Henry Jenkins's Blog, page 21

Acafandom and Beyond: Concluding Thoughts

Louisa Stein: I feel the need to start off by saying I never wanted or felt we needed a referendum on the term "acafan"; when I initially proposed the "Future of Acafandom" workshop at SCMS, I had in mind that we'd talk about the practices of acafan methodology and pedagogy, and perhaps also the shifting terrain for acafan scholars in graduate school and on the job market. But it became clear in that conversation that the term mattered to people, that the term itself was fractious, and that we couldn't engage with the concepts inside the term, so to speak, without poking at the term itself. I found myself asking why the term was so fractious; indeed, we originally talked about wanting these conversations to be dialogues rather than the debate structure of the Fan Girl vs. Fan Boy debates, hence the three participants, and yet it seems like we've found ourselves back in debate territory. I still don't feel like I have a full answer to this question: why is the term acafan something people feel so strongly about, or that causes discomfort?



I've come away from these conversations, both the in person ones and the blog dialogues, with an increased sense of the power of terms, of the way in which internalized definitions can link ideas and the people thinking through those ideas, but can also prevent dialogue and create miscommunication. So if acafan means one thing to me--and I say so and say it visibly, that doesn't mean others will embrace my definition over theirs (and indeed, why should they?) and may indeed continue to read my work from within their definition of the term. To make this more concrete: for me acafan is all about emphasizing the necessary synthesis of academic and fan--it's never been an exclusive term (again, to me), nor a term meant to raise rational academic discourse on fandom above emotional, non-academic fandom (indeed, quite the opposite!) But if acafan signifies these things to others, then those meanings may frame my work if I use the term.



But does that mean that I should give up the term? To me the answer is clearly of course not (I know, I'm sure everyone's very surprised about this!) because it still has methodological and personal resonance, and still offers the power to connect networks of scholars and fans. But perhaps more centrally, for me it still comes down to the fact that like it or not, the term is here with us, in the present if not the far future.

We can't just declare language dead--despite my spurious blog post title about "not-hosting the workshop that killed Acafandom." No single workshop could ever have that power. Spurred by the conversation between Jason, Alex, and Abigail, I googled acafan (why had I never done this before?) and found that in colloquial online use, the term bridges silos and boundaries. Yes, most of the first page of hits are Henry's blog, with Ian Bogost's declamation of acafan positioning making an appearance as well. But there's also fan fiction--a Sherlock Fan Fiction, no less, entitled "The Affair of the Asphyxiated Acafan" (!) And there are blog posts, twitter accounts, a fan lore entry, livejournal posts, delicious bookmarks, podcasts, etc. with varying levels of academic and fannish affiliation. To me there's a value in all that boundary crossing, and moreover it demonstrates simply that the term has a cultural life, and it's up to each of us to perform and model it as we see fit, in multiplicity, rather than to proclaim a single definition.



I want to close by building on Alex Doty's concluding point about the value of acafandom for teaching. For me, this is absolutely key, and a way my individual acafan perspective manifests every day. Depending on the course context, I don't necessarily spell this out to my students (because again, the label isn't all or even most of what matters here) but I am most acafan when I model to my students engaged critique and critical engagement. And no, we don't need the term to define this synthesized position, but the terms serves as a thread connecting my work to my teaching, and reminds me of what I value in media culture as a whole, as a scholar and a teacher, and for that matter as a student of media and fan culture who still has much to learn.

Henry Jenkins: I am not sure what I expected when I opened this particular can of worms. In many ways, I found the resulting exchanges fascinating -- especially hearing the diverse ways that contributors positioned themselves in relation to both academia and fandom, the ways that those relationships did or did not inform their work, and the other ways they were taking up some of the issues which for me are central to the use of the aca-fan concept -- especially those having to do with our subjective experiences as consumers and participants always implicated in the popular culture we study, one way or another, whether or not we want to admit it.

Progress has been made on some of the issues which spawned the term, but not others. I still hear about students who are hurt and confused when teachers write "too fannish" on their papers, with the implication that they do not demonstrate the appropriate amount of distance and rationality, that they are too emotional invested, and therefore, the chain of assumptions goes, that they are not sufficiently critical. I still get questions which imply these things when I speak outside of circles where Fan Studies has become a long accepted paradigm, as happened to me during a recent talk at Indiana University, where someone in the audience wanted to know in what sense a fan could be a critic.

This is no doubt part of what we mean when we talk about the pedagogical value of the term, that it allows certain kinds of work to be done, that it allows students and teachers another way of addressing these issues, that it allows students, especially those who may not have mentors involved in fan studies, an identity to rally behind and a means of justifying the work they want to do. For that reason, if for no other, we should hold up a banner for the acafans. It's so easy to feel isolated, the odd one out in those circumstances, and if acafan may offer too easy an affiliation as some have suggested, that is still better than no affiliation at all.

The post that has had me struggling the most with my own assumptions was John Campbell's critique of the essentialism implicit in refering to oneself as a fan rather than as "a fan of." We come at this question from such a different place, yet with such shared values, that this one got under my skin and I am still scratching at it. Most early writings about fans sought to essentialize them by defining them in terms of their singular relations to particular texts. So, a "Trekkie" (rarely a Trekker for such writers) was someone who loved Star Trek. There was no sense that they might be interested in other texts, that their biography might connect across a range of fan communities, that fan culture might have a tradition that extends beyond the single text, and so forth. In Textual Poachers, I stressed that fans were nomadic, that they "traveled across" texts much as De Certeau describes readers as "traveling across" lands they have not cultivated. The nomadic dimensions of fandom keep getting dropped from accounts of the book in favor of the concept of poaching -- titles do shape readings, after all -- but it is key to imagining the reader as structuring their relationships with texts and each other through choices made about which materials to borrow.

To me, going back to the "fan of" formulation means ascribing too much authority to the text, not enough authority to communities. I get John's points that there is no essential fan, that we are never just fans, that fans are not alike, etc., and these are useful correctives to our current use of the term. But, for me, when I speak of fan, I am thinking of being a fan as a subcultural identity, one defined through loose affiliations and shared traditions, as well as by shared debates and tensions, which run through the history of fan practices. There is not just one fan community, but most fan communities, in some ways, tap into the shared traditions of fan culture as they are defining themselves in relation to particular texts in particular social and technological contexts. I am not sure I have fully resolved the issues John raises (and I would welcome his response), but in many ways, this was one of the posts that most pushed the conversation forward.

