very much a critical reading which could never have been written as an 'official' BBC book. But there are some arenas where 'acafandom' seems to increasingly lack critical reflexivity, and where the term seems to have become coterminous with the "Something Popular With Upper Middle Class White Americans and Philosophy" sort of book, as Jonathan says. I think all three of us, as writers working in different but not unconnected strands of TV Studies, are united in seeing this as a thorny issue.

'Acafandom' has certainly become multiple, as I've argued, but I'm not sure I'd want to use Jonathan's terminology: I wouldn't equate multiple acafandoms with a sense of the word having been somehow "polluted" or rendered toxic. The question of multiple acafandoms suggests instead, I think, that we need to argue more carefully and more precisely for what we want acafandom to do. And perhaps to work to make these definitions more available, and more visible, to those 'outside' the debate itself, so that wider notions of 'acafandom' may themselves become more nuanced.

As Alisa says - what does acafandom include and exclude? Or more than that: what would we like it to include and exclude? The concept - as I would want to use and defend it - needs to be about critical reflexivity in relation to fan and academic communities. That means being reflexive about the canonisation of limited texts, and the (relative) failure to engage with childhood fandoms and fan cultures, and the question of whether industry and production discourses are being reinforced in some acafan work. But it also means being reflexive about fans' moral economies - and where and how fandom remains inattentive to issues of gendered, classed or age-based forms of cultural power. Reflexivity needs to be embraced as something substantively informing our practices rather than something we write about in passing in forewords and footnotes - reflexive acafandom can be precisely about addressing all the sorts of concerns raised here. And very much not "a cost-effective source of market research for industry", as Alisa writes. In short, I view acafandom - as I have defined it here, asymptotically - not as the problem, or as something murky and/or conceptually exhausted to be let go of, but as an ongoing way of thinking through the problematics of studying media while being positioned within variant interpretive communities.

Reiterating my response to Jonathan's final question: I'd say the term has become dispersed but not necessarily polluted. And so perhaps acafandom needs to be re-defined (to re-emphasise its critical edge), rather than being "rescued" per se? Mind you, I wonder whether I'm writing this, in part, as a fan of acafandom: a fanacafan. At which point, and before logical regression takes hold, I'll hand over to Alisa with a question: if we agree that acafandom does have a responsibility to expand beyond the genre and "quality" texts that it has clustered around, then what (if any) other responsibilities might it also have?

Alisa Perren:

I find it fascinating that, although Matt, Jonathan and I all have similar issues with the current definition - and perception - of acafandom, we deliver very different responses on how to proceed. To put it somewhat crudely, Matt (fanacafan?) thinks we should salvage the term, Jonathan (anti-fanacafan?) wonders if it has outlived its usefulness. Meanwhile, I am more ambivalent. I do not feel comfortable arguing to either "dump it" or "save it," as I do not have the long-standing investment in researching and writing about it that either of you have. The most I can do is speak from the stance of a "casual observer," illustrating how the term might presently be perceived by those who are less aware of its layered history and meanings.

From this position of casual observer, I appreciate reading each of your explanations about how acafandom can mean - or at least, has previously meant - much more than "one who is an academic who is also a fan." And Matt does make a strong case for retaining the word, as long as it is deployed with sufficient clarity and reflexivity.

I guess the issue that remains for me is whether the nuances of the term can be made apparent to those who don't regularly engage with fan studies and conversations about acafandom. Is it a "responsibility" (returning to Matt's final question) of those writing about acafandom to expand their objects of analysis, but also to make this expanded scope more apparent to "outsiders"? Will a change in perception take place if there is more "outreach" on the part of acafans, a greater effort to illustrate that acafans can and do write about far more than Spock, Spike and Skate?

I want to return to one other point made by Jonathan, which connects to Matt's discussion of reflexivity. Jonathan notes that many acafans do not serve the interests of industry, but rather "engage in fan practices that the industry doesn't want to have much to do with." I certainly did not mean to imply that acafandom was monolithic, or that all acafans (want or try to) service industry desires and imperatives. But it seems to me that the industry gives a voice to those serving their interests, and makes the voices of certain acafans resonate more loudly. What's more, given the heightened pressure placed on scholars today to procure external funding, the limited funding of this type available to humanistically oriented scholars, and the receptiveness that industry has shown toward those acafans serving their promotional interests, I can't help but wonder whether these voices will continue to grow louder. To pose an even more cynical question, in an age in which it seems that "no publicity is bad publicity," aren't even those that take more critical stances ultimately serving the industry's larger promotional ends? (Suddenly I have seemed to wander into the land of Adorno and Horkheimer...I will try to step away from the computer now.)

I leave it to Matt and Jonathan (and others!) to chime in here with their own thoughts regarding the responsibilities of acafans - to other acafans, to scholars that don't self-identify as acafans, and maybe even in relationship to the media industries.

Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality, Television Entertainment, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and, with Amanda Lotz, the soon to be released Television Studies. He is also co-editor of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, Battleground: The Media, and Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture.

Matt Hills is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales. He is the author of Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002), The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum, 2005), How To Do Things With Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold, 2005), Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the 21st Century (I.B. Tauris, 2010), and the forthcoming Cultographies: Blade Runner (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2011). Recent book chapters or journal articles include work on the Saw franchise, the TV series Sherlock, and television aesthetics. Matt is currently working on a study of Torchwood.

Alisa Perren is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and author of Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (University of Texas Press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in a range of print and online publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television and Flow. She also is Coordinating Editor of In Media Res, a MediaCommons project focused on experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship.

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Jonathan Gray, Matt Hills, and Alisa Perren (Part One)

Jonathan Gray: One of my concerns with the term "acafan," and hence a key source of my reluctance to self-identify as one, is that it suggests a special relationship between one's object of study and one's academic practice that obscures the degree to which everyone studying the media has some such relationship.

Simply put, I don't believe anyone who tries to tell me that their choice of what to study and how to study isn't deeply informed by their own personal likes and dislikes. Everyone's critical practice assumes a normative ideal, and while I don't believe that such ideals are "merely" about what they like and dislike, I also don't think that like and dislike can ever truly be separated from our critical faculties, thereby meaning that there's nothing "mere" about like and dislike in the first place.

As such, I think that everyone working with texts is an acafan or proto-acafan of a sort, and an aca-antifan or proto-aca-antifan of a sort. And they very likely move between these positions (if they are even separate positions). Therefore, to claim the role of acafan risks being either redundant (because we all are or might/could be), a denial of one's anti-acafandom, a disavowal of anti-fandom and/or non-fandom that is as unhealthy as a disavowal of fandom would be, and/or an attempt to create a special elite who are better, self-actualized acafans than everyone else.

I want to see media and textual studies scholars be more reflective on the various motivations behind our research in general, and more accountable to our various publics. That reflection needn't always be public (in fact, I'd find it remarkably tedious if it was always public), but it should still be taking place. And towards that end, "acafandom" as title risks halting the process, rather than helping it. If reflexivity and accountability are required and expected of this small group called acafans, rather than an expectation of all scholars who work with texts, and if we accept that acafans can't separate out their fannish identities from their academic ones but imagine that others can, I'm not happy with the work that the tag is doing.

