Dawn of a New Era: Reinventing Confessions of an Aca-Fan

I have some big news today. I am going to be shutting this blog down for a few weeks and when it returns, it will do so with a new name and a new editorial structure.

I started this blog in 2005, wondering how I was ever going to find the time to keep it afloat. At the time, I was on sabbatical and so I was able to post five days a week, almost entirely on the basis of my own writing. Through the years, I have made well over 2,000 posts, sometimes two a week, sometimes closer to four, but always adjusting to reflect the rhythms of my increasingly complex work life.

As I did so, this blog has taken on a progressively stronger community-orientation. It has become less a place for my own reflections about our changing media landscape and more a resource which showcases important thinkers through interviews and emerging new talent through guest posts and conversations series. For the past year, I have been running the Global Fandom Jamboree conversation series, seeking to showcase the next generation of fandom studies researchers world-wide. I had fully expected to return to my previous patterns after that series, but I am finding I am really tired and frankly, my podcast is where my passion has been the past few years. It feels like time for a change.

So, when we return, this blog will have evolved towards a collective editorial board that will be responsible for generating most of the content. I will still be contributing alongside everyone else and I will be playing a senior statesman role in the short term providing mentorship to the others on the team and coordinating its activities.

Since there will no longer be just one “Aca-Fan,” the old title no longer makes sense. So, the new titles, collectively selected, will be Pop Junctions: Reflections on Entertainment, Pop Culture, Activism, Media Literacy, Fandom and More.

The new editorial board will include:

Christopher Cayari is an associate professor of music education with a courtesy appointing in Curriculum & Instruction at the College of Education and an affiliation with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies. He holds a Ph.D. and M.M.E. in Music Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor’s degree in music education from Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL. Previously, he was the Director-Producer for Wisconsin Singers and an Associate Lecturer at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Samantha Close earned her PhD in Communication at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include digital media, theory-practice, fan studies, gender, race, and Japanese media. She focuses particularly on labor and transforming models of creative industries and capitalism. Her documentary, I Am Handmade: Crafting in the Age of Computers, based on her most recent research project, is hosted online by Vice Media’s Motherboard channel. Her writing appears in edited volumes and academic journals, such as Feminist Media Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures and Anthropology Now.

Mark Deuze is a professor of Journalism and Media Culture at the University of Amsterdam (before that at Indiana University). He is author of 11 books, including McQuail's Media and Mass Communicatin Theory (Sage, 2020), Leven in Media(Amsterdam University Press, 2017), Media Life (Polity Press, 2012) and Media Work (Polity Press, 2007).

Julie Escurignan is a Lecturer in Communication Studies at Sorbonne Paris Nord University and a Doctoral Researcher in Film and Television Studies at the University of Roehampton, London. She holds a MA in Communication Studies from the Sorbonne University, has conducted research at doctoral level at the University of Texas at Austin and at the University of Nordland, Norway, and has worked for NBC Universal International. She researches television series’ fandoms, and particularly transnational fans as well as material practices of fandom. Her thesis looks at the material experience of Game of Thrones transnational fans. She is the author of several book chapters on television hits such as Game of Thrones and Black Mirror.

Renata Frade is a tech feminism PhD candidate at the Universidade de Aveiro (DigiMedia/DeCa). Cátedra Oscar Sala/ Instituto de Estudos Avançados/Universidade de São Paulo Artificial Intelligence researcher. Journalist (B.A. in Social Communication from PUC-Rio University) and M.A. in Literature from UERJ. Henry Jenkins´ transmedia alumni and attendee at M.I.T., Rede Globo TV and Nave school events/courses. Speaker, activist, community manager, professor and content producer on women in tech, diversity, inclusion and transmedia since 2010 (such as Gartner international symposium, Girls in Tech Brazil, Mídia Ninja, Digitalks, MobileTime etc). Published in 13 academic and fiction books (poetry and short stories). Renata Frade is interested in Literature, Activism, Feminism, Civic Imagination, Technology, Digital Humanities, Ciberculture, HCI.

Martina Fouquet is a J.D. candidate at USC’s Gould School of Law, Class of 2022.