In terms of my disappointments, I think the biggest one was that we did not make more progress in exploring in productive rather than dismissive ways the relationship between the identity of the acafan and that of the gamer-as-scholar. Most of the gamers here seemed to come into the conversation with very strong defense mechanisms against really entertaining that parallel and often with certain stereotypes about what it meant to be a fan. Some of those defense mechanisms emerged from the experience of stigmatization which surrounds the concept of being a gamer, stigmatizations which in some ways parallel those surrounding the fan, except that the gamer stereotype is often hypermasculine while the fan stereotype is so often feminized.

I had been struck by the essays in Drew Davidson's Well Played series, where gamers describe very specific play experiences which they had with specific titles: the argument is that there is no game text, only game experiences, and thus, criticism of games needs to preserve the process of playing them. As you do so, the player's own experiences are brought forward and with them, the player's own subjectivity, their identity, their history as players. I see strong parallels here with the trajectory of fan studies and the identity of the aca-fan. And I think the two movements have much that they can learn from each other. So, why do fans and gamers end up talking past each other, as I think has generally occurred here?

Drew, I would really love to get your reflections on this dynamic which occurred not only here but also in the discussion in Ian Bogost's blog which helped to inspire this one. Having tried and failed to bring the two groups together through this series of exchanges, I want to use my parting shots here as, well, a parting shot to push one more time to see if we can explore the similarities and differences between these two forms of cultural criticism and academic identity.

Drew Davidson: This has been an interesting experience, particularly since I wasn't deeply familiar with the term "acafan." And during the round of discussions in which I participated, I think all three of us were concerned about a lack in this regard, which we worried we had kept our conversation scratching at the surface of the ideas involved. And to be honest, due to lack of time, I followed the other rounds obliquely at best. That said, even at a high level I believe we all felt a resonance between the idea of being a fan and being a gamer, maybe the sense of defensiveness came from struggling to articulate the connections, but I don't think any of us felt overtly defensive (looking back I can see how it reads that way though).

Thinking of Henry's question, I think it comes from this lack. As with any academic field, acafan has developed a deep and rich set of issues and terminology that in some ways can become a barrier to newbies. Similarly, gamers-as-scholars are developing as a field (and it's an area where newbies would feel barriers in the terminology as well as playing ability). And so, I agree with Henry in that there is an opportunity to learn a lot from each other (and regret that it seems like we were part of the sense of talking past each other).

That said, it brings me back to the sense of a lack of time (the most finite of things). When this whole idea kicked off, there were bigger plans and more people involved, but as the reality of life set in, people dropped out here, got busy there, and a different thing evolved than initially was planned. For our round, we ended up having to squeeze in our discussion as we had wildly divergent schedules, and we weren't sure what to say really. Regardless, it seems to have inspired all involved to think anew about ideas and assumptions, so I think it's been an overall success. But it is easy to see how we will now scatter back to our daily schedules and pursuits, and having the time to better make and articulate connections across fields is a real challenge. But one worth striving for.

Just in the way Henry articulated why he was interested in inviting some gamers to join this discussion got me to think in a new light about what we've been doing with the Well Played series, and how the act of playing a game, and trying to discuss that act, is full of interesting agency on several levels. And it got me thinking about how I'm an acafan of Henry (and by extension his work), and that's why I joined in on this conversation (and often is how connections can be made).

Also, Henry's comments on how John discussed the distinction between being a "fan" and being a "fan of," got me thinking of how it can be both, particularly in terms of acafan. I think I am an acafan in general (in terms of approach), and I'm an acafan of videogames (in terms of expertise). Like Louisa notes in her closing comments, I think I'm most acafan when I'm engaged and modeling the agency in interactions with students and colleagues. And being an acafan resonates for me as an honest stance through which to consider the media and games that I both study and enjoy.

Kristina Busse: In psychology, there exists the concept of confirmation bias, which describes the informal fallacy whereby more information confirms our entrenched belief rather than expand our minds. This is a quite depressing concept for academics, because mostly our modus operandi dictates that more facts, more opinions, more positions are better and open our minds.

Sadly, I feel a bit like this reading over the acafandom conversations this summer. Personally, I came into this discussion wanting to narrow the term rather than expand it: to me acafans describe actively in the community involved fans who, at the same time, also do academic work on these very communities. Unlike Louisa, for example, I wasn't deeply invested in the larger concerns of and for the discipline but instead was quite happy to narrow the term and employ different concepts for other aspects of fan studies. The difficulties of the acafan to me were the negotiation of following competing rules of dissimilar community norms; it was the decisions of whether it was worth the CV line to expose one's friends' embarrassing debates; it was the constant explanation of fandom to academics and of academia to fans.

And yet we never really seemed to get to these difficult decisions and negotiations: Should we consciously create a canon of academically-approved fanworks that, in turn, will affect the value of these texts within fannish spaces? Do we (ab)use our role as fans when we exploit our fannish connections for academic work? Or do we, in turn, do a service to fandom by telling the better story? And do we compromise our role as academics when we focus on certain things but not others, pick the more accessible story, the more traditionally aesthetic vid, the classically trained artist's piece? Do we compromise our role by focusing on the good over the bad and ugly? And do we do harm by talking about one show and its fandoms rather than about others? What unconscious fannish and academic biases do we bring to our work, and where do the two cancel one another out and where do they amplify each other?

Those were the questions and moral dilemmas I had hoped we'd address and yet I felt we mostly were stuck in Acafandom 101: Hadn't we all agreed sometime in the nineties that academics exhibited clear fannish behaviors--that those folks at Faulkner and Hemingway and Woolf conferences clearly were quite affectively invested in their chosen writers? At the same time, hadn't Hills a decade ago convincingly argued that we can't facilely project our academic values onto fans, foregrounding the behaviors we recognized and valorized and overlooking those that were less like our own? Finally, did we really need to dismiss fannish behavior and communities in a conversation on acafandom?

The two things that most struck me was the resistance of several of the game scholars to embrace the questions and ideas that they might, in fact, be acafans and the willingness of various queer scholars to interrogate these positions and questions I raised above--even as they clearly weren't acafans in the more traditional sense.

Which brings me back to the original SCMS conversation and some of the more convincing arguments I heard there: to some, one of the strongest objections to the focus on acafans seemed to be the erasure of other central questions and the danger of studying a limited group of texts at the expense of equally culturally important ones. Then, my personal solution to that was to narrow the term down to the point where not every watercooler convo analysis, not even every user-generated YouTube response would automatically be about fans and, by extension, acafandom would define a subset of fan studies only (which, in turn, would be a subset of media studies only).

