Educomunicación:  Dialogues on Latin American Media Education (Part One in a Series)

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Earlier this year, I had a Zoom conversation with Andres Lombana-Bermudez, a former student from my years at the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program who worked with Craig Watkins at the University of Texas-Austin for his PhD and who has returned to his native Columbia to do work on media literacy. He shared with me some writing he had done on the Educomunicación movement. These theories have had an enormous impact across Latin America but are little known in the global North. I instantly knew that I wanted to share some of these conversations through this blog. Andres reached out to other colleagues, including his co-editor on this series, Julio-César Mateus, a leading voice in the media literacy movement, to bring more South American voices into this conversation. And the results, you see before you. I will let them take the story from here.

Educomunicación:  Dialogues on Latin American Media Education. (Introduction to the Series - Part 1)

By Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D.

Media education and media literacies, as fields of knowledge and practice, continue to evolve in the 21st century through initiatives, programs and policies developed at global, national and local levels. In the past years, the context of the pandemic, characterized by the exacerbation of inequalities, proliferation of information disorders, and virtualization of many education and learning processes, has given these fields more relevance, as  multiple stakeholders have explored ways to cope with the crisis. However, as media education and media literacies gain more attention around the world there is an urgent need to recognize them as an ecology of diverse knowledges and practices developed across different contexts. Particularly, there is a need to make visible approaches to media education and media literacies from the Global South that have not been fully included in the international and Global North debates, policies, curricula, and research. Due to the existing power asymmetries and epistemic hierarchies, some of the situated knowledge and practices developed in the Global South remain to be rediscovered.



This entry is the first of a series about "educomunicación," a media education movement from Latin America that has been developed and applied since the 1960s by scholars, activists and practitioners working in this region. The series is based on two webinars co-organized by Universidad de Lima (Peru) and Universidad Javeriana (Colombia) in May and June 2021, in where educomunicación researchers and practitioners from different Latinamerican countries got together to exchange ideas and talk (in Spanish) about the current state of educomunicación,  and the opportunities and challenges confronted during the pandemic and post pandemic context. Our aim is to provide a space for amplifying and translating the ongoing educomunicacion dialogue that is taking place in Latina America, and to help to overcome some of the language barriers and epistemic asymmetries that have shaped the international discussion about media education and media literacies. In this way we hope to contribute to a more plural and diverse media education and literacy ecology. 



Before entering the educomunicación dialogue, we offer, as a prologue, a brief explanation of the political and pedagogical foundations of the Latin American media education and media literacy movement.



The Origins of Educomunicación

The term “educomunicación” is a portmanteau in Spanish language (in Portuguese the term is “educomunicação”) combining the words education and communication. This mix of words highlights a radical understanding of education and communication as interrelated fields that are transformational and liberatory. Its approach differs from others in its attention to the political and cultural dimensions of communication and educational processes, which is a hallmark of Latin American thought. Educomunicación emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as part of several efforts developed in the region to empower marginalized populations, transform structural inequalities, and gain economic, cultural and political autonomy. Like other theories born in Latin America during this period of time  (e.g. Dependency Theory, Participatory Action Research), Educomunicación unfolded as an alternative paradigm for reconfiguring power asymmetries, particularly those related to the processes of education and communication.  As Barranquero points out in our recent book Media Education in Latin America (2019): 

“Unlike functionalism or dissemination-focussed approaches that are dominant in other contexts, educomunicación emphasised the cultural and political dimension of the education process, as well as its inter-subjective and transformative nature. This emphasis was the result of a series of common conditions and ‘historical singularities’ in the region: military dictatorships, economic dependence, cultural imperialism, exclusion of the lower class, etc.” (Barranquero, 2011).

Debates on the role of the media became more political and institutional in the 1970s around the world. UNESCO began to take an interest in communication policies through its International Council for Film and Television (ICFT) in 1973, defining that:

“Education in communication (“educación en materia de comunicación”) can be understood as the study, teaching and learning of modern means of communication and expression which are considered an integral part of a specific and autonomous field of knowledge in pedagogical theory and practice, as opposed to their use as aids to teaching and learning in other fields of knowledge such as mathematics, science and geography.” (Morsy, 1984, p. 7, in Barbas, 2012, p. 139).

In 1977, the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems was created, chaired by Sean McBride, Nobel Peace Prize winner, which produced the famous report Many Voices, One World: Towards a New, More Just, and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order, whose objective, markedly political, was to criticize the existing world order in the field of communication, characterized by media concentration and asymmetry in the quality of information between the so-called "first and third world" countries, generating a risk of cultural domination. Here, the emphasis was placed on the recognition of communication as a fundamental right, and on the responsibility of the mass media for culture "since they not only transmit it, but also select and originate its content" (MacBride, 1993, p. 55).

Report: Many Voices, One World

Report: Many Voices, One World

At the same time, an important movement promoting media education began to take shape in Latin America, which, with its own nuances, acquired the denomination of Educommunicacion. The pioneering work of Paulo Freire on the "pedagogy of the oppressed" and Mario Kaplún on popular communication, among other authors, allowed the development of a relevant critical production at the theoretical level and inspired the simultaneous development of many initiatives and interventions of critical media literacy and popular education, with greater or lesser scope, but always in small spheres that did not escalate to public policy levels. 

