- The University of Iowa libraries, which partner with the OTW’s Open Doors project, have announced a major fanzine digitization project. “10,000 science fiction fanzines will be digitized from the James L. ‘Rusty’ Hevelin Collection, representing the entire history of science fiction as a popular genre and providing the content for a database that documents the development of science fiction fandom.”
- At Swarthmore College, Professor Bob Rehak talked fandom studies and his article in the OTW’s academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures. “It was fascinating to see fixtures of my own media passions, such as Star Trek props and the Batmobile, filtered through the contributors’ different theoretical approaches. This sense of rediscovering the familiar is characteristic, I think, of fan studies that deepen and complexify the apparent superficialities of popular culture…Twenty years of fan scholarship have done a great deal to concretize and personalize those relationships, but object-oriented studies now promise to move us even further from the reductive idea of the media fan as gullible consumer.”
- The Prince George Citizen interviewed researcher and author Andrei Markovits about the motivation of sports fans. “[W]hile female fandom is on the rise ‘it’s very clear it’s a gendered world,’ he said. ‘The emotional investment for men is so much more, but the pain [when their team loses] is also so much more,’ Markovits said. ‘When I was a kid, every English soccer games started Saturday at 3 p.m. Why? Because the factory gates closed at 2 p.m…. and that gave them time to get to the game. For it to become part of the hegemonic sports culture, you have to have a large group of working-class men.’ However, these sports do create a mixing place for people of different social classes within society.”
- At The Daily Dot Aja Romano wrote about the Harry Potter Alliance’s equality campaign. “The newest HPA project, named after one of the Harry Potter series’ most beloved characters, is designed to raise a new generation of fandom activists. The Granger Leadership Academy, named after Hermione Granger, is a leadership conference taking place this weekend (October 17–19) at Auburn University. The goal is to empower people to turn their fandom into real-world activism, something that HPA founder Andrew Slack found transformative in his own life.”
Where research about fandom do you like to turn to? Write about it in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.
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