On Spectatorship, Reception Studies, Fandom and Fan Studies: In Media Res and Flow

Picture from Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla via Flickr, used and altered under Creative Commons License permission.

Film Studies For Free wanted you to know you have to go with the new issue of Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture on Fandom and Fan Studies.  Oh, and then you can join the party already started at In Media Res on issues of spectatorship. The great contents of these worthy e-journals are directly linked to below:


In Media Res December 13-17, 2010 (Theme week organized by Ian Peters [Georgia State University])

• Sarah Sinwell (Northeastern University) presents: The Art of Seduction: Film Spectatorship in the Age of the Cell Phone

• Ross Melnick (Emory University) presents: BIG News from India: BIG Cinemas and Diasporic Indian Moviegoing in the United States

• Sarah Hamblin (Michigan State University) presents: Puzzling Spectatorship

• Daniel C. Faltesek (University of Iowa) presents: The 3D Machine: An Experiment With Aura, Television, and Installation

• Jesse Schlotterbeck (University of Iowa) presents: DVDs Like LPs: The Official Websites of Musical Biopics and the Contemporary Film Collector

Flow: A Critical Forumon Television and Media Culture

• "Fandom In/As the Academy" by Paul Booth A look at the specific pedagogical value of fandom as an activity and how it can be appropriated in a variety of educational contexts.

• "We Have Met the Fans, and They Are Us: In Defense of Aca-Fans and Scholars" by Catherine Coker and Candace Benefiel  Fans hold their objects of study to a higher standard. How can the critical study of any text succeed without the passionate and knowledgeable participation of the scholar?

• "The Gathering of the Juggalos and the Peculiar Sanctity of Fandom" by Michael Dwyer The Gathering of the Juggalos is the scene of questionable fan practices contrary to the noble portrait of fandom elaborated by several scholars.

• "'We are all together:' Fan Studies and Performance" by Jen Gunnels and M. Flourish Klink Gunnels and Klink argue that fan studies parallels performance studies in discerning tensions between researcher and subject.

• "Stop Being an Elitist, and Start Being an Elitist" by David Jenemann Given how Aca-fandom has created its own canon and looks down its nose at certain cultural forms like sports broadcasting, we could use a little of Adorno's elitism in the discipline today.

• "Telling Tastes: (Re)producing Distinction in Popular Media Studies" by Eve Ng What we study and how we learn to talk about it is productive of our identities along mostly covert dimensions of power. How do scholars distinguish themselves from the mainstream critics?

• "Embracing the 'Overly Confessional:' Scholar-Fandom and Approaches to Personal Research" by Tom Phillips A scholar argues that embracing an "overly confessional" approach to his academic writing is integral to the fidelity of his research.

• "Revisiting Fandom in Africa" by Olivier J. Tchouaffe The application of fandom and its resources is not the same in all cultures, and African fans might not be recognized as legitimate fans. The point of this piece is to demonstrate that there is a unifying figure of American domination of mass culture.