Dialogical, Critical, Participatory and Liberatory: The Principles of the Educomunicación Approach

Given the diversity of cultural and social contexts of the Latin American region it is not surprising that Educomunicacion interventions and projects have taken multiple forms when developed in specific communities and territories. The approach has also evolved conceptually and adopted different names such as “communication in education,” and “education for critical audiences” to emphasize particular objectives and contexts. However, at the core of all the diverse Latin American media education initiatives developed during the past five decades, we can identify certain principles that structure the media education practices and relationships of the educomunicacion approach. Promoting and fostering dialogue, critical reflection, participation and collaboration among educators and learners, and aiming to empower individuals and communities so they can become aware of the world and transform it, are at the core of the educomunicación. These principles have their roots in some of the alternative paradigms developed in Latin America such as dialogic pedagogy, community development, and popular education and communication (“educación y comunicación popular”) .

We can find the roots of these principles in the works of several intellectuals such as Paulo Freire, with his radical proposal of a critical pedagogy based on dialogue and horizontal, reciprocal and interactive relations, which highlights the political dimension of education aimed at social change and its liberating function. Also in the work of Jesús Martín-Barbero, who criticized the fact that the school has systematically refused to accept the cultural decentering of the book as an intellectual axis and as a privileged instrument of access to information. Similarly, the works of Guillermo Orozco from Mexico and the Chilean-Equadorian Valerio Fuenzalida, developed valuable pedagogical proposals for the critical formation of audiences, framed in the so-called "reception studies". 

Authors such as the Peruvian Rosa María Alfaro and the Uruguayan Mario Kaplún were decisive in promoting a communication more linked to community development, understanding the media more as "relationships'' than as a set of technologies (Trejo-Quintana, 2017, p. 233). For popular communication, educomunicacion meant an opportunity to reduce social inequalities and overcome the obstacles to access knowledge, ideas from which emerged several teleducation projects mainly with community radios. Several community radio projects developed in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Peru, for example, have empowered indigenous, rural, women and youth populations and fostered sociocultural change (Montoya 2010).

In short, educommunication proposes a model based on dialogue and conceives learning as a liberating process that assumes knowledge as a collective creation. It adopts the premise that society is intrinsically mediatized and the school cannot remain quiet in the face of this condition. The media, under this view, play a role of mediation or intermediation that does not necessarily facilitate the communicative process, but rather creates new problems and challenges, and demands another type of more complex view. As Jesús Martín-Barbero (1999) said, "What is at stake in the relationship between education and the communicative ecosystem is the relationship between the school and its society".

Works cited

 

Further Readings

Authors

Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. (@juliussinmundo) is Full Professor and researcher in the Faculty of Communication at the University of Lima, Peru. He coordinates the Education and Communication research group and is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Contratexto. His PhD thesis explores the media literacy approach in teachers' initial training in Peru. He has published Media Education in Latin America (coedited with M.Teresa Quiroz and Pablo Andrada for Routledge) and several articles in indexed journals.

Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D. (@vVvA) is an assistant professor of communication at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia. He is also an associate researcher at the Centro ISUR at the Universidad del Rosario, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.  He is the co-author of  "The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality" (2018), “Youth and the Digital Economy: Exploring Youth Practices, Motivations, Skills, Pathways, and Value Creation” (2020), among other publications.

Back to School Special: The American Film Comedy Tradition

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At the very start of my career, more than three decades ago, I taught.a class on the comedian comedy tradition at the University of California-Santa Barbara, and I began the class with a screening and discussion of Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box. This term, I am returning to this terrain with a class on the American Film Comedy, which again, out of nostalgia, I am beginning with The Music Box. So much has changed in my understanding of film comedy between the two that I thought have The Music Box as a constant might keep me somewhat grounded. It occurs to me as I am about to post this that my first two books, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic are mirrored by the two classes I am teaching this term. Everything old is new again

What motivates me to get back into film comedy is the sheer range of film texts which are available now that were impossible to access three decades ago. These new discoveries are surfacing as a consequence of archival restorations, silent film festivals, small dvd publishers, and the writings of film buffs and collectors. As a consequence, I am trying to introduce students to canonical works (Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, and Lloyd still structure the opening weeks of the class) but also to disrupt that canon by showing how those performers are connected, existed alongside, and drew upon many performers who are today much less well known. For example, generations and generations of women as comedians, as directors, have been written out of the classical accounts of film comedy, but we now can see many of their works if we care to focus our attention in their direction. Similarly, we can start to locate today’s minority comics in a larger historical context and thus to reappraise the range of radicalized representations within the film comedy tradition with a greater engagement with Black creative agency.

As a consequence, the class places much greater attention onto screening works of comedy from all periods and writing responses to what you see than it places on film scholarship per se. I plan to tell my students that given the necessary choice to either watch films or do the readings, they should watch the films. And I am including many films, accessible online, to watch outside the class time, even as I am cramming the class period with clips, shorts, and features which we will watch together, hopefully with some collective laughter, despite the fact that we will all be wearing masks.


My book, What Made Pistachio Nuts? explores the intersection between film comedy and comic performance in other media. I plan to extend this work by showing connections between film comedy and comic expression in circus and popular theater, radio, television, recorded sound, standup, printed comics. and other related media practices. I will similarly be putting American film comedy into conversation with other international traditions and I am going to look for points where I can connect historic film comedy with contemporary comic texts.

If there’s a weak point here, it is that I give disproportionate attention to comedian-centered comedy at the expense of the romance comedy tradition — this reflects my interest in performance and my own knowledge and investments as a film scholar. I need. to figure out how to integrate that romantic tradition more fully into the course the next time I teach it, but I opted to follow my passion this go around.