But (and hopefully as illustration of my point about reflection) I realize that my position here comes in part from my own personal relationship to fandom and fan studies. I'm saying this as someone who is more invested in media studies than I am in fandom or in any given fan community per se. See, I thought I was a fan until I encountered fan studies and was told by many therein that fandom required a community and production. If that's the case, I've only ever truly been a fan of Star Wars, yet that was as a kid (I still love it, but I don't have the community that I did in my school playground days), and kids don't seem to count as fans either (an aside: why don't we look more at kid fandoms?). I'd still like to argue that one needn't be in a community to be a fan, but perhaps because I don't see myself as speaking for any set community, I therefore don't feel a strong need to fight that fight, and so I'm trying to catch different fish in my research instead. Meanwhile, if I'm of questionable fannishness, I guess I can't be an acafan either.

Yet I don't feel I'm missing much by not being or counting as an acafan, to be honest. When I read the best definitions and defenses of acafandom, by the likes of Henry, Matt (see below), and Louisa Stein, I recognize a great deal and would like to think that I operate with many of the same assumptions. As an instructor at a leading grad program, moreover, I'd like all of my students to think critically of their own practice and their personal engagement and stakes in that practice in what might be seen as an acafannish way ... yet many don't identify as fans, nor do I think they need to.

If there's a mission behind the term "acafan," in other words, I'd rather dis-articulate it from the seeming requirement that one self-identify as a fan and/or count as a fan in other's eyes (especially when I see the bar set too high for who counts), and let that mission take root elsewhere too. Let's instead articulate requirements of reflectivity, accountability, respect for one's subjects, and so forth to media, textual, and audience studies as a whole, and demand that of all.

Matt Hills:

My take on acafandom is that it's impossible to be 'for' or 'against' it, since either stance assumes an overly monolithic definition of what 'it' is that we're in favour of, or not. The greatest difficulty with the label of acafandom is that it misleads us into thinking there's one referent to be championed, critiqued or defended. Instead, I'd like to open up the question of acafandoms, plural, and hence the range of critical practices, identity positions, or bids for authority that the term might blur together. I'm not convinced that acafandom necessarily captures a singular (hybridised) scholarly community, and so this needs careful thought as well.

The question I recently set for myself, then, was to interrogate my own discomfort with specific narratives of acafandom. I'd identify two influential accounts of acafandom: the 'normalising' and the 'levelling'. The former asserts that popular culture is best studied from a position which combines fan knowledge and affect with academic knowledge and affect - in essence, it's the legitimation of acafandom as a generational shift in the academy. By contrast, the 'levelling' account, which I'd also read as generational, asserts that there's no longer any differential between scholarly and fan identities, so these can freely be moved between, hence the work of 'acafandom' is done, and the term is redundant.

Neither of these narratives gets to the heart of the matter, for me, which is this: what critical distance can scholar-fandom take from both 'academic' and 'fan' identities? In the 'normalising' (first generation) narrative - which was still present in my own Fan Cultures (2002) - acafans are presumed to be better scholars than academics without fan knowledge and engagement. There is a lack of critical distance here from fandom; forms of scholarship are critiqued, but fandom is assumed to provide 'the answer' to rejuvenating academic authority. First-generation acafandom is, in a sense, too close to fandom.

And in the 'levelling' narrative it seems to me that there is a loss of critical distance from academia and fandom; if 'the battle' has been won, then academia no longer requires critique or renovation, and institutional praxis doesn't call for questioning in relation to how culture is studied. Equally, fan praxis can unproblematically form the basis for academic work. Second-generation acafandom seems, therefore, to presume a happy world where institutional limits to knowledge-formation have winked out of existence.

Against these narratives, I want to argue for acafandom which strives for "proper distance" (Silverstone 2007) from all its constituencies. My rendering of "proper distance" implies critical and multi-dimensional reflexivity. I think scholar-fandom remains important to the extent that it is able to engage critically with the contemporary limits of what can be said in academic and fan communities. The notion of moral economy is thus useful - or rather, the interference pattern created by intersecting, multiple moral economies.

Acafandom goes awry if it assumes that it can speak for a fandom. In this case, the fan community that the scholar 'belongs' to is mediated and re-presented in academic literature. Likewise, acafans may speak for sections of a fandom, mediating and re-presenting a specific (gendered, or classed, or aged, or nationally delimited) incarnation of that fandom. Instead of displaying critical distance from the scholar's own fan experience, this experience instead forms the basis for their academic work. The issue here isn't that this is somehow "subjective", but rather that it leads to specific taste cultures, and fan cultures, being rendered canonical in fan studies. Why so many studies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who? (But relatively few on Torchwood, and almost none on The Sarah Jane Adventures, a children's TV show).

By speaking for their own fandoms, rather than exploring fandoms surrounding a wider and disparate range of cultural artefacts, acafans participate in a drastically skewed account of pop culture passions. I include my own work on Doctor Who (2010) within this critique - this work demonstrates a problematic acafandom rather than one which attains 'proper distance'. And by speaking for their own fan practices, rather than exploring a range of fan activities, acafans similarly skew accounts: cosplay remains under-represented in scholarship, and replica prop-making even more so, yet I regularly encounter work on vidding and, yes, fanfic (usually written by acafans who vid and create fanfic. For some reason the prop-makers have been less interested in theorizing their material cultures). So, proper distance asks the question of what it would look like if we hybridised fandom and academia without simply mirroring, or reproducing, our own pre-existent fan tastes, cultures, and practices.

And I think acafandom goes awry when it assumes that it can speak for a settled academic constituency, e.g. critical theory/sociology/psychosocial studies. When Textual Poachers sought to hybridise scholarly and fan identity positions it did so as part of a challenge to powerful academic norms. If acafandom assumes that it is speaking for a set of academic norms then it comfortably inhabits that moral economy, and fails to challenge discursive, institutional limits. My work on Doctor Who does, for example, pose questions to academia, e.g. the role of experiencing an ongoing text versus the role of mastering a (finished) text as a body of knowledge.

But there continue to be discursive limits operating in academic contexts - it feels, to me, as if Cornel Sandvoss's Fans (2005), despite being an outstanding study, speaks for critical sociology and its moral economy when it addresses fandom as self-mirroring. There is an institutional delimitation at work here, I feel, rather than a 'proper distance' being taken from this academic community. (In a sense, my own work in fan studies and Sandvoss's act as two sides of a torn dialectic, since I have tended to fail to operate with 'proper distance' from my own fan cultures and practices).