Reading Doty and Halberstam in particular, however, I wonder whether an alternative answer might not be to open up acafannishness to the point where indeed every academic is a fan (of sorts) and every fan (on some level) an academic. Borrowing from the amorphously defined and ineluctably changing concept of queerness, I wonder whether acafandom might not be better thought of as a set of parameters that circumscribe descriptors and questions and behaviors and identities while nevertheless avoiding certainties and resolutions. Because these initial questions I raised deserve not one answer but demand repeated revisiting. they are important questions, whether we are deeply embedded in a tightly self-defined and self-described community or analyze YouTube vids we stumble upon.

And maybe that made this conversation both difficult and frustrating. We tried to discuss these issues in the abstract but possibly they can only ever be presented in media res. If I take anything away from these conversations, it is my renewed investment in addressing this self-reflexive meta level of acknowledging and investigating the methodological and ethical concerns of studying fans and fan texts in everything I write. Not only can I not take anything for granted, I shouldn't assume that yesterday's procedures and theoretical framework still hold today. Just as fandoms and fans are changing, my own approach as a scholar must continue to interrogate my position and role within the academic and the fannish communities I inhabit.

Karen Tongson: Although I've taught introductory courses on fan cultures and fan studies in a general education context since graduate school--making some of the rudimentary, but necessary links between "fans" and "critics" that Kristina rightly insists we move beyond--I've never really considered myself a true fan studies scholar. Nor have I really identified as an acafan; at least not until this series of conversations transpired. In part, I think my reticence has to do with my own sense of the tremendous expertise and commitment that attends to "true" acafandom and vigorous involvements in participatory cultures. In other words, I had a sense (as both Louisa and Kristina gestured to) that the terms were narrower, or had reached the point of naming a more specific set of procedures, practices, and archives.

I also think my "primary academic orientation"--if there can be such a thing--as a queer studies scholar, kept me immersed in different conversations about affect and participatory engagements, even though I always felt and understood the tremendous overlap between acafan practices and queer cultures. All this to say that my familiarity with fan studies from the 80s onwards offered a particular lens for me to view queer studies, and vice versa. Yet my own disciplined docility to the concept of "expertise" and commitment to other identificatory practices kept me from assuming the subject position of the acafan in ways that I ultimately understand, through this summer's conversations, were rather unnecessary. In fact, it wasn't until I read this same reticence in some of the responses from my own colleagues in queer, ethnic and American studies (I'm thinking in particular of Christine Bacareza Balance's, Jack Halberstam's, Jayna Brown's and Sarah Banet-Weiser's pieces), that I realized how cordoned off many of us have been from the expansive possibilities of acafandom wherein, as Kristina phrased it, "every academic is a fan (of sorts) and every fan (on some level) [is] an academic."

More than anything, I valued this summer's conversation, and the invitation to consider in greater depth some of the practices we either rightly or falsely assumed belonged to the rubric of acafandom from an "outsider's" perspective. It brought to the surface how even certain, more established interdisciplinary fields (like the ones I listed above), are still very bounded, insular and unconsciously averse to the multiplicity of identifications. Acafandom, as I've come to understand it through this series generously hosted by Henry on his blog, is not simply a subset of Fan Studies, or Media Studies, but an orientation of sorts--at once methodological and affective--that can inform practices otherwise situated firmly within other disciplinary formations and their imperatives. I'm heartened by the extent to which emerging young scholars like Alexis Lothian and Suzanne Scott understand their work as part and parcel of the formations of both their "home" disciplines and acafandom in ways that shed the residual hang-ups (for lack of a better word) that continue to hold some of us back.

Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of gender and generation. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal and the Flow TV anthology (Routledge, 2011). Louisa is co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. Louisa is also Book Review editor of Transformative Works and Cultures.

Henry Jenkins blogs...here. He is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Art, and Education at the University of Southern California. He has recently completed Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, due out in 2012. His current fannish interests include comics, Disney, silent movies, The Walking Dead, Castle, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who...

Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories across texts, comics, games and other media. He is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center - Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University and the Editor of ETC Press.

Kristina Busse

Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures.

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press), is forthcoming in August 2011. She is co-series editor for Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins (NYU Press), and is also co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) with Gustavus Stadler.

Acafandom and Beyond: Will Brooker, Melissa A. Click, Suzanne Scott, and Sangita Shreshtova (Part Two)

Will Brooker:

Here's the problem, for me. I like reading about Sangita's sari pleats and Suzanne's Nerf battleaxe, and recognising similar fan experiences from different fan communities, but those enjoyable moments, those connections and those stories don't make me feel more able to answer the broader questions posed by Melissa. I don't feel entitled to, and I don't feel inclined to.

Somehow, in the last ten years, I've gone from being a kid who couldn't believe he was actually writing a book about Star Wars to some middle-aged man of fandom who gets reverently approached by PhD students, telling me they were inspired by that book I couldn't believe I was getting away with. I'm happy to give advice, but I don't feel comfortable telling anyone what to do, except: do what you want to do, do what you love.

I have my own answers to Melissa's questions -- I feel entirely open-minded about different types of media fandom, I feel anti-fandom is a love-hate variation on traditional fandom, and I have few hang-ups about 'quality' versus 'camp' -- I studied 1960s Batman in the 1990s, and got over those snobberies a long time ago. But these are just personal opinions, as far as I'm concerned. I don't like the words 'geek' or ''nerd' because I feel they describe what would be simply called scholarship, expertise or ability in most other areas of life; I don't like the word ''fen' (why are we adopting this twee, sub-Elven term when we have the word 'fans'?), and 'squee' makes me squick. 'Squick' makes me squick, too. I don't feel we're helping our cause, such as it is, by using baby-talk and sleepover squealing. But then, for all my love of Legally Blonde, I'm a straight white guy, and as enough of our official vocabulary is decided by straight white guys, I don't want to make any rules for fandom's vocabulary based on my own preferences.

I don't feel it's for me to make rules or recommendations about anything in fandom or aca-fandom. To be frank, I don't know if any of us should be deciding what 'we' should do. Are we even a coherent community? For all our pleasurable connections -- the recognition of love for a text, a story and character, and the recognition of having that love mocked or derided -- I think the differences between us are more obvious, and perhaps more interesting, than the similarities. Deciding on labels, rules and titles risks making something that was always inherently a lot of fun, born out of passion and enthusiasm, into just another departmental committee meeting.