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CTCS 688: Moving Image Histories: Methods and Approaches 

The American Film Comedy

Fall 2021 | 4.0 Units

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Across the semester, we will explore the American film comedy tradition -- from the role of slapstick in early cinema to the role that contemporary screen comedies play in fostering debates around gender, race, and sexuality. My approach is decisively revisionist with canonical figures and text read alongside those that history has tended to forget -- for example, what happens when we re-center silent film comedy from Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon, to incorporate a broader range of recently rediscovered silent performers, including a number of women who had their own followings at the time? Performance is a recurring focus here, in speaking not only about comedian-centered comedies but also romantic and social comedies. Performance is understood in relation to a broader range of media traditions -- particularly those associated with popular theater (the circus, Vaudeville, music hall, Commedia Dell'arte) but also radio, records, nightclubs, and television. Through this focus on performance, we gain core insights into bodies, pleasure, and emotions, but also disruption and transgression, as central attractions of the cinema. Along the way, we will be asking what it means to write the history of a film genre as pervasive as comedy.

 

Note: As we will discuss across the course, I do not guarantee that any given film will make you laugh. Comedy as a genre is only partially defined through laughter. Laughter, like comedy, has a history. Comedies may be especially interesting when they confront us with things that once made people laugh -- in specific cultural contexts -- but challenge us to understand why they were meaningful in the past. I also am pretty sure at some point in this class, you will find something you will find offensive. These films deal with stereotypes and show us more directly than many other genres do attitudes about race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, etc., which are problematic. There is a power in confronting these moments directly and understanding how they fit into the larger history of American film comedy rather than avoiding them and simplifying our understanding of the past.  Performers of color often struggled to nuance or disrupt these stereotypes through their staging of them, and we do them a disservice if we ignore these important sites of struggle. 

 

REQUIRED BOOKS AND SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS

Henry Jenkins and Kristina B, Karnick, Classical Hollywood Comedy

Rob King, Slapstick Comedy

Additional readings will be accessed via Blackboard or online. In addition to viewings via the SCA Viewing Portal, many viewings will be accessed online. See the Media Resources List attached to this syllabus for a full listing of required viewing/listening for the semester.

 

GRADING BREAKDOWN

  • Collaborative Writing Round 1 20%

  • Collaborative Writing Round 2 30%

  • Collaborative Writing Round 3 30%

  • Final Paper 20%

DESCRIPTION AND ASSESSMENT OF EACH ASSIGNMENT 

Collaborative Writing: Students will be paired and asked to engage in a written conversation each week around the class materials. This is your space to frame questions, offer reflections on what you have read and seen, and help to set the class agenda. I will write feedback intended to further push your thinking. Each student should right at least 500 words per week. Ideally, each group will go back and forth twice each week so you want to allow time in your course preparation to do this.  This will be the primary means you demonstrate mastery over the course material. I will give grades three times across the term (Round 1 20 percent, Round 2 30 percent, Round 3 30 percent)


Final Paper -- Students will write a 10-page paper on a topic of their choosing related to the course content. They should consult with me as your plans are taking shape.


 WEEKLY SCHEDULE 

The following weekly schedule is subject to change. Please consult the Blackboard site for the most current information, assignments, and due dates. 

 

Each week, we will be watching (and listening to) a range of different media artifacts—short and long—which help us to explore diverse aspects of that week’s topic.  Many weeks, we will be watching films prior to class as part of the assigned homework. We will be providing information about the best way to access this material. If you have to make a choice between watching the films and reading assignments, focus on watching the films. But where possible, do both and incorporate reflections on each into your collaborative writing. I will be assuming familiarity with video/audio material assigned prior to class as we discuss each week’s material.  You should be asking questions as you watch and you should bring those questions to bear on our discussions, in class and on Blackboard.

 

Week 1 Rethinking the History of American Film Comedy (Thursday, August 26th)

Readings:

James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Life, 1949, https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/11/17/comedys-greatest-era-james-agee/.

 

Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunovska Karnack, “Introduction: Golden Eras and Blind Spots -- Genre, History, and Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

 

Louise Peacock, “Clowns and Clown Play,” in Peta Tait and Katie Lavers (eds.), The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2016).

 

Rob King, “Historiography and Humorlects,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58(3), Spring 2019.

 

Maggie Hennefeld, “Looking for Leontine: My Obsession with a Forgotten Film Queen,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 24 September 2019, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/looking-for-leontine-my-obsession-with-a-forgotten-screen-queen/.

 

Recommended Reading: 

John Rudlin, “Playing Commedia,” Commedia Dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook (London: Routledge, 1994).

 

Henry Jenkins, “How Is It Possible for a Civilized Man to Live Among a People Who are Constantly Joking,” What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

 

In Class Screening:

The Music Box (James Parrot, 1932) (27:42) 

The Sprinkler Sprinkled (Louis Lumiere, 1895) (1:12)

Une Histoire Roulante (Alice Guy Blache, 1906) (2:35)

The ? Motorist (W. R. Booth, 1906) (2.26)

Lea and the Ball of Wool (Lea Giunchi, 1913) (3:36)

Polidor contro La Suocera (Ferdinand Guillaume, 1912) (8:18)

Onesime Clockmaker (Jean Durand, 1912) (8:04)

Be Reasonable (Roy Del Ruth, 1921) (15:34)

Mable’s Strange Predicament (Mabel Normand, 1914) (11:54)

 

Week 2 The Pie and the Chase (Thursday, September 2nd)

Readings:

Donald Crafton, “The Pie and the Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

 

Tom Gunning, “Response to Pie and Chase,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

 

Douglas Ribblet, “The Keystone Film Company and the Historiography of Early Slapstick Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

 

Murial Andrin, “Back to the ‘Slap’: Slapstick’s Hyperbolic Gesture and The Rhetoric of Violence,” Slapstick Comedy.  

