Raiding the Archives: Henry's First Essay on Fandom

Through the years, I have mentioned in interviews the fact that I had first written about fandom as a student journalist for the Georgia State University Signal. The piece is one that I have always approached with a certain degree of shame, because I fell into many of the traps that I have criticized in other people's writing about fandom.  I learned from those mistakes and in the process, developed the framework that  informed Textual Poachers and my subsequent work on fans.

When my wife discovered that they had digitized the old Signals, the first thing I wanted to read was my essay on fandom.  As part of the historical record, I wanted to share the article today.

I warn you in advance that it takes a particularly male-centric view of what kinds of fans matter. Women are discussed here almost entirely as erotic spectacle, right down to the proverbial female Amazon in the fur bikini, where-as I take seriously the activities of male fans. That said, you will also find  an emerging sense that fans are up to something important, including both creative and civic undertakings. You might think of the discussion here of NASA boosters who were very much part of the fandom I encountered in the late 1970s as an early form of what today we might call fan activism. The article gives a pretty good sense of what it was like -- for me as a randy 19 year old -- to go to his first con during this period. 

Be kind and forgiving. I share it in the spirit of senior academics who are announcing their failures as a means of helping young scholars to put the ups and downs of their careers into context. 

The Digital Civics Toolkit: Helping Students and Teachers Understand Participatory Politics

Off and on, I have shared reports of the work emerging from the Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, which over the past decade has been collaborating to research the political lives of American youth. Across multiple projects, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, we -- under the leadership of Joe Kahne -- have developed a conceptual framework for understanding "participatory politics" and demonstrating its impact on American society.  My most recent book, written with Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Arely Zimmerman, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, was one of many to emerge from this research network. And at the end of the process, several of the research groups pooled insights and resources to develop a toolkit which translated some of the core findings for classroom deployment. These tools are already being adopted and deployed by numerous classroom teachers. As we move into the new school year, it seems a great opportunity to showcase this intervention on my blog. What follows comes from the three primary architects of this collaboration.

The Digital Civics Toolkit

by Erica Hodgen, Carrie James, and Sangita Shresthova

(Adapted from an Educating for Democracy posting on the Teaching Channel)

The beginning of the school year is often a moment to pause and imagine what new and innovative things we can experiment with next year. Given our interconnected lives and the many urgent and contested issues facing our world today, reconsidering how to prepare our students to participate in democracy and in society seems warranted.

What skills, capacities, and dispositions do your students need to thoughtfully and productively navigate the world around them - and how might you support them in new ways?

Of course, students often have many skills when it comes to using digital platforms and tools. But, they may not feel confident about using digital tools to learn about issues they care about, engage in productive online dialogue, voice their perspectives in powerful ways, and take informed action.

Enter, the Digital Civics Toolkit. This new toolkit is a collection of resources for educators to support youth to explore, recognize, and take seriously the civic potentials of digital life. It draws on the research and work of the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP).

The Digital Civics Toolkit is organized into five distinct modules that each capture a key practice associated with digital civics:

• Participate -- Students explore their identities and communities, identify civic issues that matter to them, and consider how they might use digital media for civic participation.

• Investigate -- Students work to understand and analyze civic information online and consider what information they can trust.

• Dialogue -- Students navigate diverse perspectives and exchange ideas about civic issues in our interconnected world.

• Voice -- Students consider how, when, and to what end they can create, remix, and otherwise re-purpose content that they share with others in online spaces.

• Action -- Students consider a broad range of tactics and strategies for acting on civic issues.

• We invite you to explore the modules and choose the resources that best meet the interests and needs of your students, classroom, and community. Each module contains a conversation starter, several activities, and a closing reflection to support students to synthesize their learnings. If you would like to dig deeper into concepts, there are also links to extension activities. For more information on the ideas in each module, we provide teacher background information with links to articles, blogs, videos, and further resources.

We hope the Digital Civics Toolkit offers you engaging and relevant resources to explore over the summer as you plan and prepare for the coming school year.

Erica Hodgin is the Associate Director of the Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) at University of California, Riverside. She is also Program Director of the LEADE Initiative working with communities and school districts to ensure all students have access to high-quality civic learning opportunities.

Carrie James is a Research Associate and Principal Investigator at Harvard Project Zero, a Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a recurring faculty member at Project Zero’s institutes for educators. She holds an M.A. (1996) and a Ph.D. (2003) in Sociology from NYU.

Sangita Shresthova is the Director of Research at the Civic Imagination Project -- @CivicPaths -- based at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California. Her work focuses on the intersection between popular culture, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. She is one of the authors of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism.

Memory Objects and the Civic Imagination

The Civic Imagination Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, has accepted as its mission an effort to stimulate discussions within communities across America and around the world about our shared values, our hopes for the future, and the models we use to think about the process of social and political change. We conduct workshops where participants are encouraged to imagine the future together, using techniques that have been inspired by the world building practices associated with speculative fiction. We ask those who come to our workshops to imagine the world of 2060 — not as it will be but as we desire it to be, and in this way, we try to find some degree of consensus about what an ideal society might look like, a consensus that cuts across other divides amongst us. As we do so, we are using utopias not as blueprints for an ideal world but, as Steven Duncombe suggests, as provocations to have further conversations about the nature and process of social change.