So, drawing up an agenda and writing the minutes of aca-fandom isn't for me. But if that was what everyone else wanted to do, I'd book a room, bring the coffee and offer my advice.

Melissa Click:

I think I know where Will is coming from. We were both on the 2011 SCMS panel organized by Louisa Stein on "Acafandom and the future of fan studies." Some on the panel (and some in the audience) were taken aback by the idea that some "fan scholars" don't particularly identify with and/or use the term "acafan" when describing their own work. That panel spawned this blog series and though I have found the discussions invigorating, I feel most of the entries in this series have raised more questions than they've answered--and given the minimal comments on each entry, it doesn't seem like many feel as though they wish to engage with this topic (which I think itself is interesting). While these questions can be productive, they can also leave one wondering what use or relevance "acafan" has in fan studies, especially when its boundaries aren't particularly clear.

That said, we did agree to discuss the term and its relevance in this forum--and I think the variety in our responses suggests the difficulty (or perhaps futility?) in pinning "acafan" down. However, it seems that despite wanting to make proclamations about acafans and what "we" should be doing, Will's made quite a few, particularly gendered, proclamations here, for example, calling some scholars' use of fan slang in academic discourse "baby talk and fan squealing." It strikes me that it's this dismissal of the melding of the fannish and the academic (also in conjunction with gender) that gave rise to acafan identity--so while Will suggests the term is unnecessary for him, he also demonstrates why it might be useful for others.

The questions I raised in my provocation were not intended to have us decide what others should do, they were intended to provoke discussion about the application and relevance of a term. I am under no illusion that we've been asked to tell everyone else to do--instead we've been asked to join a conversation about work that we all do. Though the questions raised in this entry of a bigger conversation about acafandom may feel like a departmental meeting to Will, I do believe that some feel it is an important conversation to have. I still think there's a lot for us to learn about the work we do and what we bring to that work--and I'd like to focus on that discussion, if possible!

Will Brooker:

I don't really see a contradiction in what I say above, Melissa. It's because I know I have personal preferences and prejudices that I don't want to make any broader proclamations. You're right that the behaviour I mentioned tends to be gendered, but I feel equally, if not more alienated, by the codes and conventions of male sports fans: I could have railed against those, but the truth is, they're further from my experience and feel alien to me, whereas my resistance to squeeing, shipping and geeking out is more complex, and more bound up with trying to deny that aspect of my own fandom.

This wasn't meant to be a dismissal of certain types of expression; more a demonstration of why I'm in no position to suggest rules for other people, because fan studies is so bound up in the personal, and I (like all of us, I expect) have irrational likes and dislikes. A lot of mine, I'm sure, are a complex love-hate dynamic that, despite my attempts at honesty, I haven't fully admitted to myself: I was in happy, secret, silent tears during the first act of Legally Blonde, which no doubt counts as a kind of squeeing.

I'm under no illusions that what works for me will work for anyone else, which is why I hope I made it plain that I welcome and support the continuation of these discussions, for what my support is worth. And you're right to suggest that I was unfair to compare it to a committee meeting. I was just getting bored of my own voice in monologue. Your response and your challenges make it into a conversation, and remind me that it can still be fun, as it should be.

I should also admit to myself that I'm very bad at shutting up.

Sangita Shresthova:

As I have not tended to think of my work as based in fan studies, I come to this debate with less knowledge about the acafandom discourse. I do, however, find it extremely useful as I consider current work being done on Bollywood audiences and fans. I am, in particular, struck by the unintentional hierarchies of fandom that Melissa brought up. When does a dance choreographed by a Bollywood fan become "worthy" of study (as opposed to many, many others) and what expectation does this place on other fans who may encounter the scholarly analysis of this fan production? As my work connects Bollywood dancers in disparate parts of the world, who may or may not have encountered each other otherwise, I am especially conscious of the power dynamics that are associated with my role as a researcher of cultural practices. In fact, I would dare say that being an acafan becomes akin to a research method - one that allows a researcher to establish a subjectivity based on rapport without compromising academic integrity.

Suzanne Scott:

I don't think that any of us are interested in codifying acafandom to the extent that it sucks the fun out of the term, or to the point that it alienates some modes of fan scholarship and canonizes others. I'm certainly not interested in policing language, or methodology, or taste. Still, my gut response to some of the gendered language in your response, Will, echoed Melissa's, particularly the bits on "baby talk and sleepover squealing." We all have our personal "squicks" and "squees" when it comes to fan discourse and scholarship, but from where I'm standing what will really hurt our cause is a failure to embrace the inherent diversity and subjectivity of the term, or consider its applications beyond classifying a body of literature. The expansions that Melissa initially proposed are just one possibility.

To attempt to tie some of these threads together, and to root this in a quick anecdote, one of the chapters of my dissertation focuses on the 2009 "Twilight ruined comic-con" protests. Full fannish disclosure, I absolutely loathe Twilight. Attending comic-con as a fan that year, I was alternately annoyed by the frequent conflation of "fangirl" and "Twi-hard," horrified by the thinly veiled sexism that underpinned the protests, and disappointed that I, too, felt compelled to distance myself from those genres and texts that comprise our cultural "pink ghetto."

As a scholar, my autoethnographic reflection on these anxieties openly informed my analysis of comic-con as a microcosmic reflection of the fanboy's place of privilege in this industrialized space, and the re-marginalization of the fangirl within media convergence. My initial resistance towards writing about Twilight was equally indebted to both sides of my acafan identity. I was terrified of having one of those closed-throat moments Sangita describes. I didn't want to be mistaken for one of the "squealers," and I didn't want my work (especially as a scholar fresh on the market) to be dismissed or trivialized. Just as Sangita rightly notes the need to be aware of the power that accompanies our roles as cultural researchers, I became acutely aware as I wrote that chapter of the residual power that my fan identity affords me (as someone with more stereotypically "masculine" taste in media texts, modes of engagement, and so on).

All of that said, it was important for me to write that chapter, both as a fan and a scholar, and I bring it up because it (hopefully) speaks to these intersecting issues of taste, shame, professionalism, and power that accompany the "unintentional hierarchies" that exist within our field and beyond it. I'm an avid reader of aca-fannish work on Twilight precisely because work like Melissa's forces me to confront my own anti-fan biases and interrogate them. I may hate the franchise, but I will defend its fans to the bitter end. I recognize their affect, even if I don't always understand what motivates it. Collectively, I can acknowledge their importance, even if their individual expressions of fandom don't resonate with my own.

