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Fandom plays an integral part in our lives. Not only does it provide us with entertainment and social connection, but it also is a connection to larger cultural and sociological structures of the world. Fans do it all. They write fanfiction, organize charity projects, and communicate with each other around the world. We can all agree that fandom is a big deal. However, it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of the term ‘Fan Studies.’
Fan Studies is an interdisciplinary field of academic research focused on media fans and fandom cultures. Getting its start in the early 1990s, Fan Studies is a relatively young field in search of new voices to explore new possibilities and challenge the status quo.
Fan Studies Network- North America (FSN-NA) is a national conference focused on the gathering of Fan Studies scholars from students to tenured professors. While typically held at DePaul University in Chicago, FSN-NA has been preserved virtually in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19. Thus, the conference is the perfect way for new scholars (and anyone who is curious) to learn more about Fan Studies from the experts.
The View From Fan Studies Network- North America (FSN-NA)
In this special feature, we are joined by FSN-NA organizers Dr. Paul Booth, Dr. Lori Morimoto, and Dr. Lesley Willard, who provide some insight into the world of Fan Studies and the history of the conference.
The Daily Fandom: Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to chat with me about FSN-NA. Would you like to introduce yourselves to our readers?
Paul Booth: Hi, I’m Paul Booth, Professor of Communication (Media and Cinema Studies/Digital Communication and Media Arts) at DePaul University. I’m the author/editor a number of books about fandom, including Digital Fandom ((Booth, Paul. Digital Fandom : New Media Studies . New York: Peter Lang, 2010.)) , Playing Fans ((Booth, Paul. Playing Fans : Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age . Iowa City: University Of Iowa Press, 2015.)), and the forthcoming Fan Studies Primer with Rebecca Williams in 2021.
Lori Morimoto: And I’m Lori Morimoto, an Assistant Professor, General Faculty in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. I co-authored an essay with Dr. Bertha Chin of Swinburne University of Technology in Malaysia entitled “Towards a Theory of Transcultural Fandom” ((Morimoto, Lori & Chin, Bertha. “Towards a Theory of Transcultural Fandom.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. 10. 92. 2013.)) back in 2013, and this has kind of become my calling card in the world of Fan Studies.
Lesley Willard: Hey there, my name is Lesley Willard and I’m a lecturer in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. I am also the RTF Internship Director and the Program Director for UT’s Center for Entertainment and Media Industries. My work has been published in In Media Res, Transformative Works and Cultures, and the Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics. My research explores the exploitation of “amateur” creators like fan artists within the media industries with a focus on labor conditions and digital platforms.
TDF: To kick things off: tell me your origin story. What initially drew you to Fan Studies?
LM: I was taking a graduate course on media audiences at Indiana University back in 2000, and one of the books we read for that was Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers. I was deep into X-Files fandom at the time, and I had never even heard of fanfiction before, so upon reading the book I sought out X-Files fanfiction, fell in love with it, started writing it as well as reading it. Then when Bertha and I met online in an X-Files fan community and started talking about our research interests, “fan studies” kind of became a reality to me and I started down that path. My dissertation ended up being a study of Japanese women’s fandom of Hong Kong films in the 1990s — something I still hope to turn into a book at some point.
PB: I told this story on Lori’s excellent “It’s a Thing” podcast ((Morimoto, Lori. “It’s a Thing!” 2020.)): I never really intended to go into Fan Studies, and I didn’t even really know it existed until I started working on my dissertation, and later book, Digital Fandom. I knew that I was a fan and that I did a lot of fannish things, and of course I’d read Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers ((Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers : Television Fans & Participatory Culture . New York: Routledge, 1992.)) in grad school, but it wasn’t until I started putting all my work together that I realized, hey, I’ve been writing about fans for awhile. And I continued my exploration of the topic of fans and discovered Matt Hills’ work, and then more and more connections became clear. It was quite an organic journey, as I’ve found all of my work has been — I almost never end up studying the thing I set out to study.
