acafanconvo | Entries tagged with participant statements

Mirrored from http://henryjenkins.org/2011/09/aca-fandom_and_beyond_rhianon.html

Rhiannon Bury:

It has been a bit of a challenge putting together this "provocation" in the final weeks of the Acafan and Beyond debate. I hope I have succeeded in responding to the original set of questions without covering too much of the same ground as earlier posts. Let me start by saying that I really am an accidental fan studies scholar. As late as 1995, when I was doing my PhD in Education with a focus on Cultural Studies, I was still heavily invested in the high/low culture binary. I whole heartedly agreed with William Shatner's "get a life" cri de coeur to fans. I identified strongly as a feminist so my "discovery" of the three David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades (DDEBs) while surfing the web for X-Files information and subsequent engagement with some of the members forced me to interrogate and reevaluate my elitist attitudes. Sixteen years later and an academic career made possible by the kindness and generosity of participatory fans, I do not consider myself an acafan or even a fan-scholar (overlapping but not interchangeable terms). ( Read more... )

Matt Yockey:

Responding to these provocations has proven much more challenging than I originally anticipated, perhaps in large part because it requires the kind of candor and reflexivity I've tried to dodge in my own work on texts of which I am a fan. The problem for me is my own struggle with identifying as a fan, as if this some sort of monolithic construct. For similar reasons I've often resisted the label of academic. The acafan label limits my identity as an academic (I do more than study texts of which I would consider myself a fan) and as a fan (I don't perform academic analyses of many objects of my fandom, such as the Red Sox, Robyn Hitchcock, or The Rockford Files). Curiously, however, the designation acafan has both emphasized my ambivalence regarding such labels and reconciled some of the problems I've had with them. ( Read more... )

( Participants )

kbusse

Mirrored from http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/aca-fandom_and_beyond_jonathan.html

Jonathan Gray:
One of my concerns with the term "acafan," and hence a key source of my reluctance to self-identify as one, is that it suggests a special relationship between one's object of study and one's academic practice that obscures the degree to which everyone studying the media has some such relationship. ( Read more... )

Matt Hills:
My take on acafandom is that it's impossible to be 'for' or 'against' it, since either stance assumes an overly monolithic definition of what 'it' is that we're in favour of, or not. The greatest difficulty with the label of acafandom is that it misleads us into thinking there's one referent to be championed, critiqued or defended. Instead, I'd like to open up the question of acafandoms, plural, and hence the range of critical practices, identity positions, or bids for authority that the term might blur together. I'm not convinced that acafandom necessarily captures a singular (hybridised) scholarly community, and so this needs careful thought as well. ( Read more... )

Alisa Perren:
While I appreciate being asked to participate in this conversation about aca-fandom, I come to this conversation feeling a bit like an outsider. This is in part because my own scholarship has focused much more on media production and distribution practices, rather than on fandom. But this feeling of "being an outsider" is not simply based on my different scholarly emphases. Rather, it also stems from that fact that my interests in popular culture seem to differ from many of those who write and speak from the position of aca-fans. This is not to say that I have a problem with the term of aca-fandom per se. But it does lead me to ask what this label includes - and excludes - and what these boundaries might suggest. ( Read more... )

( Participants )

kbusse

Mirrored from http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/aca-fandom_and_beyond_alex_juh.html

Friday August 5, 2011
Alex Juhasz 9:50 AM (via MS Word):
For about an hour and a half on Monday August 1, Jay Bushman and I had a typed conversation over Skype while Derek Kompare drove thousands of miles and was off line. Through previous email exchanges, we had learned that we had almost nothing in common with each other, and had little interest in acafandom. It is from there that we began the "conversation" that follows. As we typed, I also read from a novel, played Internet scrabble, worked on my YouTube art show, PerpiTube: Repurposing Social Media Spaces, and monitored my children who were playing Minecraft and Sims.

Monday August 1, 2011
Alex Juhasz 4:27 PM (via Sykpe):
Jay. Hi. My thought is we try to have an asycnch conversation about the issues for Henry's blog, and then use it as our submission. Given people's vacation schedule, this may be a bit complicated, but it's worth a go, just to shake up their format a bit, if nothing else.

