The books (esp. ebook 1) straddle autobiography and autoethnography. In your minds, is there a separation between the 2 (and does there must be?) and the way does your personal private background have an effect on the books?
Henry: It might be laborious to exclude the autoethnographic/autobiographical voice from a ebook on the sphere of fandom research. As we focus on in Fandom as Subculture (not but printed), the aca-fan stance has been a founding and defining trait of fandom research. We pay tribute there to the work of Angela McRobbie, whose affect I’ve come to see as completely foundational to my very own work in Textual Poachers. In her “Settling Accounts” essay, she calls out the male researchers at Birmingham who had been writing about numerous British subcultures with out acknowledging their very own involvement with them. She advocated a feminist standpoint epistemology as the intellectually sincere approach to strategy such terrain. I’d say the passages within the books the place we write about our experiences as followers are a achievement of these ideas.
I’ve usually been reluctant to go full autoethnography prior to now when writing about, say, feminine fan fiction writers in Textual Poachers, for worry that as a male scholar I’d be taking on an excessive amount of area or redirecting consideration away from the feminist/female undertaking of fan fiction. However, right here, I can faucet my very own participation in, say, the monster tradition of the Nineteen Sixties as we study the methods it deployed a spread of home applied sciences and practices – from monster fashions to my mom’s eyeshadow, which I appropriated for monster make-up, to a super-8 digital camera or a Disney report of haunted home sounds or the photocopier from my dad’s firm – to encourage and allow new types of participatory tradition.
Our use of the first-person can also be a problem to the nameless voice with which most textbooks are written and the rationale why such “nonhuman” prose turns into lethal to learn. We frequently use first particular person to name consideration to the types of affiliation between people who form our scholarship, seeing scholarship as rising by way of conversations, debates, and even confrontations between human beings. That is one thing I by no means obtained from a textbook: understanding right here who our mentors had been, who our college students had been, who our collaborators are, to assist readers grasp the collaborative nature of scholarship. We don’t just like the thoughts/physique cut up implied once we focus completely on concepts with out acknowledging the individuals behind them.
Rob: There’s a distinction between autobiography and autoethnography, and it’s a significant one, though maybe it isn’t at all times a tough and quick boundary. We actually do straddle it in Defining Fandom and throughout the collection, and we try this very deliberately. Autobiography, historically, is about self-expression and narrative coherence, the place the telling of a life, or a slice of it, foregrounds the non-public and the idiosyncratic as a result of it’s attention-grabbing and entertaining in itself. Autoethnography, on the opposite hand, takes that non-public slice and makes use of it for a function–it refracts it by way of conceptual lenses and asks, “What does this story assist us perceive about tradition, media, society, know-how or one thing else? What frameworks does it supply to us, which does it problem, which does it broaden upon?”
Our collection, and particularly the primary ebook, mobilizes autobiography within the service of autoethnography. So we aren’t simply telling tales about our youthful engagements with Batman, Gilligan’s Island, or Pogo comics as a result of we predict they is perhaps charming tales or nostalgic journeys down reminiscence lane (which, typically, they is perhaps). We’re utilizing them to get at some of the finer conceptual factors of fandom, to calibrate, by way of the lens of our personal experiences, its which means throughout private, cultural, business, sacred, and different territories.
This requires a form of cautious attunement. We’re conscious that who we’re—our backgrounds, identities, affiliations, fascinations, values, emotional repertoires, and way more—shapes how we perceive fandom, and even what points of fandom we contemplate significant. However moderately than bracketing that affect, we attempt to make it central. Positionality in qualitative analysis doesn’t get rid of subjectivity (that’s inevitable in all analysis) however it does search to make it seen in order that we will make it depend in our interpretations. It acknowledges that who we’re shapes what we see, how we interpret, what we select to jot down down and miss. Like I inform my college students once I train qualitative analysis strategies, positionality isn’t a bug: it’s a characteristic of cultural inquiry. By inserting our subjectivities in full view, we deal with them not as one thing which distorts or “biases” our views however as devices that may be adjusted for, cross-checked, and interpreted in mild of their particular strengths and limitations–one thing we’re doing consistently behind the scenes as we write this ebook collection and attempt to alter for our mutual blind spots.
That stated, though we now have some key similarities, we do not communicate from a single unified voice. As a substitute, we use our two voices to emphasise the divergences between us—our totally different relationships to faith, for instance, or to explicit genres (like sports activities, videogames, and music), and even to what counts as “severe” educational work. These variations aren’t obstacles to understanding; they really are our understanding. We’re modeling by way of our voices and their views what it appears prefer to construct idea in dialogue, throughout views, with consideration to friction and resonance.