But we do not want simply to focus on the future — on what changes are ahead. We also reflect on our traditions, on things we cherish and want to carry with us into the future with us. One way we get our participants to reflect on that sense of tradition is to ask them to bring a meaningful or memorable object with them and share its story as a means of introducing themselves to the group. At first, we understood this practice as simply an ice-breaker, but from the start, it was clearly much more. Sharing these objects and their stories with each other creates a degree of intimacy and vulnerability between the workshop participants; it enables trust as people talk about stuff that is at the core of our common humanity. In the room, the sharing of these stories, the handling of these cherished artifacts, break down barriers, but as we’ve returned to our base at the University of Southern California, we have found that these object stories continue to do important work as tools to think with, ways that we as a research group can gain some sense of what things are valuable and meaningful to the people we encounter in our research.

Spring semester, we conducted an interpretive experiment trying to understand the memorable objects shared with us by the participants in two of our recent workshops — one centered on the future of work, involving former coal miners and tobacco farmers, assembled in Bowling Green, Kentucky and one exploring the future of faith with the congregation of a Lutheran Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Our discussions of these memorable objects were shaped by recent work in anthropology and sociology that explores how humans map meaning onto their possessions, how our belongings often express a sense of belonging, how the exchange of things helps to shape our relations with other people in our lives. See, for example, Daniel Miller's The Comfort of Things, which we read and discussed as a group.  In this tradition, certain objects are seen as "telling" — that is, they yield stories that help us to better understand the people around us. When we are asked to show off things that are meaningful to us, we engage in a process of self-fashioning — we construct and perform our identities through the stuff we share (both the objects themselves and the emotional baggage they carry for us).

In these short and very personal essays, our graduate students engage with some of the object lessons which we gathered from our engagement with the people of Kentucky and Arkansas. Our students are writing here to and about people they have not met, people they only know through these stories about cherished objects. Given the contemporary political context, the temptation is to read these essays as pieces written from a very blue state — California — to the inhabitants of two red states. But, in practice, the situation is far more complex, since some of our group members were raised in the south (as I was) or in the rust belt, and thus these stories offer a glimpse into a world they have left behind, at least for the purposes of their education. And beyond this, the members of our research group come from varied other places — from Latin America to Eastern Europe — and thus find other cultural connections with the original tellers of these tales and possessors of these objects.

For our research group, this is a means of getting our intellectual juices flowing — a discovery process that we hope will yield further insights into the civic imagination. But we also hope that it is simply another stage in a longer communication process. We published some reflections on Medium late in the spring and I wanted to share them with my blog readers today. 

We're Back...

My blog is back in production again after my summer hiatus. I wanted to provide some updates. I am going to be spending the fall in Washington DC as the Kluge Chair of Modern Culture at the U.S. Library of Congress. I will be up to my elbows in archives as I return to a project I started several decades ago only to be derailed but which has continued to haunt me—a historical account of children's media (and discourses regarding "permissive child-rearing") in the 1950s and 1960s. It means returning to texts which had meant a lot to me growing up in that era but also getting a better sense of what the adults were reading and talking about at the same time. I will be looking at Benjamin Spock, Margaret Mead, and others, as well as everything from Dennis the Menace to Mr. Roger's Neighborhood to Room 222.

Billy Proctor has agreed to step in and help me manage content flow.  Proctor is a kindred spirit and a good friend.  Proctor is killing it with work on remakes and reboots, media franchises,  and horror media. Proctor hosted a round table about "Toxic Fandom" on the blog last spring and wrote three essays on Disney's Star Wars and The Last Jedi. 

I still expect to have some one off posts showcasing our current research efforts and other resources that will be of interest to some of you, but I am structuring things so that we will spend much of the fall on two series which grew out of this Spring's State of Fandom series.

First, I have worked with Diane Winston and Sarah McFarland Taylor to organize some  exchanges focused on Popular Religion and Participatory Culture. I had discovered how much work in Cultural Studies is taken up and engaged with in religious studies and yet very little of that work is known within Media and Cultural Studies. So, I wanted to use this series to fret greater awareness across disciplines, pairing people who are working on similar themes and topics. 

 In the second part of the fall, Billy Proctor will be conducting a series of one on one interviews with an international mix of scholars who re working on horror and cult media. This topic is close to my own heart having taught a Horror class off and on during my time at MIT. I grew up in the Monster Culture of the 1960s as I recently talked about during Proctor's podcast, The Death and Resurrection Show. So I am looking forward to reading Proctor's interviews. He's shared a few with me already and they are nothing if not provocative.

How Do You Like It So Far?, the podcast I co-host with Colin Maclay. will be back this fall for a new season and we have some great things planned there as well. I hope many of you had a  chance to check out some of our episodes over the summer dealing with, among other things, Black Panther, The Last Jedi, Ready Player One, K-pop, Wyonna Earp and Sherlock.