Grace D. Gipson is an assistant professor of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University where she teaches courses on theories and foundations in Africana Studies, Blackness in pop culture, and Black media narratives. Her research interests include Black pop culture, race and gender in comics, Afrofuturism, and digital humanities. Outside the classroom, you can find Grace collecting comic books and stamps on her international travel discoveries, ticket stubs to the latest movies, co-hosting the video podcast "Conversations with Beloved and Kindred," contributing her personal and professional thoughts on pop culture via blackfuturefeminist.com and giving back to the community through a myriad of projects and organizations. You can also follow her on Twitter @GBreezy20 and Instagram @lovejones20.

Kishonna Gray is currently an Associate Professor in Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She previously served as an MLK Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT in Comparative Media Studies and the Women & Gender Studies Program. She also served as a Faculty Visitor at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research (Cambridge). Her scholarship is influenced by my interdisciplinary training and grounded in critical race theory and feminist approaches to knowledge production. She interrogates the impact that technology has on culture and how Black users, in particular, influence the creation of technological products and the dissemination of digital artifacts. While her extensive publication record explores how technology disparately impacts women and people of color, her current research interrogates the possibilities and potentials of what that technology can afford Black communities who are traditionally excluded from public spaces, including digital ones.

Do Own (Donna) Kim is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago's Department of Communication. She studies everyday, playful digital cultures and mediated social interactions. She focuses on boundary-crossing practices in human-technology assemblages: being together across diverse "real", "online", "virtual", or "imaginary" places, and among the mundane and the weird, the "normal" and the Other. What does it mean to be human in mediated communication environments? How do we want to be together?She received my Ph.D. degree in Communication from the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (2022). Her dissertation—Virtually Human? Negotiation of (Non)Humanness and Agency in the Sociotechnical Assemblage of Virtual Influencers—took a deep dive into boundary crossings in digital reality technology and social media cultures through the lens of virtual influencers (CGI human social media influencers).

Bethan Jones is a Research Associate at the University of York. She has written extensively about anti-fandom, media tourism and participatory cultures, and is co-editor of Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics, and Digital Society (Peter Lang) and the forthcoming Participatory Culture Wars: Controversy, Conflict, and Complicity in Fandom (under contract with University of Iowa Press). Bethan is on the board of the Fan Studies Network, co-chair of the SCMS Fan and Audience Studies Scholarly Interest Group and one of the incoming editorial team for the journal Popular Communication.

Tara Lomax has expertise in blockbuster franchising, multiplatform storytelling, and contemporary Hollywood entertainment. She has a PhD in screen studies from The University of Melbourne and is published on topics such as the superhero genre, franchising, licensing, transmedia storytelling, storyworld building, and digital effects. Her work can be found in publications that include the journals Senses of Cinema and Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the book collections Starring Tom Cruise (2021), The Supervillain Reader (2020), The Superhero Symbol (2020), The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production (2019), and Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (2017). She is also editor at Mark Out Comics and a multiplatform story consultant.

Antonella Mascio is Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy. Her research interests focus on digital media, fashion communication, audience studies, nostalgia and celebrity culture.

Alex Peek is a philosopher and designer focused on creating educational blog posts based on minimalism and immediacy. Alex has a blog at Econ Analysis Tools and an economic data website at econfactbook.org.

Lauren Alexandra Sowa is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at Pepperdine
University. She recently received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication and
Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on intersectional
feminism and representation within production cultures, television, and popular culture. These interests stem from her several-decade career in the entertainment industry as member of SAG/AFTRA and AEA. Lauren is a proud Disneyland Magic Key holder and enthusiast of many fandoms.

Rachel Joy Victor works at the intersection of three related sectors: innovation strategy for content, products, and brands; product design for emerging tech; and narrative design and worldbuilding for interactive and immersive narratives.

Ioanna Vovou is an Assοciate Professor at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Athens, Greece), in the Department of Communication, Media and Culture. Her writings focus on the relation between the media and the society, on media analysis and on Television studies.

 Sulafa Zidani is a writer, speaker, and educator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Media Studies and Writing. She is a scholar of digital culture, and writes about global creative practices in online civic engagement across geopolitical contexts and languages such as Mandarin, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French. She is working on a book-length study called Global Meme Elites: How Meme Creators Navigate Transnational Politics on the Multilingual Internet.

If you would be interested in contributing to this effort, contact me at hjenkins@usc.edu.