We also need to stop thinking spatially about acafandom as if it is the intersecting portion in a Venn diagram, and consider acafandom temporally instead. What varied (personal, disciplinary) histories and traces does the term mask? Acafans can exist within academic disciplines, or they can be in motion between disciplines, mobilising fandom to challenge their parent discipline, or even to temporarily (or definitively) move beyond it. Acafandom may look obsolete, or unnecessary, to those raised intellectually in cultural studies and TV studies, whereas it may be revelatory to those wanting to write about videogames, TV, or pop music in, say, philosophy departments. I

t's thus surely important to consider the 'aca' of acafandom in context; is this contextualised acafandom issuing a challenge to disciplinary norms and discourses, definitively breaching them, or engaging in transdisciplinary traffic? The potential acafandom of a book like Doctor Who and Philosophy may read - and performatively act - very differently to that of Triumph of a Time Lord, for instance. Some acafandoms may even offend or aggravate us as acafan readers, where the version of academia being engaged with is alien or othered (e.g. writing about TV as an acafan without doing any reading whatsoever in TV studies).

Acafandom cannot secure one communal identity since it is partly fractured by academic disciplines, as well as by different fandoms. In my experience, acafans within the same academic discipline can find some common ground despite tackling different fan objects, whereas those who share a fandom but not a discipline often still find themselves speaking uneasily across discursive frames. We shouldn't narcissistically mistake acafandom as the property of media/cultural studies alone: it will likely look very different from the standpoint of philosophy, an English Lit department, or even within game studies and fields newer than media studies.

In short, I would argue that acafandom has not yet (often) existed in terms of a simultaneous 'proper distance' from both fandom and academia. This is an ideal, always still to come, rather than finished and outmoded. So-called acafans, myself among them, have usually either spoken for a fan culture (critiquing academia), or they have spoken for an academic community (critiquing fandom). Acafandom demonstrating "proper distance" is an asymptote rather than a fixed category or a tidy concept. Perhaps we should be striving to do acafandom better, rather than giving up on it.

Alisa Perren:

While I appreciate being asked to participate in this conversation about aca-fandom, I come to this conversation feeling a bit like an outsider. This is in part because my own scholarship has focused much more on media production and distribution practices, rather than on fandom. But this feeling of "being an outsider" is not simply based on my different scholarly emphases. Rather, it also stems from that fact that my interests in popular culture seem to differ from many of those who write and speak from the position of aca-fans. This is not to say that I have a problem with the term of aca-fandom per se. But it does lead me to ask what this label includes - and excludes - and what these boundaries might suggest.

Put simply: to what extent has aca-fandom legitimated the study of certain tastes over others? I have no problem with people choosing to study texts or creative figures that they feel passionate about - passion drives much of the best scholarship. The problem, it seems to me, is that expansion of the "aca-fan" identity has led to a heightened emphasis on the same body of texts (in the case of television, this includes genre shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica and Lost).

I like many of these shows. I like to talk about many of these shows. But I don't like the degree to which these shows seem to dominate conversations about fandom (and, increasingly, television/media studies) at the expense of conversations about so many other shows. What does it mean that these particular media products are the objects of so much discussion, while shows like Law & Order and The Good Wife (two personal favorites of mine) are far less likely to be examined at panels devoted to aca-fandom? Does "aca-fandom" have a responsibility to expand its scope beyond the genre or "quality" texts that it has tended to radiate toward?

This last question raises a related issue, one that is particularly pertinent to me as a scholar who studies the media industries: Namely, how might aca-fandom be used to serve industry imperatives - and is this something about which we should be concerned? Those working in media organizations, of course, have little interest in interacting with scholars that question their practices or products. Access has always been difficult to gain, especially for those scholars who present themselves as being critical of the organizations or their practices. Within this context, from the perspective of industry, aca-fans represent the ideal (humanistically-oriented) scholars. They are eager for access, and willing to share their knowledge with executives and production staff. The issue then becomes whether aca-fans simply become a cost-effective source of market research for industry, in much the same way that fans can (and have) also been exploited on occasion.

I pose these questions in part to question what's at stake in the evolving industry-aca-fan relationship. But I am also posing these questions because they are meaningful to me, personally. I take pleasure in researching and talking about the operations of the media industries. I enjoy going to sites like Variety, Movie City News and Deadline and reading the latest news and gossip. Indeed, if I were to self-identify as an "aca-fan," I would most likely be an aca-fan of industry discourse. Is such an identification possible, given how the term has evolved thus far? And if it is, what are the implications or stakes involved in adopting such a label?

Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality, Television Entertainment, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and, with Amanda Lotz, the soon to be released Television Studies. He is also co-editor of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, Battleground: The Media, and Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture.

Matt Hills is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales. He is the author of Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002), The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum, 2005), How To Do Things With Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold, 2005), Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the 21st Century (I.B. Tauris, 2010), and the forthcoming Cultographies: Blade Runner (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2011). Recent book chapters or journal articles include work on the Saw franchise, the TV series Sherlock, and television aesthetics. Matt is currently working on a study of Torchwood.

Alisa Perren is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and author of Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (University of Texas Press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in a range of print and online publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television and Flow. She also is Coordinating Editor of In Media Res, a MediaCommons project focused on experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship.

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Alex Juhasz, Jay Bushman, and Derek Kompare (Part One)

Friday August 5, 2011 Alex Juhasz 9:50 AM (via MS Word):

For about an hour and a half on Monday August 1, Jay Bushman and I had a typed conversation over Skype while Derek Kompare drove thousands of miles and was off line. Through previous email exchanges, we had learned that we had almost nothing in common with each other, and had little interest in acafandom. It is from there that we began the "conversation" that follows. As we typed, I also read from a novel, played Internet scrabble, worked on my YouTube art show, PerpiTube: Repurposing Social Media Spaces, and monitored my children who were playing Minecraft and Sims.

Monday August 1, 2011

Alex Juhasz 4:27 PM (via Sykpe):

Jay. Hi. My thought is we try to have an asycnch conversation about the issues for Henry's blog, and then use it as our submission. Given people's vacation schedule, this may be a bit complicated, but it's worth a go, just to shake up their format a bit, if nothing else.

Jay Bushman 4:27 PM:

Works for me. Perhaps a good place for us to start would be off of this provocation:

"How might the debates about the acafan concept relate to other debates in connected fields of popular culture studies, such as discussions about the emergence of the 'new games journalism' as a means of capturing the subjective experience of players?"

I work in what you could describe as the professional transmedia community, and the ongoing debate over the definition of "transmedia" is absolutely related to self-identity and a need to justify the right sort of hybridization--a strange attraction to purity for such a multi-disciplinary field!

The phrase "subjective experience of the players" caught my eye. I've been arguing that the output of the various competing factions vying for control of the term transmedia, when viewed from the perspective of audience/player experience, actually have very little in common.

Alex Juhasz 4:40 PM:

Although I don't play or study games, my kids do (12, 12, and 13. Don't ask! blended pomo family...) and I have lots to say about my own subjective if vicarious experience of everything from Sims, to Minecraft, to Mario: a strange attraction/repulsion. I also don't study or play with mainstream culture. So fandom (and acafandom) are way outside my sitelines, except again for the vicarious experiences of my children, and various life partners (all of whom watch a lot of TV). That said, self-identity and subjective experience have both been really important to my work as a feminist scholar of alternative culture (that is what I do like to watch, and play, and make, in the forms of films, documentaries, and lately YouTube videos and websites).