I think a similar logic motivates my staunch defense of the term "acafan." I have always viewed acafandom as an extension of the mentorship and communal support that we've always celebrated in fans. And, just as in fandom, tensions and fissures, debates about the canon or about codifying a scholarly identity, will always be a part of that. We might find that we're no longer interested in a media property, or a piece of terminology, and move on to a new one. But I, for one, am still shipping aca/fan, and will always be happy to debate its significance, its boundaries, and its limitations.

Will Brooker:

I feel like I've been duly schooled, which is good and how it should be -- thanks Suzanne. I may have taken 'provocation' a bit too literally above, and I could have tempered my language, although again, it was meant as an example of why I don't think I'm in a position to make any broader recommendations. This is a good example, like your Twilight story, of why it's more helpful to try to engage with the tensions in our fannish identities (that is, I'm probably embarrassed by shipping because I recognise it in my own approach to narrative and character, and snobbish about squeeing because I'm jealous of it as a shared emotional response that I find it hard to admit to) than to go with initial and more superficial, perhaps defensive reactions, as I did above.

Suzanne Scott:

To briefly contextualize my own moments of defensiveness here, I think how we approached the provocations says a great deal about the stages we're at in our respective careers. I feel like I'm still cementing what sort of acafan I want to be, or coming to terms with the fluidity of that identity and its applications outside of fan studies. Part of my excitement about how we might realize the participatory and transformative ethos of fandom in our own work, or apply those ideas to an interdisciplinary discussion about pedagogy and scholarly communication, is because I'm just starting out. And, I know that in a year I'll be back on the market, where my acafan identity will intrigue some institutions and alienate others, and I'm personally and professionally invested in proving its worth. Reading Sangita's provocation, it's clear that there are spaces where that work still needs to be done, and without question part of the reason I refuse to shut up is because I'm not in a position to do so yet.

Melissa Click:

Perhaps without meaning to, we've just performed one form of utility "acafan" holds for fan scholars as our field of study grows and shifts. One important component/use of the term is to understand how our fan identities/preferences inform our scholarship. Will, Sangita, and Suzanne have all demonstrated how our affiliations and preferences can inform our work and the positions we take in relation to others' work. I think it's really important to try to find linkages/overlaps in our work as well as noting where our differences lie. Will's initial response suggested a feeling that our work and positions were too disparate to warrant further discussion, but I think that the ensuing discussion has pointed out that in fact it is our differences that fed our discussion and (hopefully) helped us come to a more complex sense of how our own positions affect what we study and how we evaluate others' work.

Will Brooker:

I thought I knew where I stood, and what I felt, but this discussion has challenged me in a very interesting and valuable way -- as a scholar and as a fan. So, thanks very much to the three of you.

Melissa A. Click is an assistant professor of Communication at the University of Missouri. She is co-editor of Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media and the Vampire Franchise. Her work on media audiences and messages can be found in Popular Communication, Women's Studies in Communication, Transformative Works & Cultures, and in NYU's anthology Fandom.



Will Brooker is Director of Research at Kingston University, London. His work on popular culture and audience includes Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, The Audience Studies Reader and The Blade Runner Experience. His next book is Hunting the Dark Knight.

Sangita Shresthova is the Research Director of Henry Jenkins' Civic Paths Project at USC. A Czech/Nepali dancer/choreographer and media scholar, she holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. Sangita's book on Bollywood dance (Is It All About the Hips? Bollywood Dance Around the World) has just been released.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning and Research at Occidental College. She currently serves as a symposium editor for the journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and her work has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica and The Routledge Handbook of Participatory Cultures (forthcoming). She blogs on fandom, the politics of participatory culture, and teaching fan studies at suzannescott.wordpress.com.

Acafandom and Beyond: Will Brooker, Melissa A. Click, Suzanne Scott, and Sangita Shresthova

Will Brooker:

Why I Spoke About Myself, and Why I Shut Up

I identify as male, white, straight and middle-class. Anyone who has read my first monograph, Batman Unmasked (2000) will know that, as I helpfully pointed it out in the introduction. I also included extracts from my diary, reproductions of a story I wrote when I was seven years old, and a history of my own involvement with Batman. 'I love that man,' I wrote. 'I love Batman.'

In 2011, I wrote another book about Batman, called Hunting the Dark Knight. In this new book, I have barely mentioned myself or my fandom at all. This short piece tries to explain why I spoke about myself, and why I shut up.

As a white, straight, heterosexual, middle-class man, I can't help feeling that white, straight, heterosexual, middle-class men have enough chances to speak about themselves, and that we hear enough from them. But I'll need to talk about myself a little more here, before shutting up again.



Why I Spoke About Myself



Batman Unmasked was originally my PhD thesis. Part of the research process was, therefore, about learning the traditions of my discipline, and situating myself within those strands and approaches: becoming aware of a heritage, demonstrating that awareness, choosing an affiliation, and identifying as a scholar.

My declaration of identity was shaped and inspired by the Cultural Studies work I particularly liked or aspired to, from the previous decades: Janice Radway with her romance readers, Paul Willis and his school-lads, John Fiske and his unembarrassed enjoyment of 1980s trash culture. I was encouraged by Fred Pfeil's White Guys, with its Nineties-New-Man self-examination, and provoked by Andy Medhurst's opening statement, in 'Batman, Deviance and Camp', that he was gay, thirty and not a particularly devoted follower of the Dark Knight. It was Medhurst's (then) youth and his bold anti-fan position that prompted me to interrogate his work so doggedly in my own thesis: at 26, I saw him as someone I had to take on, a contender to challenge.

And that's another reason for the foregrounding of my own identity in that book. I was 26 when I started it. With hindsight, that seems not much more than a teenager, with a potent mix of anxiety and arrogance driving me to make my own mark on the world. Batman Unmasked was my brand: it was my first, and for all I knew, my only chance to stamp my name somewhere on scholarship. So it's not just got my name on the cover; it's got my personality all through the text. It was my first book, and I thought it might be my best book or my last book, so it became personal: a missile of the self, carefully aimed, and designed to become a small monument.