That’s additionally why our strategy embraces a variety of fan practices, motivations, and intensities, simply as we present our personal attachments as uneven, typically ambivalent, and at all times reworking. The non-public turns into significant when it isn’t solely deeply felt but additionally when it’s analytically located as a formation we will use to ask higher questions on how individuals type attachments, how which means circulates, and the way cultural buildings form affective life.
On this means, the autobiographical and the autoethnographic come collectively for us as complementary modalities. One supplies uncooked materials we get pleasure from writing and really feel keen about, whereas the opposite encourages us to be even handed and contemplate its processing right into a extra conceptual type of understanding. One brings the reader closeness and the specificity of explicit examples; the opposite affords some extent of distance and an area for summary reflection and issues. Our books use each, to not collapse the non-public into the scholarly, however primarily to discover how one can make clear and deepen the opposite.
Are you able to focus on what influence you need the books to have? Why these matters for the fifteen books – how did you provide you with these, why not others? They’re semi-academic, semi-personal; they’re quick, however nonetheless longer than (say) the Fandom Primer collection; they’re constructed across the two of you, however inform tales of fandom throughout a spectrum of concepts. How ought to readers “place” the books of their categorization of books about fandom?
Rob: The influence we hope for is each mental and sensible. We would like these books to assist reframe how fandom is known and approached throughout a number of fields. Which means deepening the conversations already taking place in cultural and fan research whereas additionally extending them into advertising, client analysis, and communication research. We would like the work we’ve every accomplished individually to satisfy right here, in dialogue. Not fused into some hybrid center however sharpened by way of distinction and coordination. These books purpose to try this work out in public, so to talk.
The preliminary objective was modest. We wanted a textbook for our Fan(dom) Relations course at Annenberg. However in a short time, the undertaking expanded. It turned an mental voyage, one which it appears we may solely take collectively. The concept of “frames” gave the entire notion construction as nicely as depth. Every ebook would study a special paradigm for understanding fandom: Fandom as Audience. Fandom as Subculture. Fandom as Activism. The frames overlap, they construct on each other, and typically they even battle with each other. That’s okay; we really wished that stage of complexity and depth. This wasn’t a grasp idea of fandom we had been placing collectively. It was at all times meant to be a means for us to consider and throughout fandom’s many multiplicities.
Fandom immediately is multifarious—it’s robust, nice, and quite a few. We predict that, for higher and worse, has moved from the margins to the middle of tradition, economics, identification, and politics. We wished to jot down books that mirrored that shift. These books needed to discover a steadiness between being centered, teachable, grounded in prior considering, up-to-date, future ahead, and conceptually wealthy. The books are quick however not mild. They’re accessible however not simplistic. And sure, they’re private. We seem in them as a result of we consider that idea is healthier when it’s located, when it has a voice, a historical past, and a perspective.
The fifteen matters we selected replicate a form of mapping train. They hint out the dominant methods students and practitioners have tried to know fandom. Some frames, like Fandom as Participatory Tradition or Fandom as Co-Creation, replicate well-established paradigms. Others, like Fandom as Need, Fandom as Devotion, Fandom as Technoculture, or Fandom Relations, push into much less charted territory that we predict is essential or shall be. However each ebook tries to say one thing new. We try to make use of these books to develop a novel perspective, not simply report on or overview present ones.
We’re conscious that this collection doesn’t match simply into present classes. It’s not fairly educational publishing, however it’s additionally not a fan primer or how-to. These are conceptual books written by researchers, who’re additionally followers, and by followers, who’re additionally researchers. We’re constructing on a long time of work that has argued—we predict accurately—that fandom is just not a deviation from on a regular basis life, however a strong and productive mode of partaking with tradition. That argument has been made and what we do right here is hint in a range of new methods its implications for students, college students, managers, and positively for followers themselves.
The place ought to these books be positioned? Possibly within the area that doesn’t but exist: a shelf for works that take fandom significantly as a worldwide social type. That talk throughout disciplines. That interact idea with out detaching from lived expertise. Which can be keen to argue, to take a position, to construct, and to danger being fallacious. This, as I see it, is the Frames of Fandom collection.
Henry: Our preliminary discussions on the undertaking centered on the excessive prices of textbooks and particularly pupil frustration when solely small parts of books are used. Most college students haven’t but realized to assume of books as long-term investments not restricted to the advantages to be gained throughout the context of a specific class. However what if we may deconstruct the textbook, permitting individuals to, in impact, purchase chapters a la carte, paying for less than the parts they want? This query is what began us down the trail in direction of self-publishing.
As we obtained into it, our thought of promoting a ebook chapter by chapter advanced into the idea of short-ish books centered round a single body however taking a look at that body from a quantity of totally different angles, thus incorporating a broad array of totally different literatures.