LW: Like Paul, I didn’t intend to. In fact, when I started graduate school, I didn’t even know it was an option. I have been active in fandom since the mid-to-late ‘90s and I have always loved school, but I always held them separate. Then, my first semester in my PhD program at UT Austin, I took Suzanne Scott’s Gender and Fan Cultures class and it was like one of those mind-expanding memes. Once I realized I could combine both, that was it for me. I read everything I could get my hands on and it was at once validating for my decades of experience in fandoms and fascinating for my ongoing training in critical media studies.
TDF: Fan Studies Network has existed in the UK since 2013. What was the inspiration to start FSN-NA in 2018 and what did those early days of planning look like?
PB: I co-organized, with Casey McCormick, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ (SCMS) group focused on Fan and Audience Studies back in 2014, with our first meeting in 2015. Louisa Stein was also one of our first chairs. At our first meeting there was a ton of engagement — in that pre-pandemic world, I remember close to 100 people crammed into a small room together. Egads!
The focus of that discussion was really on how to make Fan Studies its own thing, as it were, and so a group of us started to think about how to create a North American version of the UK FSN conference (which we’d been to and loved). We wanted to do something similar but open it up to scholars that may not have the means to fly to the UK in the summer!
LM: As I recall, we actually talked about this at the UK FSN conference held at the University of Huddersfield, at that weird little restaurant at the hotel across the street. Kristina Busse was also part of our early planning and first conference, and Lesley Willard had transitioned from her role as graduate representative in the SCMS to co-organizer with FSN-NA. Jacinta Yanders later joined us as we were planning our second in-person conference at DePaul.
LW: As Lori and Paul said, the original impulse came from a respect for what the original FSN organization created and a desire to expand it here in North America for graduate students and precariously employed scholars who could not afford to travel internationally for conferences. Between all three branches of FSN—FSN UK, FSN-NA, FSN Australasia—I hope we have made fan studies scholarship and community more accessible for more scholars.
TDF: Due to COVID-19, the fan studies community feels simultaneously fractured and globalized. While virtual conferences have allowed us to join in from anywhere in the world, there is also a physical and emotional barrier to the experience. What does it mean to engage with the FSN-NA community during this time?
LM: The internet was kind of made for this kind of engagement, and as one of Fan Studies ‘natural’ habitats, as it were, I think fan studies scholars are uniquely well-prepared for online interactions. Last year was our first all-virtual conference, thanks to COVID-19, and we worked to enable interaction as much as presentations through setting up a conference Discord server that hosted channels ranging from those dedicated to conference sessions to those with nothing but pictures of our pets. Since Discord is a nimble little platform, we were able to respond to requests for new channels in the spur of the moment.
LW: To be honest, I’m a big proponent of virtual and hybrid conferences, especially for fan studies. A virtual conference run on and through digital platforms like Discord actually feels closer to my own experiences with fandom and fan communities than traditional academic conferences do. There’s certainly a nice collegial aspect to in-person conferencing and networking but that’s always felt like work, to me. Beyond the familiarity of engaging with people online and establishing connections through shared interests, virtual fan conferences and conventions can flatten some of the hierarchies perpetuated in physical spaces.
For example, they allow more people to participate and attend from around the world since they’re much cheaper and more accessible, both in terms of access and accommodation. They fit into the rhythms of day-to-day life in a way that traveling to an in-person conference disrupts, especially for those with work conflicts, mobility needs, and/or caregiving responsibilities. I hope that, if we’re ever on the other side of COVID, that we can preserve some of these virtual benefits.
TDF: I personally really loved the channel dedicated to pet pictures. It was my favorite part, aside from the panels. What is your favorite memory of past FSN-NA conferences?
PB: I loved playing Fans Against Humanity in the pub after our second conference in 2019. I don’t think I laughed that hard in a long time! I still have the cards in my office.
LM: Honestly, all of them where I can see both familiar faces and people I’ve never met, or whom I’ve only ever ‘met’ online, is my favorite moment. But I also have very fond memories of our virtual conference last year. The energy was surprisingly high, and everything seemed to come off mostly without any hitches, which is always deeply, deeply rewarding. It could have been Fans Against Humanity, too, but my main memory of that is being nearly passed out in a nearby booth, exhausted from several days of conferencing. I am old.