 

Recommended Reading: 

Peter Kramer, “Derailing the Honeymoon Express: Comicality and Narrative Closure in Buster Keaton’s The Blacksmith,” Velvet Light Trap 23, Spring 1989.

 

Noel Carroll, “Notes on the Sight Gag,” in Andrew Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

 

In Class Screening:

His Wooden Wedding (Leo McCarey, 1925) (19:35)

Pass the Gravy (Leo McCarey, 1928) (24:40)

What’s the World Coming To (Richard Wallace, 1926) (10:36)

The Playhouse (Buster Keaton, 1921) (22 mins.)

 

Week 3 Crazy Machines and Their Inventors (Thursday, September 9th)

Before Class Screening:

Buster Keaton: The Art of the Gag (2015) (8:35)

Backstage (Roscoe Arbuckle, 1919) (19:39)

The Electric House (Buster Keaton, 1922) (23:30)

One Week (Buster Keaton, 1920) (22.24)

 

Readings:

Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in The Garden if the Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

 

Henry Jenkins, “‘That Keaton Fellow Seems to be the Whole Show’: Buster Keaton, Interrupted Performance, and the Vaudeville Aesthetic,” in Andrew Horton (ed.), Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

 

Rob King, “The Art of Diddling: Slapstick, Science and Antimodernism in the Films of Charlie Bower,” in Daniel Ira Goldmark and Charles Keil (eds.), Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-era Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

 

Recommended Reading:

Tom Gunning, “Mechanisms of Laughter: The Devices of Slapstick,” Slapstick Comedy.

(cont.)

 

In Class Screening:

Sherlock Junior (Buster Keaton, 1924) (45 mins.)  

Now You Tell One (Charles Bowers, 1926) (22:19)

It’s A Gift (Hugh Fay, 1923) (10:12)

Plastered (Norman Taurog, 1930) (10 mins.)

Jackie Chan: Master of Silent Comedy (9:13)

This Too Shall Pass (O.K. Go, 2010) (3:53)

 

Week 4 Tramps, Immigrants, and Other Outsiders (Thursday, September 16th)

Before Class Screening:

Easy Street (Charles Chaplin, 1917) (23:27)

The Immigrant (Charles Chaplin, 1917) (24:31)

Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936) (1:27:24)

 

Readings:

Jennifer M. Bean, “The Art of Imitation: On the Originality of Charlie Chaplin and Other Moving Images Myths,” Slapstick Comedy.

 

Tom Gunning, “Chaplin and the Body of Modernity,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8(3), 2010.

 

Elizabeth L. Sanderson, “Bert Williams: Minstrelsy and Silent Cinema,” Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and Black Face in American Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019).

 

Recommended Reading: 

Alan Bilton, “Accelerated Bodies and Jumping Jacks: Automata, Mannequins and Toys in The Films of Charlie Chaplin,” Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).

 

In Class Screening:

Sidewalk Stories (Charles Lane, 1989) (1:40:45)

Cinderella Cinders (Alice Howell, 1920) (19:23)

Just Imagination (Harry Watson Jr., 1916) (13:59)

 

Week 5 Comedy and the Modern City (Thursday, September 23rd)

Before Class Screening:

It (Charles G. Badger, 1927) (1:16:25)

 

Readings:

Steven Jacobs, “Slapstick Skyscrapers: An Architecture of Attractions,” Slapstick Comedy.

Charles Musser, “California Slapstick Revisited,” Slapstick Comedy.

 

Recommended Reading: 

William Solomon, “Harold Lloyd’s ‘Thrill’ Films,” Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

 

Alan Bilton, “Consumerism and Its Discontents: Harold Lloyd and the Anxieties of Capitalism,” Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).

(cont.)

 

 

In Class Screenings:

Safety Last (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Wood, 1923) (1:13:33)

A Thrilling Romance (Jess Robbins, 1926) (16 mins.)

On the Loose (Hal Roach, 1931) (20 mins.)

 

Week 6 Comedy and Sound: Radio (Thursday, September 30th)

Before Class Screenings:

Jack Benny Show (radio)

Buck Benny Rides Again (Mark Sandrich, 1940) (82 mins.)

 

Readings:

Rob King, “Sound Went Along and Out Went the Pies,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

 

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, “Eddie Anderson, Rochester, and Race in 1930s Radio and Film,” Jack Benny and The Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017),

 

Recommended Reading: 

Scott Balzerack, “Queered Radio/Queered Cinema,” Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2013).

 

In Class Screening:

Lambchops (Murray Roth, 1929) (8:01)

It’s A Gift (Norman Z. McLeod, 1934) (1:07.53)

 

Week 7 Vaudeville, Music Hall, and Comic Anarchy (Thursday, October 7th)

 

Before Class Screening:

Love and Hisses (Sam White, 1934) (17:47)

Dumb and Dumber (Farrelly Brothers, 1994) (117 mins.)

 

Readings:

Henry Jenkins, “A Regular Mine, a Reservoir, A Proving Ground,” What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

 

Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunoska Karnack, “Acting Funny,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

 

Rob King, “The Cuckoo School,” Hokum!: The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

 

Recommended Reading: 

William Paul, “Animal Comedy,” Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

 

In Class Screening:

Hotel Anchovy (Al Christie, 1934) (17:52)

Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1934) (1:09:42)

 

Thursday, Oct 14th Fall Recess

Week 8 Comedy and Femininity (Thursday, October 21st)

Before class screening:  Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 1929) (105 mins.)

 

Readings:

Kristin Anderson Wagner, “Pie Queens and Virtuous Vamps: The Funny Women of the Silent Screen,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

 

Henry Jenkins, “Don’t Become Too Intimate with That Terrible Woman?” What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

 

Mary J. Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994).

