OSCAR WATCH 2024 — World on Fire: Reflections on 'Oppenheimer' (2023) and Contemporary Hollywood

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — World on Fire: Reflections on 'Oppenheimer' (2023) and Contemporary Hollywood

Welcome to the first of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. This piece explores the timeliness of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), a biopic about the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, by relating the film’s story and imagery to the contemporary threat of nuclear war, judged to be greater than at any time before by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists setting its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight. In addition to indicating the film’s impressive success with critics, the piece explores the film’s chances at this year’s Academy Awards with regards to the Academy’s love of biopics and of Nolan. Oppenheimer’s surprising commercial success is situated within decades-long trends at the global box office. The film marks a triumphant return to the tradition of blockbusting historical epics, combines talking heads with spectacular visual effects imagery, places 20th century science and engineering within a mythological framework, and raises many questions about its protagonist, steadfastly refusing to provide clear cut answers.

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Immersive Ways of Live Storytelling Through Challenging Transmedia Universes: Rodrigo Terra Interviewed by Renata Frade and Bruno Valente Pimentel

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Immersive Ways of Live Storytelling Through Challenging Transmedia Universes: Rodrigo Terra Interviewed by Renata Frade and Bruno Valente Pimentel

Scholar Renata Frade interviews transmedia and AR/VR creator, scholar, and entrepreneur Rodrigo Terra and mobile apps developer and VFX editor Bruno Valente Pimetel. They share insights on the history and future of transmedia and AR/VR work in Brazil as well as internationally, with examples like VR immersive narrative The Line and game universe Pixel Ripped.

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Serial Killers and the Production of the Uncanny in Digital Participatory Culture

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Serial Killers and the Production of the Uncanny in Digital Participatory Culture

Everywhere you look, the serial killer looks back at you. Streaming services finance endless documentaries about notorious killers, broadcast networks greenlight miniseries telling similar stories, podcasters jump in, social media debates ensue, amateur content proliferates – around the world. There seems to be an uncanny alliance between participatory digital media culture and the mythos of the serial killer. The serial killer, we argue, is not an accidental exemplar of contemporary digital culture—it is a totem upon which people can project their anxieties about dehumanisation uniquely experienced in a digital environment. For our argument, we consider what people – professionals and amateurs alike – do online with the serial killer as practices that function to (re-)appropriate existing serial killer discourse into a new media language that belongs to the Internet. 

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Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Four): Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential

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Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Four): Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential

Jewish communities may all have originated from the Twelve Tribes of Israel, but they have transformed over time and space, moved, merged as well as diverged.  So did their cuisine: Jewish cooking and eating is multifaceted and yet highly capable of dialogue. It is a marker of religious and cultural belonging, its historical and contemporary features and possesses a commendable diversity, deriving from the various patterns that form belonging to a broader Jewish sphere. Exploring the “Jewish Food Society” with its storytelling around passed down family recipes, I focus on the combination of tradition and adaption. Through a focus on the practices of cooking and eating in a Jewish context, their change overtime, for instance, concerning valorisation and trendsetting, can be traced, and tracked. This adds up to the formation of Jewish cuisine as a term with interconnections between prescribed dietary laws – the Kashrut – and local as well as global conditions, ultimately leading to a pluralistic approach to “Jewish Cuisine”. Sparking civic imagination, this can serve as a soft though powerful approach to resilient relations of inclusivity, when pictured with a certain openness for its combinability.

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Returning to Tradition: Emotional Morality in Fan Fiction of 'A Dream of Red Mansions'

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Returning to Tradition: Emotional Morality in Fan Fiction of 'A Dream of Red Mansions'

Cao Xueqin's masterpiece A Dream of Red Mansions is both a model of ancient literature and the subversion of many of the conventions of its literary genre. Today, it is also a popular canon for fan fiction writers on the internet. But where the original work is renowned for its subversive nature, contemporary fan fiction for it most often returns to classic social values.

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The Popularity of Cotton Dolls: The Desire to Return to Childhood

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The Popularity of Cotton Dolls: The Desire to Return to Childhood

Cotton dolls, originally of K-Pop idols, have become a favorite object of high school girls and young office ladies, a totem of "Peter Pan syndrome.” Baudrillard called non-functional goods "gadgets," meaning that they were divorced from practical value and had only symbolic meaning. The practical value of the cotton doll lies precisely in the implementation of the symbolic meaning on the concrete and perceptible material, which forms an interesting contrast with Baudrillard's "gadget."