Jay Bushman 4:43 PM:

I live in Los Angeles, where "academic" usually means something different than what it does in the rest of the world. I'm called "academic" because I want to produce new media versions of classic texts like Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice and Moby-Dick.

Alex Juhasz 4:52 PM:

Do you have any fancy degrees? I'm an academic, I think, in large part because I have a Ph.D. That said, my method is often "artistic," in that I choose to make things as my critical, studied process and project. Also, given my interest in things "alternative," my work is thought to be in some sort of opposition to the "classic texts" you are committed to. Although, of course, like most highly educated people, I have a soft spot in my heart for many of the greats, which also puts me at odds with a lot of what I think acafandom is supposed to be about: finding highs in mainstream culture's lows.

Jay Bushman 4:55 PM:

"a lot of what I think acafandom is supposed to be about: finding highs in mainstream culture's lows." - I like that description. It reminds me of one of my favorite plays, Wallace Shawn's "The Designated Mourner." A major theme of the play examines real and perceived differences between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" culture.

I have an MFA in Film and Video production. I'm now working as a writer and designer at Fourth Wall Studios, where the boundaries between narrative design and game design are blurry. I wrote an essay about my experience playing the first Alternate Reality Game for the ETC, which is why, I think, I was invited to participate

Alex Juhasz 4:57 PM:

And speaking of games: I LOVE the board and card kind. I also am addicted to Facebook Scrabble. But none of the immersive kind at all. That for me is a book.

I feel like fault lines of the conversation are already hi/low, immersive/narrative, fan/artist or perhaps fan/maker? Does that sound right? How are experience and narrative related in your work? BTW I write a lot about the processes of making activist/art work within communities (as important as the text).

Jay Bushman 5:08 PM:

My work tends to be split along two very different lines. One would be the digital narrative with the emphasis taken almost completely off of interactivity. Things like twitter novels, serial blog fiction, stories where the different delivery mechanisms are used to convey different characteristics of the story. Matching medium to material. For example, I wrote a sci-fi adaptation of the Melville short story "Benito Cereno" that was written for and distributed via Twitter. "Benito Cereno" is all about the faulty perceptions of its unreliable narrator, and twitter was a great medium to use to force the reader to adopt the narrator's descriptions of events.

The other fork is hugely interactive, with very little narrative--basically collaborative realtime story events using Twitter (and other social media to a lesser extent). For instance, every year during the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX, I run a Star Wars-based story event. And on Halloween, I usually run some sort of spooky/horror themed experience - I've done ghosts and Lovecraft so far, and am in the planning stages for next October.

The idea is to devise a simple ruleset with a light narrative throughline, and get participants to create their own stories within that world. I ripped off a description that I heard Douglas Rushkoff use to describe this - Throughline and Magic Circle - where the throughline represents tradition narrative structure, surrounded my a magic circle of interactivity and participation.

Alex Juhasz 5:18 PM:

So interactive/narrative is another split.

As an activist/artists/academic of alternative culture I think of the living, doing and making of things as immersive and interactive. I use narrative to structure and re-present representations of the activities and actions that are important to me in the living and doing of them. However, my new work is about the living and doing of online experience, which, I think of as already representation, and which I do not use narrative to structure. Hmm.

Jay Bushman 5:40 PM:

Well, one of the neat things about online/interactive storytelling is that you can throw out a handful of almost random data points, and the audience will tie them together into a narrative for you. Although sometimes, that doesn't work out the way you'd want.

Alex Juhasz 5:47 PM:

Audience/user, another faultline? Can you give an example that worked, and one that failed?

Jay Bushman 5:51 PM:

There's a somewhat well-known story from the A.I. ARG (aka The Beast.) Where the same piece of stock photography was accidentally used to depict two different characters - a successful executive, and robot geisha. The players immediately found the mistake, but decided to turn the error into a conspiracy theory about how the executive was secretly a robot in disguise. The game designers took this player-created theory and ran with it, incorporating it into the story. That one is both a failure and a success: failure of execution in the regular game leading to a remarkable, opportunistic success.

Alex Juhasz 6:06 PM:

Interesting. The work I make has neither players, nor fans. Teaching has students. Documentaries have viewers. Websites have users. And collaboratives have doers. When we make, we play, for sure. Mistakes usually happen because we lack budgets, then jump great hoops for coherence (i.e. $20K collaborative lesbian feature, The Owls, 2010, that had no coverage and half the story left unshot after grueling five day shoot, and yet still a narrative feature got made, and even got micro-distribution: First Run Features.) We played to make it work with our tiny budget and for our tiny microcommunity of makers, and slightly larger group of "fans" or maybe "friends."

Gotta make dinner for the kids. Any way that we might share this with Derek, let him voice in, make something of it, finish it off, and be done (and yes, this had been play: thanks!)

Friday, August 5, 3:40 PM

Derek Kompare (via MS Word)

I apologize for missing this intriguing discussion; as Alex said, I was driving with family across the US southwest. Rather than retcon myself into the above, I'll briefly respond to what I consider the most significant point.

As the member of this triad who most identifies with the usual conception of "acafan," it was refreshing to see how the term looks from its outside. As Alex and Jay suggest, we all have hybrid identities that affect our work and our play. But the modes and mediums we use in either are also parts of those identities. A "game" thus means different things to Jay, Alex, Alex's kids, Jay's "players," etc.

There are many ways of "doing" culture. Moreover, there are many ways of explaining how culture is done. My main issue with the term "acafan" is that, while it has certainly loosened the boundaries between those ways, it has itself established new expectations and restrictions. As Alex and Jay's work respectively shows, cultural engagement is not always about "academics and/or fans," and it's time we started to acknowledge that more.

Jay Bushman is a transmedia story designer. Writing under the name "The Loose-Fish Project," he's produced a series of Twitter-based interactive story events around subjects including Star Wars, H.P. Lovecraft and famous ghosts. Jay is also the author of The Good Captain, a Twitter-based adaptation of Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno," and Spoon River Metblog, a modernization of "Spoon River Anthology" in the form of a group blog. His essay "Cloudmaker Days: A Memoir of the A.I. Game" appeared in Well Played 2.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning from ETC Press. Jay is currently a writer/designer at Fourth Wall Studios and the co-coordinator of Transmedia Los Angeles.

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (Minnesota, 2005), and Media Praxis: A Radical Web-Site Integrating Theory, Practice and Politics, She has published extensively on documentary film and video. Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy. She recently completed the feature documentaries SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008), Video Remains (2005), and Dear Gabe (2003) as well as Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (1998) and the shorts, RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Film (2000) and Naming Prairie (2001), a Sundance Film Festival, 2002, official selection. She is the producer of the feature films, The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about YouTube: www.aljean.wordpress.com. Her born-digital on-line "video-book" about YouTube, Learning from YouTube, is available from MIT Press (Winter 2011).