Why I Shut Up

A few years after the publication of Batman Unmasked, I was asked to review Scott Bukatman's book, Matters of Gravity. I knew of Scott Bukatman; he was young, smart and successful, an academic superhero. I was envious that he had a collection of his miscellaneous articles published, and while part of me was thrilled and energised by his roller-coaster writing and laser-sharp thought, another part was perversely glad to find so many self-congratulatory asides and personal confessions. No doubt I recognised in Bukatman something I disliked in myself. Grouped together in my review, and joined up through my sardonic, ungenerous commentary, his autobiographical reflections looked pretty self-indulgent. Soon afterwards, I received an email from Scott Bukatman. He wasn't happy. He said it seemed I had liked the book, but didn't like the person who wrote it.

It doesn't matter now who comes out best from that exchange. I don't think I come out well. It was a faintly pathetic spectacle: two geeks locked in superhuman combat, like Bruce Banner battling Peter Parker. 'If I KILL YOU... I DIE!' By squabbling with Scott, I was only knocking myself.

In Hunting the Dark Knight, I mention once, early on, that I'm a fan. I do it for much the same reason I foregrounded my fandom in my work on Star Wars audiences, and in the questionnaires I circulated for this recent book: to reassure my respondents and fan-readers that they're in safe hands, and they - and the things they love - are going to be treated with respect. That I still feel a need to do this is, I guess, a reflection on the shoddy way that popular journalism still treats popular culture and its followers: decades after Trekkers were mocked on Saturday Night Live (Jenkins, 1992), we still have to let people know they're not going to be satirised and belittled for enjoying something.

But the truth is, I don't have to tell people I'm a fan, and that I love Batman. It's there on every page. Any Dark Knight devotee reading my discussion of Red Robin, Kathy Kane, Owlman and Bat-mite will know they're in safe hands, that I'm one of them. Just as Coleridge doesn't have to declare 'I love that man: I love Shakespeare' at the start of his essays, because his devotion and understanding speak from every word of his analysis, so, arguably, our work should be steeped in respect and commitment to our objects of study. As in so many loving relationships, the bond can come across subtly as a constant presence, and doesn't have to be shouted aloud, like a teenage crush.

I want to end this piece with a quotation.

This dress needs to seal the deal
Make a grown man kneel
But it can't come right out and say bride
Cant look like I'm desperate or
Like I'm waiting for it
I gotta leave Warner his pride
So bride is more implied...

Elle Woods, 'Omigod You Guys', Legally Blonde: The Musical (O'Keefe, Benjamin, Hach, 2007)

I can quote all of that song from memory: I can sing all the different parts, though not very well. I don't have to tell you that I love that musical, or how many times I've seen it and listened to the soundtrack. I don't have to tell you what kind of white, straight, middle-class guy I am. The fact that I can recite Legally Blonde word for word surely tells you enough.

To paraphrase Harvard scholar Elle Woods: the 'fan' can be more implied.

Sangita Shresthova:

I come to acafandom from a slightly tangential, yet to me, closely connected perspective. I am a dancer (one trained predominantly in Indian classical dance) and a media scholar who has spent many years studying Bollywood dance. I also boldly claim my affinity for the energizing stories and shimmies that, to me, define Bollywood dance that I have had many occasions to indulge in as an audience-dancer, dance instructor, and on the now very rare occasion, even as a performer. Mixing academic research with fannish practice has not been easy, or even welcomed, in some of the scholarly company I have kept over the past years. That said, I want to open my provocation on aca-fandom with a brief excerpt from an article I wrote for Pulse Magazine (a South Asian dance magazine published out of the United Kingdom):

"As I run towards the studio, the sound of chanting fills the early evening air. I glance at my watch and sigh. I am late again. I change into my dance sari, and hurriedly check that my pleats allow for a full Aramandhi (a classical pose). Cautiously, I pull back the sliding door and step into the a room filled with dance students stamping in unison to the driving commands of their Bharat Natyam (Indian classical dance) teacher, Viji Prakash. I settle into a position in the back of the room, rush through my salutation, and prepare to join the class. But just then, the sequence ends and the students disperse briefly. Viji-auntie, as she is deferentially called by her students, looks at me with a teasing smile. "Miss Bollywood is here," she exclaims. Several students snicker and laugh. "No seriously, she is writing her Ph.D. on Bollywood," Viji-auntie explains. An incredulous student in her late teens asks me, "Is that right?" I nod, suddenly very preoccupied with my sari pleats. I am angry at myself for feeling embarrassed by this superficial, playful exchange. "You should show us some Bollywood some day," another student comments teasingly. "Well, Bollywood dance does actually have a very interesting history..." I begin to justify myself. Viji-auntie laughs as she moves her hips side to side looking to the side seductively. The class convulses in a burst of laughter. I smile but feel my throat tighten ever so slightly. I have been once again singled out as a Bollywoodized Bharat Natyam dancer. So, why would a Bharat Natyam dancer take Bollywood seriously and even (gasp) admit to enjoying some of the choreographies?" (Pulse Magazine 2010)

Re-reading this introductory paragraph as I collected my thoughts about acafandom, I was once again overcome with the profound sense of discomfort I faced in my Indian dance class that day and how that feeling really followed me throughout my research on Bollywood dance. I initially embarked on my research on Bollywood dance as a graduate student the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT where I was allowed to explore Bollywood as the natural symbiosis of my areas of interest (dance and media) and my own mixed-race South Asian background. The fact that I actually took great pleasure in watching (re-watching), discussing and choregraphing movements to Bollywood songs - to me clearly defining me as an acafan in this space - was seen as definite plus. I left MIT with a conviction that aca-fandom was a welcome breath of fresh air to the largely dismissive scholarship on Bollywood dance that pre-dated my work. Sharing my enthusiasm, my friends joined me in starting a largely fan-driven Bollywood Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic.

In the years that followed, I have gone through a series of battles around my enthusiasm and willingness to foreground my Bollywood fandom. Very early into my dance-based doctoral program at UCLA, I was told that I would have to "put my love of Bollywood aside to write well about it." In translation, this implicitly suggested that the best way to approach Bollywood dance was to critique it for its commercial nature and underpinnings, rather than engage with the fandoms it inspired. This stance contrasted starkly to the much more importance that was afforded to my classical Indian dance training and the ties and investments I had to that community as a result. In retrospect, it was this training in Indian dance (not my years of attention to, and experience with, Bollywood dance) that allowed me to position myself as a credible scholar in this field in the department and beyond. This is also probably why I no longer fully identify as a dance scholar. As I progressed towards completing my dissertation and sought to establish myself as a scholar in dance studies, I often found myself foregrounding my classical dance training when presenting at conferences and otherwise sharing my work. I was often silent about my own affinities towards Bollywood (unless explicitly asked).