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Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part Three)

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Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part Three)

Meet Molly. She was gifted to me during the seven weeks I spent this summer teaching, lecturing, and doing field work on fan culture in China. She is a product readily available at any of the Pop Mart stores in Shanghai. Across this post, I am going to explore some of the different ways we might make sense of Molly as an embodiment of Chinese fan culture.

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Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part Two)

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Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part Two)

Meet Molly. She was gifted to me during the seven weeks I spent this summer teaching, lecturing, and doing field work on fan culture in China. She is a product readily available at any of the Pop Mart stores in Shanghai. Across this post, I am going to explore some of the different ways we might make sense of Molly as an embodiment of Chinese fan culture.

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Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part One)

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Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part One)

Meet Molly. She was gifted to me during the seven weeks I spent this summer teaching, lecturing, and doing field work on fan culture in China. She is a product readily available at any of the Pop Mart stores in Shanghai. Across this post, I am going to explore some of the different ways we might make sense of Molly as an embodiment of Chinese fan culture.

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Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse: Notes on an Unfolding Semantic Shift (Part Two)

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Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse: Notes on an Unfolding Semantic Shift (Part Two)

Cosplay is big news today. And I’m not just talking about within the realms of fandom and fan studies; cosplay has hit the mainstream hard over the last few decades. A socio-cultural evolution seeing its meaning change in ways unexpected and not yet quite understood. Once describing a subcultural, niche fan practice, cosplay is fast becoming a metonym for all kinds of dressing up practices. Forget the subtleties of masking and costuming, masquerade, mimicry, fancy dress, dressing up, or just plain old dressing, it’s all cosplay now.[1] As a natural aspect of evolving phenomena, semantic shifts are hardly surprising— that’s not the story here. Like seasoned seamsters, fans and scholars are always adjusting the meaning of cosplay, altering its pattern and form, letting it out a bit here, a timely tuck or hem there, and always embellishing our understanding of this art of making otherwise. Less important then is the idea that cosplay’s meaning is stretchable, it’s the origin, nature, and agents of this particular public amplification that I want to observe and consider, and its potential impact upon what’s rather magically called the “cosphere.”

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Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse: Notes on an Unfolding Semantic Shift (Part One)

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Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse: Notes on an Unfolding Semantic Shift (Part One)

Cosplay is big news today. And I’m not just talking about within the realms of fandom and fan studies; cosplay has hit the mainstream hard over the last few decades. A socio-cultural evolution seeing its meaning change in ways unexpected and not yet quite understood. Once describing a subcultural, niche fan practice, cosplay is fast becoming a metonym for all kinds of dressing up practices. Forget the subtleties of masking and costuming, masquerade, mimicry, fancy dress, dressing up, or just plain old dressing, it’s all cosplay now.[1] As a natural aspect of evolving phenomena, semantic shifts are hardly surprising— that’s not the story here. Like seasoned seamsters, fans and scholars are always adjusting the meaning of cosplay, altering its pattern and form, letting it out a bit here, a timely tuck or hem there, and always embellishing our understanding of this art of making otherwise. Less important then is the idea that cosplay’s meaning is stretchable, it’s the origin, nature, and agents of this particular public amplification that I want to observe and consider, and its potential impact upon what’s rather magically called the “cosphere.”

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The Space Between Fiction and Reality: A Conversation about ‘Swarm’ and the Crucial Project of Cinematic Representation

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The Space Between Fiction and Reality: A Conversation about ‘Swarm’ and the Crucial Project of Cinematic Representation

When is discomfort effective, and what does it tell audiences about themselves? When is a challenging representation breaking down stereotypes and when does it fall into them? Jacqueline Nkhonjera and Yvonne Gonzales debate these questions in the context of Swarm, a streaming TV series created by Donald Glover and Janine Nabers about a super-fan of Ni'Jah (read: Beyoncé) who becomes a serial killer.