An annual attendee of both the SCMS conference and the San Diego Comic-Con, Derek Kompare is an Associate Professor in the Division of Film and Media Arts at Southern Methodist University. His research and writing is primarily focused on how media forms develop, and can be found in the books Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (2005) and CSI (2010), several anthology and journal articles, and online at Antenna, Flow, In Media Res and (occasionally) his own blog.

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Roberta Pearson and Alexis Lothian (Part Two)

Roberta Pearson: You and I differ so radically with regard to what constitutes our acafandom that it's difficult for me to respond to the substance of your post (not having had experience of the kind of fandom in which you're involved). I'm going to use what you say to continue to meditate on what we might mean by acafan and whether it's a useful label. It's interesting that you, like many others, have the urge to self-confession. You say that the overlap of fandom and academia in your life has everything to do with personal ethics, particularly through the feminist science fiction convention where you serve as an advocate of transformative fan works. You also say that you're not at the moment a fan of a particular text but rather as I suggested in my original post a fan of fandom. I'm glad that you're 'self-confessing' this way and also glad that other people here have given into the urge, since it may be these self-confessions that help us to refine the acafan label.

In terms of the matrix of acafandom that I began to develop above, you'd be a non-tenured, transformational fan of fandom, and now I would add with a strong stake in this identity. I'd be a tenured, affirmational fan of particular texts without a particularly strong stake in this identity, except for my continuing connections with Sherlockian friends and my decade long attempt to write my book about Star Trek as television. I think the identity issue might be a key differentiator not only amongst fans but amongst acafans as well. Being an empiricist at heart (although not a raw positivist) I'm tempted to put together a little questionaire for everyone participating in this site to see if we can come up with an acafandom matrix. .

Alexis Lothian: I feel strange about the "fan of fandom" label, although it clearly applies to me. The awkwardness comes from the flexibility of the term 'fan' I discussed in my provocation, I think. I'm a transformational fan of fandom too; I certainly wouldn't want to affirm everything that is included under that term, although I would want to call attention to the hierarchy of values operating in what I would and would not be willing to affirm.

Perhaps the origin of those terms "transformational" and "affirmational" fandom (at least as I understand it) can help make sense of where I stand. They are terms that come from fandom, coined initially by obsession_inc and then taken up by Skud+ response to the feminist convention WisCon, which is the one I've been talking about my involvement in. When I talk about acafandom, I'm talking at least partly about acknowledging and doing justice to my own thinking's debt to fannish theorists and artists outside the academia machine who have given me terms and ideas that help me theorize just as much as the dense analyses and critical explorations of literary and cultural studies do.

I appreciate that you called attention to the "tenured / non tenured" strand in our aca/fannish matrix. Both as someone on the bottom end of that particular greasy pole, a graduate student on the cusp of finishing her PhD and entering the job market, and as someone who is invested in unpacking hierarchies of status and privilege, I think a lot about the materialities underpinning what we can and can't say about our fandom, our academia.

On the question of tastemaking that you brought up, for me, it goes without saying that Star Trek has as much place in scholarship as Shakespeare, and I see the Shakespeare scholar's celebration of genius as fannish in just about the same way as the Star Trek geek's idealization of 'Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination.' As a scholar, delving into texts for their own sake is less what interests me than the work texts can do in the context of readers and cultures (though I love close textual analysis for what it can uncover and engage in it both in fannish and in academic situations). I would like to think that both Star Trek and Shakespeare fandom can show us important things about what Shakespeare and Trek can be, can create in and for their viewers.

I often work with texts that few members of academic communities are familiar with, whether because they are little-read historical works (let me just pause in this space to recommend Katharine Burdekin's 1937 feminist dystopia Swastika Night) or because they circulate outside of mainstream literary communities.

I do embrace the capacity to be a tastemaker that academia gives me to some extent in that it allows me to share these amazing works with other people: I've been able to put together several vidshows for student audiences to explain the way transformative fan communities have developed a set of literacies and artistic practices for digital video remix. I'm alert to the issues Kristina Busse has often raised, in terms of the ways scholars may be creating a canon that isn't representative of fan creators' work as a whole and may indeed go against the way fans want to be represented. But I aim to be quite clear that when I show fanworks, my aim is generally not to show what fandom is (I am grateful to scholars like Tisha Turk for doing the work of explicating fan videos' rhetorical functioning so that I can focus on my own interests without needing to do that to the same extent) but rather to show what fans' transformative artistic practices can do.

Roberta Pearson: I know the original definitions of affirmational versus transformational fandom as developed by obsession (if we can call her this for short) although don't know how the concepts have been developed by Skud so need to go look at that. While I find the distinctions useful, I reject the value judgements inherent in them. As I said in my essay for Kristina and Louisa that I mentioned above, I think that celebrating the latter and intimating that the former are too closely linked with producers returns us to the early days of fan studies when we celebrated semiotic geurrillas and ignored other aspects of fandom. But if the distinction is between fans who engage in interpretation and evaluation of a loved textual object and those who transform that object in some way, without one being seen as superior to the other, than I'm happy to use it not only for fans but for acafans.

I really find this whole fan of fandom thing fascinating since it's something I've just 'discovered' while writing that essay I keep referring to. I had thought that fans always had to be anchored to particular texts and that indeed 'texts' produced fans (who might then of course go on to produce other texts). This is getting us a bit far from the acafan debate, although perhaps not if we return to my point that we need to theorise fandom before theorising acafandom.

Re your statement about fannish theorists and artists who help you theorise as much as any academic, this seems quite close to people studying contemporary art -- as least as I understand it! I have a colleague who works on contemporary Chinese art. He says that many of the artists have imbibed some critical theory from the academy and are now reworking it in their art works. And he's very interested in the junction between critical theory and critical practice. So this kind of work might be very close to what you and other acafans are doing when working with fan artists. Again, this suggests that we might broaden the term acafan to many humanist disciplines.

RE academic power and privilege, of course even those at the top of the greasy pole can't entirely escape our fannish affiliations. Many colleagues in various depts have teased me about Star Trek -- associating me, of course, with the most stereotyped fans of all, the Trekkies. But as long as I'm publishing on the topic they're happy because of the national system of research evaluation that we have in the UK. I imagine that a fannish identity might be harder for an ambitious young acafan to disclose in publications or more particularly at job interviews. But that might be more of a problem in the States. Here in the UK, I don't think it's such a big deal, but then again I think the US academy is generally more obsessed with identity issues than the UK one.

Alexis Lothian: Skud doesn't alter obsession_inc's concepts of affirmational and transformational fandom so much as lay them out in a matrix of examples--it might fit nicely with your interest in the empirical! I think that a value judgment does sometimes seem very present in how those terms are used by those who engage in transformational fandom, but a line in Skud's post suggests that the intention is much as you have been using them: she writes that ""affirmational" and "transformational" are things you can be both of, either at different times or simultaneously, without disappearing in a puff of illogic." I think that, if we made your questionnaire (an idea I rather love), we would find that many people appeared simultaneously in several different places on the matrix.