LW: Truly, Fans Against Humanity was a high point for me and one clear vote in favor for in-person conferences. However, I was really gratified last year to see how engaged everyone was in the Q&As and in the Discord. The conversations started in the roundtables often carried over into the Discord channels, allowing people to gush about and connect over fandoms and projects. The conversations in the poster channels were really robust and productive, too.
TDF: What advice would you give to someone looking to get involved with Fan Studies?
PB: It’s still a young enough field that it’s possible to read a lot of the literature that has built the field — and to see how that literature is out-of-date. Fan Studies is so wonderfully idiosyncratic, in the best way: it thrives on the diverse community that has constructed it. Everyone has a voice and a story to tell; the trick is to find where yours fits into the larger conversation. And don’t be afraid to rock some boats and change the paradigm.
LM: What Paul said, but especially about rocking boats and changing paradigms. One of the benefits of fan studies’ relative youth is that we’re well-positioned to change things up when old paradigms aren’t really working anymore. But we have to be willing to jettison those things that aren’t working and consider out loud what might work better to fit a changing social/cultural/media world. For fan studies, knowing the canon is important, but transforming it is arguably even more important.
LW: Right now, we’re in the midst of a much-needed reckoning about the unquestioned, unacknowledged white and Western subject of fan studies research. Many scholars are also trying to reconcile and expand our frameworks and literacies with the decades of work done in sports studies, video games, dance and theater, and many other fields. So read but also ask questions. Poke holes. Make connections. Complicate frameworks. I also have a cheesy piece of advice: follow your passion, whether you’re passionate because you love it so much or because it makes you that angry. Academic work—especially writing theses and dissertations—can be really taxing and isolating but exploring questions, problems, and/or communities that truly interest you makes all the difference. Figuring out what really interests you will also help you locate and connect with people who are similarly inclined.
TDF: That is some really solid and encouraging advice. I couldn’t agree more.
For our final question, would you tell me about some of your fandoms and research interests?
PB: Anyone who knows me knows that my main fandom is Doctor Who, and I’ve been exploring facets of that fandom for over a decade. But recently I’ve started researching/writing much more about board games and the rise of analog gaming cultures. I just started a new book series at the University of Michigan Press with Aaron Trammell on Tabletop Games and my most recent sole-authored book is Board Games as Media ((Booth, Paul. Board Games as Media . New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.)), which looks at the way board games can be considered, well, media texts.
LM: I’m pretty much known as a scholar of transcultural fandoms (which encompasses transnational fandoms, my great love), and I’m pretty much all about the intersection of things that, at least on the surface, don’t seem to go together ‘naturally’. I like to question what is and isn’t ‘natural’ in such contexts, understand how people make sense of media texts and fan cultures from outside their own media/fan cultural contexts, and just generally interrogate what it means to be a fan in a world that feels like it’s getting smaller by the minute.
LW: More than specific fandoms or fan communities, I’m focused on the exploitation of fan labor across the contemporary media industries. My work is interdisciplinary, combining fan studies, media industry studies, and platform studies. From television fan artists to social media influencers to video game modders, I interrogate how and why their labor is co-opted and coerced, extracted and exploited, promoted and professionalized across the media and tech industries. My dissertation chronicled, contextualized, and critiqued the ethics of employing and exploiting fan artists as promotional labor in the U.S. television industry. My current research carries those questions and themes into video game platforms like Steam and Twitch.
TDF: Again, thank you for taking a moment to talk with me and for planning what will be another great year at FSN-NA.
The Future Of Fan Studies
Fan Studies is a field open to all, regardless of background or education. It thrives on the experiences of fans and scholars alike. There are multiple ways to get involved in Fan Studies, such as reading up on recent books and articles, participating in research surveys, and even taking interest/ demographic polls of your fandom. And, of course, FSN-NA is another excellent way to introduce yourself to the community. Like Paul, Lori, and Lesley you might even find your calling.
For more information about FSN-NA and updates on future events and conference dates please refer to the FSN-NA website and Twitter account.