 

Natalie Zemon Davis, “Woman on Top,” Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975).

 

Recommended Reading: 

Henry Jenkins, “You Don’t Say That in English,” The Wow Climax (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

 

In Class Screening:

The Patsy (King Vidor, 1928) (78 mins.)

The Introduction of Mrs. Gibbs (1930) (10 mins.)

 

Week 9 Comedy and Masculinity (Thursday, October 28th)

Before Class Screening: 

The Chaser (Harry Langdon, 1928) (1:02:46)

 

Readings:

Scott Balzerack, “Someone Like Me for a Member,” Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2013).

 

 Tamar Jeffers McDonald, “The View from the Man-Cave,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

 

Joanna E. Rapf, “Doing Nothing: Harry Langdon And the Performance of Absence,” Film Quarterly 59(1), Fall 2005.

 

Recommended Reading: 

Alan Bilton, “Shell-Shocked Silents: Langdon, Repetition-Compulsion and World War I,” Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).

 

Scott Bukatman, “Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewis’s Life As A Man,” in Andrew Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

 

In Class Screening:

The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Judd Apatow, 2005) (116 mins.)

 

Week 10 From Screwball to Rom-Com (Thursday, November 4th)

Before Class Screening:
Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) (102 mins.)

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) (94 mins.)

 

Readings:

Kristine Karnick, “Commitment and Reaffirmation in Hollywood Romantic Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

 

In Class Screening:

Game Night (John Francis Daley/Jonathan Goldstein, 2018) (100 mins.)

 

Week 11 Comedy and Race (Thursday, November 11th)

Before Class Screening:

Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer, 2019) (118 mins.)

You Must Remember This: “Hattie McDaniels” (podcast) (30 mins.)

 

Readings:

Mel Watkins, “Race Records and Black Films,” On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1994).

 

George Derk, “Inverting Hollywood from the Outside in: The Film’s within Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman,” Screen 59(3),Autumn 2018.

 

Recommended Reading: 

Bambi Haggins, “The Post-Soul Comedy Goes to the Movies,” Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).

 

Racquel Gates, “Subverting Hollywood From the Inside Out,” Film Quarterly 68(1), Fall 2014.

 

In Class Screening:

The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996) (90 mins.)

 

Week 12 Vulgar Modernism (Thursday, November 18th)

Before Class Screening:

Hellzapoppin (H.C. Potter, 1941) (84 mins.)

The Stan Freberg Show (1957)

Bob and Ray (1955)

Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, “2000 Year Old Man” (1950s/1960s)

The Goon Show (1955)

 

Readings:

Frank Krutnik, “A Spanner in the Works?” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

 

Henry Jenkins, “I Like to Kick Myself in The Face,” in Daniel Ira Goldmark and Charles Keil (eds.), Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

(cont.)

 

Henry Jenkins, “Mel Brooks, Vulgar Modernism, and Comic Remediation,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

 

Ethan De Seifie, “Tashlin, Comedy and the ‘Live-Action Cartoon’,” Tashhlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012).

 

Recommended Reading:

Ethan Thompson, “What Me Subversive?” Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010).

 

In Class Screening:

Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) (93 mins.) 

 

Thursday, November 25th Thanksgiving NO CLASS

 

Week 13: Comedy, Politics and War (Thursday, December 2nd)

 

Before class screening:

You Nazi Spy! (Jules White, 1940) (18 mins.)

To Be or Not to Be (Ernest Lubitsch, 1942) (99 mins.) 

 

Readings:

Maria DiBatista, “The Totalitarian Comedy of Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

 

Louis Kaplin, “It Will Get a Terrific Laugh,” in Henry Jenkins, Tara Mcpherson, and Jane Shattuc (eds.), Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

 

In Class Screening:

The Death of Stalin ( Armando Iannucci, 2017) (107 mins.)

 

Back to School Special: Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 (2021 Version)

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Each term, I share with my readers what I am teaching and a bit of the behind the scenes thinking. The last time I taught my fandom class, I made a concerted effort to be more aware of the global backgrounds of my students and to embrace a more racially diverse set of readings, responding to the intellectual intensity of debates regarding race and nationality that are defining both fandom and fandom studies at the moment. For too long, fandom studies bracketed race in order to focus on questions of gender, sexuality, and generation.

As my friend Gail DeKosnik has suggested, we need to move beyond broad generalizations in favor of greater particularity about which fans of which properties in which contexts in regard to which norms and practices. Assumptions that whiteness or Americanness is an unstated norm can no longer hold and the readings selected here reflect that. I have continued this process of struggling to develop a more antiracist syllabus this term, taking advantage of new work in the field, though the changes are less dramatic than the alterations I made last time. And clearly more work needs to be done.

I am also doing some work to catch up with our shifting understanding of gender and the importance of paying attention to Ace, Gender Nonbinary, Gender Fluid, and Trans fans as we continue to see fandom as an important space where conversations about gender and sexuality are taking place.

Another significant shift this go around has to do with the assignment structure. Last term, I experimented in the arts and culture journalism class I co-taught with incorporating more dialogic writing practices into my teaching. Building on what turned out to be a surprisingly big success, I figured that a fandom studies class seems like a place where a more dialogic practice would be valuable and you will see that I have shifted from individual responses via Blackboard to group-based conversations as a core basis for my assessment practices. And I am offering substantive responses to each post each week to open up my own direct line of dialogue that helps especially students who do not talk much in class. I have always been reluctant to call on students for fear that they may not adequately be prepared but asking students to share some of what they posted in their dialogic writing means they are prepared with something to say and they already have at least one other person who might want to build on their point more fully integrating them into the discussion. These practices worked very well in the social isolation of Zoom and I am eager to see what happens in a face to face but masked classroom context.