I completely agree that the way I am talking about fans and fanworks is the way many scholars engage with practising artists. In fact, in October of this year I am taking part in a panel at the Los Angeles Queer Studies conference with three other young queer scholars, in which we will all be presenting work on queer digital artistic self-fashioning and talking about projects with regard to which we are both scholars and creators. The work that I will be talking about just happens to be fan production.

As for the UK/US difference in academic structures, I have experience of both and think you're probably correct regarding identity, but I suspect the differences within each country are at least as wide as the transatlantic gap. And I'll have to get back to you regarding the fate of the ambitious young acafan in a couple of years...

Alexis Lothian is completing her dissertation in the English department at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on queer time, speculative fiction, and fan communities' transformative modes of digital analysis and critique. She is a founding member of the editorial team for Transformative Works and Cultures and has presented and published on science fiction literature and film and on fan video, including contributions to dossiers in Cinema Journal and Camera Obscura (forthcoming). Her website is http://queergeektheory.org.

Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies and Head of the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. She has written about Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, Batman and other cultural icons. She has written some Sherlockian scholarship and even produced a Trek fanfic or two for private circulation, but considers herself primarily an 'affirmational' fan whose academic interests are more in the industry than in fandom.

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Roberta Pearson and Alexis Lothian (Part One)

Roberta Pearson: I'm looking forward to Alexis' 'provocation' since our preliminary exchanges indicate that we're ideal partners, coming at the issue of aca-fannishness from very different perspectives. In fact, it's the perspective and position of the various posters that I want to address first.

The very title of Henry's blog together with this debate have so far led most participants to confessions concerning the kinds of acafans they are or are not and why. As Anne Kustritz pointed out, though, there's a danger here. "The aca-fan concept will be defined by perhaps the most simplistically "confessional" works unless we create a theoretical frame for understanding...." And as Henry said, "my bet is that each participant has reasons to feel somewhat inside and somewhat outside the "core" of the community being represented." So far we've had discussions of myriad fandoms, including skating and Radiohead, with many people positioning themselves somewhat outside the core of the fan communities with which they affiliate. We've also had people positioning themselves outside a presumed core of acafans, which implicitly (and not so implicitly in some cases) means an active involvement in a fan community or at least a stake in transformational as opposed to affirmational fandom. I'd like to suggest that we can't begin to theorise the concept of acafan unless we first return to our theorisations of fan.

Harrington says, "I am also, I suspect, a different kind of fan that most participants in this blog series. I'm definitely an "as-is" (not transformative) fan and for the most part my fandom is experienced privately not publicly." Campbell says that when reading some fan studies, he has the "distinct impression that if I don't don a Star Trek uniform, attend Sci-Fi conventions, invest a significant amount of my time memorizing minutia surrounding each episode and reading fan fiction, then I cannot claim to be a Star Trek fan. Apparently, enjoying the series, collecting some Star Trek memorabilia, and discussing the series with friends who also enjoy the show is not enough to be a "fan.""

And now time for a bit of personal confession and positioning. I certainly consider myself a fan, particularly with my core fandoms of Trek and Sherlock Holmes. Re the former, I've written a couple of fanfics, just to see how it was done, but the first and only time I went to a con, the sight of people dressed in Starfleet uniforms struck me as either risible or horrifying. Re the latter, I've written Sherlockian scholarship, was for a period in my life actively involved in the Sherlockian community and still count some members of that community among my dearest and oldest friends. But with Harrington I'm much more an affirmational than a transformative fan and experience most of my fandom in private; thus by some accounts I'm probably not a fan despite my self-declaration as such. Here we have two possible dimensions of fandom: affirmational versus transformational and private versus public (or perhaps text versus community).

In a recent essay that I wrote for Kristina Busse's and Louisa Stein's collection on the BBC Sherlock, I suggested another dimension, distinguishing between those who are fans of a specific text/cultural icon and those who are fans of fandom itself, the shared protocols of fandom on sites such as LiveJournal permitting fans to move easily from one fandom to another. The relationship of these various kinds of fans to texts, to the industries that produce them and to fan communities are distinctly different and worthy of exploration. And until we do this we cannot begin to distinguish among the different kinds of aca-fans.

And of course once we've charted the fan bit of the term, we must also chart the aca bit, defining the individual's relationship to the academy. We can then differentiate for example, between a non-tenure track transformational fan of fandom and a tenured affirmational fan of particular texts or cultural icons (the category into which I would put myself), along with the factors of power and privilege that come with these distinctions.

Continuing with self-positioning, I have to confess (and among this crowd it feels very much like a confession, although one I've made before and in print) that I'm a fan of lots of high culture, ranging from Shakespeare to Bach. I would argue that many in the humanities who engage in "serious scholarship" around these cultural icons are also fans. As Henry says here, "as writers like Jolie Jensen noted, this mixture of passion and knowledge was what qualified one to speak about classical music, serious literature, or high art, but because of the legacy of critical studies, being passionate about popular culture was seen as being duped by the culture Industries." Here's the classic Bourdieu-ian binary: passionate engagement with popular culture and distanced appreciation of high culture.

Yet as I have argued elsewhere, those who love Bach or Shakespeare are just as passionate as those who love skating or Radio Head, and this extends to those who engage in "serious scholarship." Above I've suggested refining the concept of the aca-fan; here I suggest broadening it to include those within the humanities who research particular texts or icons. Anyone who has been in the company of Shakespeareans for example, recognizes the easy familiarity and in-group conversation of the fan, as people reference various plays and characters. Why should those of us who (also) study popular culture and engage in much the same activities, feel inferior to acafans of high culture?

These high culture acafans have always felt fully confident in their judgments as authorized tastemakers, fully confident that is until the culture wars that enshrined relativism and challenged academic authority. As someone who began her academic career amidst this furore and fully imbibed the concept of cultural relativism, I've never felt confident in imposing my own tastes upon my students nor in unproblematically declaring that something I like is 'good'.

My initial training as a social scientist, which involved the notions of objectivity that others have referenced here, probably also made it harder for me to engage either in aesthetic analysis or aesthetic judgments. From my preliminary exchanges with Francesca Coppa, originally scheduled to be my partner in this debate, I have the impression that the younger generation of academics feels much less reticent about this and happy to grab the tastemaking power that comes with an academic position. And even I am now happier to declare something "good," or at least to interrogate the factors that might make something "good," as my co-author and I are doing in a chapter of our book about Star Trek and Television. But does being an acafan always mean that one loves the object that one studies?