It has taken me quite a long time to get past this disconnect, but its resolution finally came last year when I was invited to curate and speak at a Hindi film dance symposium convened by Akademi, one of, if not the most, prestigious Indian dance institutions in the United Kingdom. Speaking there, I took a bold step and decided to starkly differentiate Bollywood from Indian dance, positioning Bollywood as a hybrid rather than Indian dance form. To do this, I drew on my own early experiences with Bollywood, once again, best summarized by an excerpt:

My first introduction to Hindi cinema took place many years ago at my cousin's pirated video rental store in Kathmandu (Nepal) where I would, on occasion, watch anything that was playing on the VCR. Most of the time, it was some Hindi movie. As the plots and stars slipped by me, it was the dances that were etched in my memory. As the product of a Czech/Nepali mixed marriage, my childhood was defined by a constant, at times painful, cultural negotiation. Born in an era that preceded the current more tolerant approaches to interculturalism, my life was littered with constant reminders of my outsider status in both Nepali and Czech societies. Strangely, it was in watching Hindi film songs and dances that a world of cultural mixing first welcomed me into its midst. In the remorseless blending of movement sources and costume-styles, I found a messy, yet appealing, reflection of my own scattered cultural identity. (Pulse 2010)

To my surprise, my approach to Bollywood dance as a hybrid dance form struck a cord among a generation of younger scholars and dancers, who have felt constrained by the restrictions of Indian classical dance practice and discourse. But it was really my position as both a scholar and a fan, as someone who both studied and experienced Bollywood dance, that allowed me to get to this moment. Clearly my research on Bollywood dance would not have been possible without the personal connections I was able to form with dancers around our shared experiences in this space. At the same time, it was my ability to downplay my fandom as foreground my training in Indian classical dance that allowed me to get to where I am now. So to me, the term acafan is at times a support, and at other times a challenge. It is, however, always relevant.

Melissa Click:

I'm a bit ambivalent about whether I'd use "aca-fan" to describe myself. If I were to use the term, it would be only in the most limited of applications to denote that I am an academic who studies fans. To be clear, my ambivalence stems from the ways comparison to transformative cultures diminishes my fan practices. I am what Anne Kustritz describes as an "as-is" fan, not a "creative fan," and I usually study "as-is" fans as well. Because of this distinction, I often feel (in both aca and fan circles) as though my interests and behaviors are too vanilla to signify "true fandom." Indeed, Kustritz's distinctions, though instructive, demonstrate the value normally given to (or removed from) particular fan practices--who wants to be the "as-is" fan?

My work on Martha Stewart and Twilight fans further separates me from my fellow fan scholars. I don't study "quality" media texts or groups of people deemed particularly interesting. My topic choices, as a result, offer me little credibility in academic or fan circles--adult women obsessed with Stewart's homekeeping advice and teenage girls who debate the merits of vampires and werewolves are seen as dupes who waste their time on lowbrow (and feminine) texts, and my interest in studying them, as a result, is dismissed as inconsequential and uninteresting.

That said, my ambivalence about the term should not signal that I am not doing many of the things this discussion has pointed out that aca-fen do. What I find most useful about "aca-fan" is the focus on self-reflexivity and the insistence on maintaining a dialogue between our aca and fan selves and communities. I think a discussion about the role of value and taste in our work is long overdue. In this spirit, I wish to reflect upon some areas I hope we can discuss about the ongoing application and function of "aca-fan":

* Is there a way we can recognize the distinctions among fans as differences of kind and not value? If we can agree that there are different kinds of fans, might we too have different kinds of aca-fen?

* How can we (should we?) expand our work to incorporate different kinds of fans? How might anti-fan studies and anti-aca-fen contribute to the study of fans?

* How do taste and value affect the kinds of texts and fans we study and the terrain of the field? What might be gained from studying fans of texts that aren't viewed as "quality" (or at least campy/ironic)?

Our field began in defense of fans ridiculed in mainstream culture, and to support our arguments about fans' value and activity, fan scholarship has focused on fan creativity and invention--but it seems that by selecting the fans we deem most interesting for study, we have created hierarchy a new, leaving fans we deem uninteresting to be derided as too ordinary, too dim-witted to appreciate quality texts, and too uninteresting to be worthy of study. Underscoring our dedication to reflexivity, I think we need to ask ourselves how aca-fan identity impacts the scholarship we produce and value, and what is lost when our scholarship overlooks fans who are not like us.

Suzanne Scott:

I come to this conversation at an interesting professional juncture, but a fitting one considering the topic. Last year, I completed my dissertation, which broadly focuses on the demographic, representational, professional and academic "revenge" of the fanboy within convergence culture, and the potentially marginalizing effects this has on fangirls. I also braved my first pass at the academic job market. Suffice it to say, I have spent the bulk of the past two years contemplating, writing about, marketing, explaining, and (occasionally) defending my scholarly identity.

"Acafan" is a label that I embrace, and one that I will always remain deeply indebted to professionally, pedagogically, and personally. It has granted me access to a network of brilliant scholars I'm lucky to also call my friends. Acafandom has allowed me to connect with my students and assure them that affect is not the arch nemesis of critical thought and compelling analysis. I think it has helped my work embody the qualities of immediacy, accessibility, particularity, and situationalism that Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc called for in their manifesto for a new cultural studies. Perhaps most importantly, it has helped that work travel outside of the walls of the academy and attract a wider readership whose feedback I've found invaluable.

It also helped me get a job (and may have lost me a few along the way...a Nerf battleaxe did make a regrettable appearance in the background of a video conference interview).

This July, I began a two-year appointment as a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow at Occidental College's Center for Digital Learning and Research. This was not a conventional tenure track position, and accordingly the interview process was far more transparent. I was given a list of questions to consider for my Skype interview, so that we might have a more substantive dialogue about what I would bring to the position. In addition to the usual suspects (tell us about your teaching, research, etc.), I was asked to consider the "possibilities for hybrid academic careers." The question stuck out because I hadn't ever heard anyone ask it before, but also because hybridity was already so deeply embedded in my scholarly identity. I had, for better or for worse, approached prior interview questions about acafandom with Admiral Ackbar echoing in my head. I recognized immediately that, this time, it was not a trap; it was a call to think about acafandom in more expansive terms.