I should note that I am stripping out of this syllabus all of the boilerplate bureaucratic stuff which makes the contemporary syllabus so intimidating for students. We all operate in our own institutions and I am not sure how valuable this stuff is for shared consumption,


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COMM 577: Special Topics: Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 

3 units

Fall 2021  

Course Description

Sites like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Wikipedia have made visible a set of cultural practices and logics that had been taking root within fandom over the past hundred-plus years, expanding their cultural influence by broadening and diversifying participation. In many ways, these practices have been encoded into the business models shaping so-called Web 2.0 companies, which have in turn made them far more mainstream, have increased their visibility, and have incorporated them into commercial production and marketing practices. The result has been a blurring between the grassroots practices I call participatory culture and the commercial practices being called Web 2.0. 

 

Fans have become some of the sharpest critics of Web 2.0, asking a series of important questions about how these companies operate, how they generate value for their participants, and what expectations participants should have around the content they provide and the social networks they entrust to these companies. Given this trajectory, a familiarity with fandom may provide an important key for understanding many new forms of cultural production and participation and, more generally, the logic through which social networks operate. 

 

So, to define our three terms (at least provisionally): 

·       fandom refers to the social structures and cultural practices created by the most passionately engaged consumers of mass media properties

·       participatory culture refers more broadly to any kind of cultural production which starts at the grassroots level and which is open to broad participation

·       Web 2.0 is a business model that sustains many web-based projects that rely on principles such as user creation and moderation, social networking, and "crowdsourcing"

 

That said, the debates about Web 2.0 are only the most recent set of issues in cultural and media studies which have been shaped by the emergence of a field of research focused on fans and fandom. Fan studies:

·       emerged from the Birmingham School's investigations of subcultures and resistance

·       became quickly entwined with debates in Third Wave Feminism and queer studies

·       has been a key space for understanding how taste and cultural discrimination operate

·       has increasingly been a site of investigation for researchers trying to understand informal learning or emergent conceptions of the citizen/consumer

·       has shaped legal discussions around appropriation, transformative work, and remix culture

·       enters discussions of racial representation, diversity, and inclusion within the entertainment industry

·       offers a useful window for understanding how globalization is reshaping our everyday lives

·       contributes to important debates about the nature of media authorship

·       and so much more

 

This course will be structured around an investigation of the contribution of fan studies to cultural theory, framing each class session around a key debate and mixing writing explicitly about fans with other work asking questions about cultural change and the politics of everyday life. This term, I have chosen to revise my syllabus to reflect ongoing debates in the field – in particular, a new effort to “de-colonize fandom studies,” to re-center the field around questions of race and nationality, as well as its historic focus on gender and sexuality. Together, we will work through the ways that this new work requires us to question and revise earlier formulations of the field. 

 

Student Learning Outcomes 

·       Distinguish among fandom, participatory culture, and Web 2.0

·       Map the roots of fandom studies in earlier theories of audiences, readers, subcultures, and publics

·       Recognize and apply methods (ethnography, autoethnography, historiography, close textual analysis) associated with fandom studies

·       Explore the links between fandom studies and earlier forms of grassroots media practice

·       Engage with debates in fandom studies around gender, sexuality, generational differences, race, and nationality

·       Identify core fandom practices, such as fan fiction, vidding, and cosplay

·       Map the social dynamics (and tensions) that define fan communities

·       Discuss the relationship between fan activism and civic imagination

·       Define core concepts used to explain fan activity, such as resistance, participation, engagement, taste, and mastery

·       Question the conflicting assumptions about authorship and intellectual property that shape relations between fans and producers

·       Debate Moral Economy and Fan Labor as contrasting models for how value emerges from fan communities

·       Make an original contribution to the scholarship on fandom and participatory culture

 

Course Notes 

This class relies heavily on discussion of core concepts drawn from the readings and, thus, I expect students to come to class prepared with ideas and questions to be discussed. Students may be called to revisit issues that surfaced during the dialogic writing, which is intended to spark ideas and identify students’ interests. I may also invite students to share some of their own research and experience, informally, with the class, if it seems appropriate. And all students will make short presentations of final research projects.  Students are encouraged to bring to class examples of fan practices drawn from their own experiences. Most of the work we are reading draws on fan practices in the Anglo-American tradition. I recognize that what fandom looks like, how it operates, and what its history is will differ from country to country, and region to region. Students are encouraged to introduce other national traditions across the semester.


Required Readings and Supplementary Materials

Rukmini Pande (ed.) Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).

 

Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill, A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020).

 

These can be purchased through the USC Bookstore, Amazon, or Bookshop.org. All of our other reading materials will be made available to you in PDF form or as links. These will be posted on Blackboard and incorporated in the weekly assignment sheets “handed out” in class via email. Most are in this syllabus under Course Schedule.

 

Description and Assessment of Assignments 

Dialogic Writing: This semester, I want students to experiment with collaborative or dialogic forms of writing. You will be assigned a partner at the start of the term (someone who will bring a significantly different background and perspective from your own). Across the term, you will write a weekly series of conversational pieces where the two of you dig into issues which have been raised by the course materials, conversations, and experiences, but which will also draw on your own observations about fandom and participatory culture. These are not crossfire posts; your goal is to explore your differences but also to search for common ground. Each installment should be roughly 1,500 words (i.e. 750-1k words per contributor) and should include more than one round of back and forth exchanges.  Assignments are due by 9 AM on the day the class meets. 

(20 percent each round) 

(I will provide two grades, one based on work prior to Oct. 12, one at the end of the class.)