And yet another confession - as well as being a fan of texts I'm a fan of the industries that produce them. This industry fandom was practically forced upon me as a fan of Star Trek during its first airing, as news of low ratings and imminent cancellation continually circulated. In order to understand this, my adolescent self had to acquire some grasp of network operations, even if only through the not so reliable medium of TV Guide. Now that production studies has emerged as the dominant paradigm within television studies, I return to worries about objectivity and what it means to study the beloved object and to have access to those who produce it. Can we/should we maintain a critical distance?

I said above that when I first saw someone in Starfleet uniform at a con, I hovered between horror and laughter. The next time I saw someone in Starfleet uniform, was on the Paramount studio lot during the filming of Star Trek Nemesis. When Brent Spiner and Marina Sirtis appeared fully decked out in their characters' costumes, scholarly objectivity disappeared in a haze of excitement: I was for a moment completely fan without a trace of aca, indeed, living the fan's perfect daydream. But loving something doesn't mean always being affirmational: affirmational fans are perfectly capable of insightful criticism.

And fans of course are themselves often insightful industry analysts, for the same reasons that I was forced to be as an adolescent; they want to know what brings their beloved object into being and how long it might survive. I think it's important that fans, academics and aca-fans all have some knowledge of the industries that produce the texts that generate the majority of fandoms. Therefore, I disagree with Kristina when she says, "As a fan I don't want to engage directly with actors/writers/directors, and as an academic, I don't care about that side either. I know it's an important area, and I'm very happy that we have good and smart people explaining and representing fandom, but to me fandom is mostly about what we as fans do." However, I do think that acafans who do production studies do need to engage in constant self-reflexivity about their relationships to industry and to producers.

Alexis Lothian:

I couldn't agree more with Roberta that we need to theorize what it is we mean when we talk about being a "fan" as well as an "acafan." Without that, we find ourselves talking at cross purposes--though, of course, it's the very overdetermination of both those terms that keeps them alive and interesting. That said, it is difficult to engage in this conversation without giving in to a certain urge to self-disclosure. Especially because the way I experience the overlap of academia and fandom in my own life has everything to do with personal ethics, with the contexts and standpoints that shape my participation in knowledge production.

For me, fandom is less an identity than a location, a set of networks and connections within which I'm situated. My participation in fan culture mostly means being accountable to a community that I became part of through my love for science fiction and my interest in transformative works and fan video, but it's been sustained--and friendships formed--more through discussions of feminism, race, queer sex, and capitalism than through exploration of a source text. In fact, I find it difficult to name anything that I am intensively a fan *of* at the moment. Other than to say that I'm a fan of critical fanworks that engage transformatively with the hegemonic politics of the culture industry, which is possibly partly a way of seeking excuses for the extent of the pleasures I take in the aforementioned hegemonic products.

Being a fan is difficult, as Jack Halberstam says in this debate. The things you love betray you and other people just don't understand. In fact, my own movement away from more object-oriented fandom can probably be traced to the intensity of my disappointment with the end of Battlestar: Galactica, around which I participated in an exciting whirl of collaborative fanwork-making, drawing out queer and antihumanist and other critical interpretations through transformative works. The show's last half-season (and here I do speak as frustrated fan!) made a mockery of everything that excited my collaborators and I, and even though the fanworks the group created maintained the queer worldmaking we'd been doing around the show in ways I think are fascinating and important, I've been less inclined to give myself over to a fannish passion since.

Instead I have been working to celebrate and expand critical forms of fandom through the feminist science fiction convention WisCon, where I've been part of a group bringing transformational fanworks into the heart of a convention traditionally focused on literary science fiction with a feminist focus (the kind that tends, alas, not to sell very well or to get mainstream marketing). The convention is not an academic conference, but it shares very many concerns with my academic home of queer studies: thinking critically about politics and pleasure, discovering and creating and building on ways of living, thinking, loving that are outside the mainstream. It owes at least as much to activism (often online activism but certainly not restricted to that) as to the fandom it's ostensibly organized around. As with anything one is a fan of, I have plenty of frustrations relating to WisCon, but it wouldn't be inaccurate to say I'm a fan of this particular fan community. It's also true that I could occupy the position I do with respect to the WisCon community without necessarily calling myself a fan--to think of myself as a fan marks me as more personally invested, names the position the feminist sf world plays not just in my professional but also in my personal life.

In going to WisCon as a fan, even a fan who has been afforded professional opportunities through it, I tend not to go as an academic. I don't study fans or fannishness as such, though I have written about fanworks and will continue to do so. It's more that my participation in fandom has shaped the way I engage with scholarship. My academic work is about what speculative fiction and other forms of artistic speculation can do to create alternative ways of being, different ways of living and thinking futures and worlds. Being part of feminist sf and transformative works fandom lets me see how other people are also thinking about these things. I don't want only to study fans or to use fans' ideas to make sense of texts, although those are certainly dynamics that I engage in. I tend to prefer to think about fandom, as about as a set of communities where people are engaging in cultural production, intellectual exchange and concrete worldmaking that participates in the same project as the one I'm working on. Fandom has become central to my intellectual life because of the specific things that happen in the fannish world I live in: the art that gets made, the people who connect, the ways in which normative relationships between pleasures, politics, capital, genders, and sexes get played with and reimagined.

I say "intellectual life" rather than "academic life" with some care. I take seriously Matt Hills's injunction in the classic Fan Cultures that academics should bear in mind our tendency to valorise the modes of fannish participation that look most like the particular class based institutional worlds that we inhabit, and certainly convention-based US sf fan culture looks sometimes disturbingly similar to the academic conference and publication circuit. But the differences between fandom and academia are profound, and I get very uncomfortable when they are eroded from either side.

Fandom's structures come about through play, sometimes through desires to make the world a better or more equitable or more entertaining place. Academia's an industry, and academics working on objects they love or with communities they are a part of don't get to opt out of the more problematic parts of knowledge production--such as measuring their output for the assessment of research's quality and impact. If I use my connections to fandom for that purpose, I think it's vital for me to offer something to fandom itself as well. I could call that research ethics, but as a scholar of literature and cultural production without a substantial background in the social sciences or in critical anthropological literature, I'm happier calling it acafannish manners.

I hope these meditations make it clear why I tend to embrace the term acafan, and how I've been able to leverage that term to account for the ethical considerations that are important to me. Other terms might fit as well; Halberstam talks in In a Queer Time and Place about the subcultural archivist who is also a participant, and that also describes how I see my work.

There are plenty of places where my scholarship and my fandom do not overlap, and I think I need that space in order to maintain both rigor in my academic work and pleasure in my fandom. But in the spaces between, acafandom is a helpful shorthand for my affective, ethical, critical, and personal negotiations. Working within queer studies and having lots of connections to critical ethnic studies scholarship, I've seen plenty of examples of the way this kind of insider/outsider position plays out for scholars who study communities of which they are members--particularly communities that are excluded and oppressed. Fandom is not an oppressed community, although there are plenty of people and groups within it who are structurally oppressed in various ways. But it is often marginal, overlaps with other marginal groups and practices (especially when it comes to sex and sexuality, I have found) and it can still be unfairly exploited.