( Read more... )

( Participant Bios )

alothian

Mirrored from: http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/aca-fandom_and_beyond_roberta.html

Roberta Pearson:

I’m looking forward to Alexis’ ‘provocation’ since our preliminary exchanges indicate that we’re ideal partners, coming at the issue of aca-fannishness from very different perspectives. In fact, it’s the perspective and position of the various posters that I want to address first. The very title of Henry’s blog together with this debate have so far led most participants to confessions concerning the kinds of acafans they are or are not and why. As Anne Kustritz pointed out, though, there’s a danger here. “The aca-fan concept will be defined by perhaps the most simplistically "confessional" works unless we create a theoretical frame for understanding….” And as Henry said, “my bet is that each participant has reasons to feel somewhat inside and somewhat outside the "core" of the community being represented.” So far we’ve had discussions of myriad fandoms, including skating and Radiohead, with many people positioning themselves somewhat outside the core of the fan communities with which they affiliate. We’ve also had people positioning themselves outside a presumed core of acafans, which implicitly (and not so implicitly in some cases) means an active involvement in a fan community or at least a stake in transformational as opposed to affirmational fandom. I’d like to suggest that we can’t begin to theorise the concept of acafan unless we first return to our theorisations of fan.

( Read more... )

Alexis Lothian:

I couldn’t agree more with Roberta that we need to theorize what it is we mean when we talk about being a “fan” as well as an “acafan.” Without that, we find ourselves talking at cross purposes--though, of course, it’s the very overdetermination of both those terms that keeps them alive and interesting. That said, it is difficult to engage in this conversation without giving in to a certain urge to self-disclosure. Especially because the way I experience the overlap of academia and fandom in my own life has everything to do with personal ethics, with the contexts and standpoints that shape my participation in knowledge production.

( Read more... )

kbusse

Mirrored from: http://henryjenkins.org/2011/07/aca-fandom_and_beyond_harringt.html

Karen Tongson: Earworms, Touchstones, Inversions

I've got a reason, girl, and it's Immanuel Kant's--and I like it
-Scritti Politti, "Boom! There She Was"

I'm convinced the only reason I ever cracked open a copy of Kant's Critique of Judgment--the "Great Books" edition--is that Green Gartside, the helium-voiced frontman of the 80s British pop band, Scritti Politti, suggestively whispered this remark through my Walkman when I was 13 years old. I hadn't even realized then that several years prior, Scritti Politti also recorded a single called "Jacques Derrida," in which the andro-voiced Green declares: "I'm in love with Zhack Derr-eee-dah/Read a page and I know what I need to/Take apart my baby's heart..."( Read more... )

Jayna Brown: Monster Paws Up! Loving the Stuff You Love

I've never thought of myself as a fan. In fact, I always thought of fandom as the inability to think creatively for the self, as being centrally about consumption. Despite my focus on popular culture in my work, when I thought of fans my thinking became strangely Frankfurt School. Surely, that kind of blind fervor was about the commodification of affective response, the symptom of a modernity that created dependency on the cultural industry for permission to have any emotion or passions. Making pleasure dependent on purchase was canalizing creativity. ( Read more... )

Geraldine (Gerry) Bloustien:

I don't feel the term acafan really resonated with me as something particularly different from what I have always done and considered as a researcher. My sense of an intersectional identity which incorporates both my European / Jewish migrant cultural background (arriving as a female adult in Australia) together with my education and training as an educator and then as an Anthropologist has made me always very aware and sensitive to occupying / embodying several worlds and cultures all at the same time. ( Read more... )

( Participants )

lstein

Mirrored from: http://henryjenkins.org/2011/07/aca-fandom_and_beyond_harringt.html

Lee Harrington: Very interesting discussion thus far......I think my own experience and perspective most closely aligns with that of Nancy Baym's. I do not find myself struggling to reconcile any competing expectations or ethical codes in, as Nancy puts it, being a fan studying fandom within academia. I appreciated Henry's backstory of where the term "acafan" came from. Even though I began writing about fans in the same time period he refers to, I came out of a very different disciplinary background (sociology) and training (sociology of emotions). Even though some of the early sociological pathologizing of media fans is exactly the body of scholarship that an acafan positioning responded to (bad grammar, sorry, it's summer), the type of tension or dissonance inherent in the term does not reflect my own experience.

( read more )

lstein

Mirrored from http://henryjenkins.org/2011/07/aca-fandom_and_beyond_christin.html

Christine Bacareza Balance:

fan (n.): a person enthusiastic about a specified sport, pastime, or performer; devotee

fanatic (Latin, "of a temple"): unreasonably enthusiastic, overly zealous; a person whose extreme zeal, piety, etc. goes beyond what is reasonable.

