Here’s a roundup of stories on education and fandom that might be of interest to fans:
- Librarian Joyce Valenza wrote about teen readers and their connectedness to literature in “Celebrating reading under the radar”. “For these kids, their favorite authors are rock stars” and they connect through reading online reviews, following authors on Twitter, and taking part in social activism. “They participated in the Speak Loudly campaign when Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak was targeted for banning They took offense to and reacted to Meghan Cox Gurdon’s WSJ article Darkness Too Visible. They were inspired by Laurie Halse Anderson’s response to the piece and eagerly followed and took part in the author/readers discussion through the #YAsaves hashtag. Literature inspires these kids to write and create and share. They contribute to FanFiction and deviantART and NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program.”
- Writing for Fast Company, editorial board member Sam Ford cites the OTW’s Transformative Works and Cultures as one of “5 Projects Helping Open Media Studies To The World”. “The journal publishes in open access online, with two new issues each year, and it aims to generate readership not only from academic circles but also among fan communities themselves and often features analysis from a variety of voices outside traditional academia.”
- Transformative Works and Cultures also hosts a Symposium blog, for which Alex Jenkins recently wrote about integrating fannish work into a poetry classroom–which requires asking students to get their hands a little dirty: “In order to excite fannish energy, it turns out, one must alter a portion of the work of the course into creative production. Lisa [Schmidt, a co-blogger] describes in her first post the experience of showing an episode of fan favorite Supernatural, and then later, a Supernatural fanvid, but she remained disappointed until she asked students to create a fanwork for their final project.”
Regardless of what fandom you’re in, why not write about it in Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.
We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!
Submitting a link doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn’t mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.