[Air-L] CFP - Ethics of Fan Studies

[Katherine Larsen]

Given that so much of fan studies focuses on online activity we're particularly interested in how this relates to ethical use of the internet overall.

CALL FOR PAPERS


Book Collection: Ethics of Fan Studies 
Deadline:  Abstracts  June 30,  2010; finished essays March 31,  2011

Ethical issues are raised whenever a researcher investigates a particular group or community.  These ethical considerations are often compounded by resistance to academic scrutiny on the part of the community or group being investigated. 
This is often the case in Fan Studies, where fans conduct what they feel to be private business in the public domain of the internet and other “closed” venues such as fan conventions.  Studies of fans by academics often anger fans, who feel that researchers are being disingenuous in their claims of being fellow fans,  even as those fans engage in many of the same activities as their academic counterparts.  For their part, many researchers  still find themselves in ambivalent positions, with one foot inside the academy and on in fandom, unsure of how to identify themselves and often resistant to being too closely identified with their fan communities.

In this essay collection we hope to bring issues of researcher identity,  fans’ rights, the legality of  fan activity and  the sometimes fortuitous and sometimes fraught relationship between fans and media producers, among others, to the fore.

Please submit a abstracts by June 30, 2010; finaished essays by March 31,, 2011. Essays must be approximately 5,000  words in Harvard Referencing Style with 12-point font. Essays must be written in English, but they do not have to be about the anglophone, western version of the internet. We welcome submissions which include--but are not limited to--the following topics:


˙theorizing online fan cultures
˙the relative positions of the aca-fan and the fan scholar
˙teaching fan studies
˙research methods
˙breaking “the fourth wall” 
˙producer/fan relationships
˙fan practices, transformative works and legal issues 
˙citing and issues of privacy

Send one copy of your submission as an electronic attachment to:
John Walliss
Liverpool Hope University
wallisj at hope.ac.uk 
or
Katherine Larsen
The George Washington University
klarsen at gwu.edu


Katherine Larsen
University Writing Program
Rome Hall 561
George Washington University
Washington, D.C. 20052
202 994 3941
http://home.gwu.edu/~klarsen/main.html
http://fangasmthebook.wordpress.com/