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Fandom, Participatory Culture and Web 2.0 — A Syllabus

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Fandom, Participatory Culture and Web 2.0 — A Syllabus

As regular readers of this blog know, the syllabus for my PHD seminar on fandom studies has evolved a lot through the years. The changes I have made this round mostly center on integrating a transcultural fandom perspective across the whole, with a particular emphasis on East Asian fandoms. I have lots to learn here, but there's a broad range of expertise amongst the students enrolled in the class and so I look forward to creating a context in the classroom where we can all learn from each other -- one of many reasons I am leaning heavily on the dialogic writing process for the assignments.

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The Revolution is Female: How Luiza Trajano Has Been Transforming the World with Disruptive Technology, Civic Engagement and Community Logic — An Interview with Renata Frade

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The Revolution is Female: How Luiza Trajano Has Been Transforming the World with Disruptive Technology, Civic Engagement and Community Logic — An Interview with Renata Frade

Renata Frade interviews entrepreneur and activist Luiza Trajano about her many projects with Magazine Luiza and Mulheres do Brasil and what inspires her work. As Luiza Trajano points out, "The digital is a culture. It is not software or an application; it is a way of life."

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Catherine D´Ignazio and Lauren Klein Interviewed by Renata Frade: The Future of Tech Feminism in the Present with Artificial Intelligence and Storytelling

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Catherine D´Ignazio and Lauren Klein Interviewed by Renata Frade: The Future of Tech Feminism in the Present with Artificial Intelligence and Storytelling

Renata Frade interviews the authors of Data Feminism, Catherine D´Ignazio and Lauren Klein, to see what impact the book has had in academia and society both. Feminist approaches to data and technology are more necessary than ever in a society where artificial intelligence threatens another round of making the same mistakes.

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What Makes Media Work Special is Also What Can Make People Sick

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What Makes Media Work Special is Also What Can Make People Sick

The majority of workers in the media report experiencing mental health problems, struggling with feelings of fatigue, isolation and depression related to the job, and experiencing irregular and inadequate sleep. They subsequently tend to engage in a variety of unhealthy lifestyle practices such as lack of regular physical activity, poor nutrition and overeating, and smoking and alcohol abuse. Despite all of this, most of the same industry studies and reports that document these issues note that professionals still claim to be satisfied on the job.  It is exactly this tension between vision and reality that goes to the heart of any debate and assessment of mental health and wellbeing in media work.

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On Parasocial Relationships with Professional Athletes

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On Parasocial Relationships with Professional Athletes

My family have always been fans of the Philadelphia Eagles. To most Philadelphians, being an Eagles fan means more than just supporting our favorite football team: it’s a lifestyle. So when my sister brought home an Odell Beckham, Jr. jersey several years ago, I was mortified. It wasn’t until years later that I realized she had recognized something crucial about the changing landscape of American sports fandom: people invest a lot more into individual players today than they have in the past.

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From Brazil to L.A. : Transmedia and Audiovisual Creators Raphael Draccon and Carolina Munhoz (Part Two)

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From Brazil to L.A. : Transmedia and Audiovisual Creators Raphael Draccon and Carolina Munhoz (Part Two)

Raphael Draccon and Carolina Munhoz bring together unusual and solid characteristics as content creators, capable of reading a world and translating it to increasingly sophisticated and broad audiences in a universal aesthetic and language without losing their creative DNA. There are many interesting topics to be covered and therefore this interview will be divided into two parts. We will address biographical aspects to understand how the trajectories of the authors are inspiring for young talent, aspects related to content creation, editorial and audiovisual business, interaction with technology and platforms, relationship with fandom and influence in the conception and development of projects, the relationship between creators and large entertainment companies, and future projects will also be covered.

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From Brazil to L.A. : Transmedia and Audiovisual Creators Raphael Draccon and Carolina Munhoz (Part One)

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From Brazil to L.A. : Transmedia and Audiovisual Creators Raphael Draccon and Carolina Munhoz (Part One)

Raphael Draccon and Carolina Munhoz bring together unusual and solid characteristics as content creators, capable of reading a world and translating it to increasingly sophisticated and broad audiences in a universal aesthetic and language without losing their creative DNA. There are many interesting topics to be covered and therefore this interview will be divided into two parts. We will address biographical aspects to understand how the trajectories of the authors are inspiring for young talent, aspects related to content creation, editorial and audiovisual business, interaction with technology and platforms, relationship with fandom and influence in the conception and development of projects, the relationship between creators and large entertainment companies, and future projects will also be covered.

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