I've recently had the opportunity to experience the acafannish situation from the opposite side, as it were. A friend of mine, who I know through fannish circles and who is a postgraduate student, recently wrote a paper about vidding. She wanted to interview a vidder and asked me, and I've now had the opportunity to read my own opinions about fannish meaning-making as stated by a research informant rather than from the pedestal of scholarly publication. Her piece is excellent and I learned a lot from the way she was analyzing my responses; I suppose this must be an experience with which any academic who is also an artist or cultural producer will be familiar. Yet it was still a strange and vulnerable feeling, one that may well affect the way my academic and fannish projects intersect in future.

Alexis Lothian is completing her dissertation in the English department at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on queer time, speculative fiction, and fan communities' transformative modes of digital analysis and critique. She is a founding member of the editorial team for Transformative Works and Cultures and has presented and published on science fiction literature and film and on fan video, including contributions to dossiers in Cinema Journal and Camera Obscura (forthcoming). Her website is http://queergeektheory.org.

Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies and Head of the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. She has written about Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, Batman and other cultural icons. She has written some Sherlockian scholarship and even produced a Trek fanfic or two for private circulation, but considers herself primarily an 'affirmational' fan whose academic interests are more in the industry than in fandom.

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Karen Tongson, Jayna Brown, and Geraldine Bloustein (Part Two)

Karen Tongson: What strikes me when I view our opening remarks collectively, is that each of us has such a different orientation to the concept of "cultural studies." I think I work from a Williamsian genealogy (still very much influenced by literary studies), whereas Jayna invokes the Frankfurt School, and Gerry speaks from the vantage point of Anthropology. These positions clearly have an impact on how we each respond to the notion of "fandom" itself: whether we embrace, disavow, or express some ambivalence to being a fan, let alone an "acafan."

The capaciousness of the term "fan" (at least for those of us not squarely situated within "fan studies") reminds me of how the term "queer" used to circulate in the early-to-mid-90s: as irritant and stimulant, as identification and practice, as discipline and unruliness. We, as a trio, are are quite loose with our associations to the terms "fan" and "acafan." My rather casual embrace of the term "acafan," I think, has as much to do with seeing it as an adjacent and complementary practice to the other fields in which my work is more readily situated. It's descriptive of another dimension to my work in queer cultural studies. Do you two feel the same way about the "adjacency" or additive power in the terms "fandom" and "acafandom?"

I was especially struck by the moment in Jayna's piece when she declared her identification as "a fan," not in relation to a broader set of cultural objects, but of her nephew's attachment to Gaga and other pop iconoclasts. Jayna forges a fandom once removed, and practiced through mediation. Instead of thinking this as a disavowal of, or distancing from what "true fandom" and commitment might mean, I am drawn to the possibilities it opens for creating a prismatic approach to affective, intellectual attachments.

I also see something of this in Gerry's relationship to her research "subjects," who are her collaborators, as much as they are figures of inquiry and "knowledge acquisition."

Each of us also seem to find and wind our way into this adjacency or proximity with fandom through music, in particular. In what ways does music, as the object, and as form, bear some impact (or not) on the practice of "acafandom?"

Jayna Brown:

Karen has asked us in her response to consider the ways we may think of acafandom or fandom as additive or adjacent to the fields we work in. Acafandom, if I am using it in the correct way, would seem adjacent in the sense that the skills I learn and develop in my intellectual life are my way of embracing the music and film and literature that I feel passionate about. These skills open up the 'texts,' to reveal the shape and texture of my passions. But these skills also help shape what I find interest in, what I am drawn to, or become the object of affection themselves. What strikes me about all three of our opening remarks is just this: the dialogic relationship between our topics and our intellectual training.

Karen also asks a very important question, regarding the ways music impacts the practice of acafandom. Perhaps one of the ways it does so is to require that we become part of, or engage with a mixture of communities. Karen's remembrances bring me back to my undergraduate years in England, reading the Brontës and Kristeva during the day and dancing to house music and northern soul in the club all night (yes, I am feeling nostalgic today!).

Music could also challenge what we think of as 'aca' in the first place, broaden our sense of what that means. If 'aca' implies study of and incorporation of influences, so might fandom, as with the 'homework' I see my nephew doing into music and cultural movements of the past. The way, as Karen says, Scritti Politti introduced her to Kant is the same way Lady Gaga has introduced my nephew to Dada, Andy Warhol and German Cabaret. This is the same way The Clash's Sandinista album (my favorite!) got me to find out what dictatorship was and about US cold war policies in Central and South America.

I share with Gerry an appreciation of the ways music blurs the lines between creator and audience; at least the types of music I am drawn to are participatory, collective. Music also impacts the practice of acafandom in that it makes us search for a way to think about the non linguistic, what happens, as Paul Gilroy puts it, at lower frequencies, in different registers.

Gerry Bloustein:

I think Karen's initial questions about the additive or adjacent nature of acafandom to our own areas pf interest and research are pertinent. On reflection, like Jayna, I realise that my engagement and in fact my immersion with particular areas of popular culture and especially with music does continue to both shape and develop my intellectual pursuits and networks as well as underpin my attraction and love of the activities. So work and play interweave and mesh (how lucky are we acafans!).

Interestingly, one of the young musicians and entreperneurs (one my collaborators with whom I have been working closely for about 10 years!) articulated this dialogic relationship, which Jayne described. He now runs a grassroots and thriving retail hip hop business, including an event management business which supports his own music making and his experiential community and networks. He told me sternly one day in response to a question I asked him about how he saw the blending of his art and commerce, 'Everyone wants to make money from things they love doing, so why shouldn't I?'

If you think about the ways in which we as academic fans also make our living through activities we love and from the worlds in which we are embedded, it is a similar story.

And as far as music is concerned yes I think it does underpin so much of what we love and enjoy whatever the subject of our desires and attractions. I was/ am very much an acafan of Joss Whedon's work (love the writing, the humour, the characterisations) and so loved the clever use of music throughout all of his creations. It is an area that I still am anxious to explore - the role of affect (I think I said this earlier) which is so powerful and can often articulate the unspoken / unspeakable and even the ineffable through music. Any other takers?

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press), is forthcoming in August 2011. She is co-series editor for Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins (NYU Press), and is also co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) with Gustavus Stadler.

Jayna Brown is Associate Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Riverside. Her book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern was published by Duke University Press in 2008 and has won awards. Her current projects focus on utopias and race in speculative fiction and global pop music and black women and postpunk music in Britain.

Geraldine Bloustien is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Hawke Research Centre, Division of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of South Australia (UniSA). She has published extensively and internationally in the areas of cultural identities, youth cultures and on the complexity of effectively using participatory visual ethnography. Her book publications include Girl Making: A Cross Cultural Ethnography of Growing Up Female (Berghahn 2003), Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity (Ashgate 2008) and Youth, Music and Creative Cultures: Playing for life (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2011).. Her recent research explores the intersections of community media, music, health and Web 2.0 technologies.