Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book, Fandom as Audience, in their Frames of Fandom book series. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere. Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets. Here is Part Two of this dialogue.

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. This post features two video essays responding to Oppenheimer, one by Kai after Kai and one by Ella Wright. Both focus in on the film's depiction of character, asking how we are meant to understand them in moral terms. I encourage you to pay particular attention to the sound in each piece, the careful dichotomies between loudness and silence in “Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppeneheimer” and the menacing yet also space age-y melodies of Kai after Kai’s original music in “The Guilt of Oppenheimer.” Both essays use sound to reinforce their critical points, rather than simply to ground their audiovisual timelines--an example of the sophisticated analysis going on in the world of video essays and videographic criticism.

Pop Junctions

Frames of Fandom: An interview on Fandom as Audience (Part Two)

OSCARS WATCH 2024 — Video Essay Reflections on Character in ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)