I begin with these two brief definitions of "fan" and "fanatic"--from which the first term is typically derived--because they touch upon some of the topics I am interested in, both in my research and everyday life. As someone whose early scholarly training came by way of U.S. ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, my research today focuses on the labor (productive, consumptive, affective) of making music within Filipino America--a soundscape created by the historical relationship (imperial, postcolonial, neocolonial) between the U.S. and Philippines. It is an intimate yet oft-forgotten relationship and, thus, is charged with the racial/cultural invisibility of Filipinos within a U.S. racial imaginary. In other words, what is Filipino culture in the eyes of the U.S.?

( Read more... )

lstein

Mirrored from http://henryjenkins.org/2011/07/acafandom_and_beyond_week_four.html

Drew Davidson:

Not being deeply familiar with fan studies, my initial response to these provocations comes from my perspective on how to best do constructive criticism, which I believe resonates with the concept of acafan that Henry champions. I like to approach experiences as a fan, in that I want to like what I'm about to experience, and I'm looking forward to it. So whether it's a movie, a show, a video game, etc, I hope I'm going to have a positive experience.

( read more )

kbusse

Mirrored from http://henryjenkins.org/2011/06/acafandom_and_beyond_week_thre.html

Kristina Busse

Being an acafan to me means constantly negotiating two often quite competing codes of conduct and ethical expectations. In particular, I worry about the compromises—both fannishly and academically—when I do acafannish research. I have a pretty strong fannish ethos in my research, i.e., I tend to not cite and reference material without the permission of its fannish creators and I am well aware of the limitations that may put on my research material (Fan Privacy and TWC's Editorial Philosophy). ( Read more... )

Nancy Baym

I have to say I don’t feel like I’m trying to reconcile competing sets of expectations and codes of conduct in being a fan studying fandom within academia.

One reason for this may be the primary fandoms with which I’ve aligned myself. I was never involved in fanfic or vidding communities. I’ve always been involved in and studied fan communities where we talk about and critique what we’re into and it seems like the dynamics are different than in communities based on fans’ creative works.( Read more... )

Flourish

I come from an unusual place: by the time I was really involved in fandom, the term ‘acafan’ had already come into general use. I knew the term ‘acafan’ first from the fan’s perspective and not from the academic’s. What’s more, the conflict I experience regarding fandom and professional life is much more general than concern about acafandom.( Read more... )

( Participant Bios )

lstein

mirrored from http://henryjenkins.org/2011/06/acafandom_and_beyond_week_one.html

This is the first installment of our summer-long discussion of "Acafandom and Beyond." Many readers ask me what "Acafan" means in the title of this blog. This conversation will be a chance to dig deeper into this concept and explore its relationship to more general concerns of the place of subjectivity and self-reflexivity in cultural critique. In the first segment of each week, we will be reading opening statements from the three invited participants.

Anne Kustritz:

My interest in aca-fan identity derives from two main concerns. First, I envision the aca-fan construct as the demarcation of a site of cultural and political struggle and an opportunity for solidarity; yet it often seems to be represented as a coherent or even essentialized standpoint or identity (and identity politics). Secondly, the issues I imagine as most central to theorization of aca-fan identity have also been elucidated significantly in the works of post-structuralist, post-modern, feminist, queer, post-colonial, and native ethnography/ethnology, and those conversations would significantly enrich our dialogue. ( read more )

Louisa Stein:

This August I will be going to my first fan convention. It's a very specific fan con, not one that is focused on any particular series, but rather a con that brings together practitioners and appreciators of the practice of fan remix video known as vidding. The con is called Vividcon, and for three days fans and vidders gather to screen vids, discuss vids, assess vids, critique vids, and dance to vids. Vividcon represents a turning point for me, as does the writing of this piece. I have always found negotiating my fan and academic personae to be a fraught process. ( read more )

Sam Ford:

Over the past few years, the term "acafan" has been picked up for a variety of uses. For academics, it's been a way to discuss a particular type of fan studies. By that, I mean pieces more qualitative in nature, more informed by in-depth knowledge of a particular fan culture because it's been written by someone who is a member of that community, and which often use an inductive sort of logic, focusing on the rich details of a particular fan community and then looking at what that case might tell us about fan practices at large. ( read more )

( Participant bios )