          

Autoethnography:  You will write a short five-page auto-ethnography describing your own history as a fan of popular entertainment. You will explore whether or not you think of yourself as a fan, what kinds of fan practices you engage with, how you define yourself as a fan, how you became invested in the media franchises that have been part of your life, and how your feelings about being a fan might have adjusted over time. 

(10 percent) 

(Due by 5 PM on Sept. 9)

          

Annotated Bibliography: You will develop an annotated bibliography exploring one of the theoretical debates that have been central to the field of fan studies. These might include those which we've identified for the class, or they might include other topics more relevant to the student's own research. What are the key contributions of fan studies literature to this larger field of inquiry? What models from these theoretical traditions have informed work in fan studies? This bibliography is intended to get you started with the secondary reading for your final project and should include a brief abstract of what you hope to explore through that project. 

(10 Percent) 

(Due by 5 PM on Oct. 28)      

   

Final Paper: You will write a 15-20-page essay on a topic of your own choosing (in consultation with the instructor) which you feel grows out of the subjects and issues we've been exploring throughout the class. The paper will ideally build on the annotated bibliography created for the earlier assignment. 

(30 percent)

(Due on the scheduled exam date for the class, which is announced later in the term)

 

Students will also do a short 10-minute presentation of their findings during the final week of class. 

(10 percent) 

(Due in final class session) 

 

Breakdown of Grade 

Assignment

% of Grade 

Dialogic Writing, Round One

20%

Autoethnography

10%

Annotated Bibliography

10%

Dialogic Writing, Round Two

20%

Final Paper Presentation

10%

Final Paper

30%

TOTAL

100%

WEEK ONE: August 24

Defining Terms

·       Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, "Why Study Fans?" in Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (eds.), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (New York: New York University Press, 2007).  

 

If you have not previously read any of the following, take a look: 

·       Angela McRobbie, “Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Account,” http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~jdslack/readings/CSReadings/McRobbie_Settling_Accounts_with_Subcultures.pdf.

·       Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding” in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2007), https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/SH-Encoding-Decoding.pdf.

·       Raymond Williams, “Culture Is Ordinary” (1958).

·       Janice Radway, “The Readers and Their Romances,” Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984).

·       Richard Dyer, “Judy Garland and Gay Men,” Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: McMillian, 1986).

·       bell hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators," in Black Looks: Race and Representation, (Boston: South End Press).

·       Stanley Fish, “Is There a Text in This Class?” Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

 

WEEK TWO: August 31st

Fan Studies and Cultural Resistance

·       John Fiske, "The Cultural Economy of Fandom," in Lisa A. Lewis (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992).

·       Camille Bacon-Smith, "Identity and Risk," Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 

·       Constance Penley, "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture," in Lawrence Grosberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

·       Henry Jenkins, "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten,” Fans, Bloggers and Gamers (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

·       Rebecca Wanzo, “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan studies,” Transformative Works and Culture 20, 2015, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/699.

·       (Rec.) Stephen Duncombe, “Resistance” in Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray (eds.), Keywords For Media Studies(New York: New York University Press, 2017).

·       (Rec.)  Henry Jenkins, “Negotiating Fandom: The Politics of Race-Bending” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

 

WEEK THREE: September 7

From Engagement to Participation  

·       Mark Duffet, “How Do People Become Fans?” Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Cultures (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

·       Rhiannon Bury, “Fans, Fan Studies and the Participatory Continuum,” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

·       Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, “The Value of Media Engagement,” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 113-150.

(cont.)

·       danah boyd, Henry Jenkins, and Mimi Ito, “Defining Participatory Culture,” Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (London: Polity, 2014), 1-31. 

Alfred L. Martin Jr., “Surplus Blackness,” Flow, April 27, 2021, https://www.flowjournal.org/2021/04/surplus-blackness/.

Auto-Ethnography Assignment Due by 5 PM on September 9

 

WEEK FOUR: September 14

Tracing the History of Participatory Culture

·       Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensibility," The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic, 2009).

·       Daniel Cavicchi, “Foundational Discourses of Fandom” in Paul Booth (ed.), A Companion of Media Fandom and Fan Studies (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2017).

·       Alexandra Edwards, “Literature Fandom and Literary Fans” in Paul Booth (ed.), A Companion of Media Fandom and Fan Studies (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2017).

·       andré m. carrington, “Josh Brandon’s Blues: Inventing the Black Fan,” Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 

·       Helen Merrick, “FLAWOL: The Making of Fannish Feminisms,” The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms (New York: Aqueduct, 2019). 

 

WEEK FIVE: September 21

Fan Activism, Fan Education

·       Neta Kligler Vilenchik, “’Decreasing World Suck’: Harnessing Popular Culture for Fan Activism,” in Henry Jenkins et al., By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

·       Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, and Neta Kligler Vilenchik, “Superpowers to the People: How Young Activists are Tapping the Civic Imagination,” in Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis (eds.), Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016).

·       Ashley Hink, “The Nerdfighter’s YouTube Project for Awesome,” Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in the Digital World (New Orleans: Louisiana University Press, 2019).

·       Lori Kido Lopez, "Fan Activists and the Politics of Race in The Last Airbender."International Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5): 431–445. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367877911422862. 

 

WEEK SIX: September 28

The Contested Social Dynamics of Fandom

·       McKenna James Boeckner, Monica Flegel and Judith Leggatt, “‘Not My Captain America’: Racebending, Reverse Discrimination, and White Panic in the Marvel Comics Fandom,” in Rukmini Pande (ed.), Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).

·       Matt Hills, “From Fan Doxa to Toxic Fan Practices,” Participations, May 2018.

·       Benjamin Woo, “The Invisible Bag of Holding: Whiteness and Media Fandom,” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

·       Mel Stanfill, 2011, "Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization, and the Discursive Construction of Fandom," in Robin Anne Reid and Sarah Gatson (eds.), "Race and Ethnicity in Fandom," Transformative Works and Cultures 8 (special issue), 2011, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/256.

·       Suzanne Scott, “Interrogating the Fake Geek Fan Girl: The Spreadable Misogyny of Contemporary Fan Culture,” Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender and the Contemporary Culture Industry  (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

 

WEEK SEVEN: October 5

Transcultural Fandom 

·       Bertha Chin and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto, “Towards a Theory of Transcultural Fandom,” Participations, May 2013, http://www.participations.org/Volume%2010/Issue%201/7%20Chin%20&%20Morimoto%2010.1.pdf.

·       Bertha Chin, Aswin Punathembekar, Sangita Shresthova, “Advancing Transcultural Fandom: A Conversation,” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

·       Rukmini Pande, “Can’t Stop the Signal: Online Media Fandom as Postcolonial Cyberspace,” Squee From the Margins: Fandom and Race (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019).

·       Mizuko Ito, “Contributors Versus Leechers: Fansubbing Ethics and a Hybrid Public Space,” in Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Izumi Tsuji (eds.), Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

·       Miranda Ruth Larsen, “‘But I’m a Foreigner Too’: Otherness, Racial Oversimplification and Historical Amnesia in K-Pop Fandom,” in Rukmini Pande (ed.), Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).

 

WEEK EIGHT: October 12

Performing Fan Identities

·       Ellen Kirkpatrick, "On [Dis]play: Outlier Resistance and the Matter of Racebending Superhero Cosplay," in Abigail De Kosnik and andré m. carrington (eds.), "Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color,” Transformative Works and Cultures 29 (special issue), 2019, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1483.

·       Samantha Close, “Fannish Masculinities in Transition in Anime Music Video Fandom,” Transformative Works and Cultures 22, 2016, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/713.

·       Rebecca Williams, “Fan Tourism and Pilgrimage” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

·       Nicole Lamerichs,”Fan Fashion: Re-Enacting Hunger Games Through Clothing and Design,” in Paul Booth (ed.), A Companion of Media Fandom and Fan Studies (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2017).

·       Joan Miller, “Race Play: Whiteness and Erasure in Cross-Racial Cosplay,” in Rukmini Pande (ed.), Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).

End of First Grading Period for Dialogic Writing

 

WEEK NINE: October 19

Fan Production: Fan Fiction

·       Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Amy Stornaiuolo,“Race, Storying and Restorying: What We Can Learn From Black Fans?” in Abigail De Kosnik and andré m. carrington (eds.), "Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color,” Transformative Works and Cultures 29 (special issue), 2019, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1562.

·       Julie Levin Russo, “The Queer Politics of Femslash,” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

·       Francesca Coppa, “Five Things Fan Fiction Is and One Thing It Isn’t,” The Fan Fiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2017.)

·       Rukmini Pande and Swati Moitra, “‘Yes, the Evil Queen Is Latina!’: Racial Dynamics of Online Femslash Fandoms,” in Julie Levin Russo and Eve Ng (eds.), “Queer Female Fandom, Transformative Works and Cultures 24  (special issue), 2017, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/908.

·       Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnett, “Transformative,” in Keywords in Remix Studies (London: Routledge, 2018).


WEEK TEN: October 26

Fan Production: Vidding and Fan Art

·       Tisha Turk and Joshua Johnson, "Toward an Ecology of Vidding," in Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo (eds.), "Fan/Remix Video," Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (special issue), 2012, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/326/294.

·       Katherine Freund, “Becoming a Part of the Storytelling: Fan Vidding Practices and Histories,” in Paul Booth (ed.), A Companion of Media Fandom and Fan Studies (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2017).

·       Francesca Coppa, Alex Lothian, Tisha Turk, “Vidding and Identity: A Conversation” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

·       Abigail De Kosnik, “Queer and Feminist Archival Cultures: The Politics of Preserving Fan Works,” Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016).

Annotated Bibliography Assignment Due by 5 PM on October 28

 

WEEK ELEVEN: November 2

Fandom and Authorship

·       Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill, A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020).

 If you have not yet read it, please also read:

·       Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/foucault.author.pdf.

 

WEEK TWELVE: November 9

Fan Labor, Moral Economy, and the Gift Economy

·       Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, “What Went Wrong with Web 2.0,” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

·       Mark Andrejevic, "Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-Generated Labor," in Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009).

·       Tisha Turk, “Fan Work: Labor, Worth, and Participation in Fandom’s Gift Economy,” Transformative Works and Cultures 15, 2014, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/518.

·       John Campbell, “Whistle While You Work: Alienation, Exploitation, and the Immaterial Labor of Disney Fans,” (Work in Progress).

·       Nancy Baym, "Participatory Boundaries," Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

 

WEEK THIRTEEN: November 16

Taste, Mastery, and Material Practice

·       John Bloom, "Cardboard Patriarchy: Adult Baseball Card Collecting and the Nostalgia for a Presexual Past," in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.), Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002) .

·       Jonathan Gray, “How Do I Dislike Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,” in Melissa A. Click (ed.), Anti-fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

·       Melissa A. Click, “Haters Gonna Hate,” in Melissa A. Click (ed.), Anti-fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

·       Alan McKee, "Which is the Best Doctor Who Story? A Case Study in Value Judgment Outside the Academies," Intensities 1, 2001.

End of Second Grading Period for Dialogic Writing

 

WEEK FOURTEEN: November 23 Independent Student Research Session

WEEK FIFTEEN: November 30 Student Presentations