Henry wondered in his post whether the term "acafan" is still useful, and the contributors to this series have been thoughtfully tackling that question. But I have to wonder if that question ultimately misses the point. I personally consider the term to be useful, but I'm ultimately more interested in developing and discussing new uses. Instead of calling for the discontinuation of the term, shouldn't we be discussing how we might deploy it in new ways? If, as Karen Hellekson has argued here, the term's "power lies in the academic's power; the fan gains little or nothing from its deployment," then shouldn't we begin thinking about how to empower fans (or our students, or other scholars) though its use?

Sam Ford noted that he longed to "see the insights of media studies academics reach audiences outside journal readership and media studies conference attendees." In my experience, acafandom has facilitated this sort of outreach. In 2007, I served as the chair of programming for Phoenix Rising, a massive Harry Potter symposium designed to draw in a mix of academics, professionals, and fans. We offered both academic and exploratory (fan creativity oriented) programming tracks, and I found the conversations and collaborations that emerged out of that space to be richer and more rewarding than the bulk of academic conferences I've attended. In 2009, I joined the symposium editorial team of Transformative Works and Cultures, a section of the open access, peer-reviewed online journal designed to promote a dialogue between academic and fans. Has my involvement and labor in these participatory, acafannish spaces made me more attractive on the tenure track job market? Would they count towards tenure once I landed a job? The answer at most institutions might still be a resounding no on both counts. But that doesn't mean they aren't valuable.

In my current corner of #alt-academia, a hybrid identity is no longer something to be defended, but desired. A fannish sensibility isn't a quirk that must be concealed, but something that can be wielded strategically to think about how to model transformative scholarship, or design more participatory pedagogical models. Am I being naïve? Will I ultimately have to cautiously explain or subtly veil the "fan" component of my acafan identity when I go back out on the tenure track market in a few years? Perhaps, on both counts. But I also get to spend the next two years in a place that actively expects my aca-fan identity to shape my work and how I share it. So, while I completely agree with Will that we don't need to continually pronounce our fan credentials, and instead allow them to permeate our work, I also feel lucky to be in a position where I'm not expected to shut up about it.

Melissa A. Click is an assistant professor of Communication at the University of Missouri. She is co-editor of Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media and the Vampire Franchise. Her work on media audiences and messages can be found in Popular Communication, Women's Studies in Communication, Transformative Works & Cultures, and in NYU's anthology Fandom.



Will Brooker is Director of Research at Kingston University, London. His work on popular culture and audience includes Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, The Audience Studies Reader and The Blade Runner Experience. His next book is Hunting the Dark Knight.

Sangita Shresthova is the Research Director of Henry Jenkins' Civic Paths Project at USC. A Czech/Nepali dancer/choreographer and media scholar, she holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. Sangita's book on Bollywood dance (Is It All About the Hips? Bollywood Dance Around the World) has just been released.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning and Research at Occidental College. She currently serves as a symposium editor for the journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and her work has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica and The Routledge Handbook of Participatory Cultures (forthcoming). She blogs on fandom, the politics of participatory culture, and teaching fan studies at suzannescott.wordpress.com.

A Virtual Bullpen?: How the USC Cinema School Has Embraced ARGS To Shape The Experience of Entering Students (Part Two)

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A key concern of the Cinema School recently has been to encourage greater integration across the different tracks (production, screenwriting, animation, critical studies, interactive). How has this game helped to support this goal?

Tracy Fullerton: This was part of the mandate given to the committee that initiated the project. The school is making an integrated effort, of which this game is only one part, to bridge divisional barriers and encourage thinking, working and team-building across the school. One way the game does this is simply by eliminating divisional identifiers on the site. We give students an area to talk about their skills so they can find each other to work with, but we don't identify them as coming from any particular part of the school. Also, more directly, we have cards in the deck that reward them for working interdivisionally, and even across other universities.

In the first few weeks of play, we had a writing student who had never done any programming pick up GameMaker on the advice of other students, teach himself some simple coding, and make a simple video game. We have a group that has created a transmedia ARG, and interactive students who have tried their hand at creating an animation flip book. The game rewards groups equally for either trying something new or adding a person with know how to the team, so it is up to players how to approach and solve a problem.

One thing that stands out to me about this project is that it isn't mandatory. Students don't get graded on their work, and they don't have to participate if they don't want to. How has this worked in practice, and what was the thinking behind making engagement optional?

Tracy Fullerton: Yes, this is a voluntary experience. We were very clear about this from the outset of the design. In fact, when we first showed the game concept to some of the staff, the reaction was "great, we can use this to make students do things we want them to do, like fill out these forms or go to this office, etc." But we very nicely pushed back on those ideas because we wanted the game to have an energy that could only come out of students' passion for making media together. It was important that it not feel in any way like an assignment or an extension of the orientation process. We felt that the tone and the sensibility had to recognize personal expression as being intrinsically motivated. Incoming SCA students have already self-selected as creative individuals, so for that kind of student, the idea of taking away that intrinsic motivation could actually be potentially harmful to their development as creative professionals.

Jeff Watson: We actually went to some pretty extreme lengths to keep the game a secret around the time that we were launching it. This was a bit nerve-wracking at first, because only a handful of students even noticed that the game existed at all. But in the end, this strategy paid off. It made the game a "pull" experience, drawing students in of their own accord. Players gradually began to appear at the Game Office, and they did so because they were curious and they wanted to be involved. As more and more students came in, the game acquired more and more evangelists, since each new player was personally invested. This approach is well-trod territory for marketers and ARG designers, but is something new in education, and we're excited to be breaking that ground.

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How do you deal with students who aren't willing or able to get involved in creative production? Are there ways to engage that don't require large investments of time or social capital?

Simon Wiscombe: We figured that the level of engagement would vary from person to person, so this came up during our design sessions constantly, and we created four tiers of engagement. The top tier is for those who engage in all the ARG elements along with making creative projects--these are our "hardcore" players who seem to be able to solve all of our puzzles in a fifth the time we estimated they would. The second tier is for those who engage in the projects and enjoy creating, but aren't necessarily interested in scouring SCA or the website for the hidden ARG clues. To tackle the last two tiers, i.e. those who wouldn't engage as much as the others but still wanted to feel a part of the community, we drew from some inspiration we took from old photographs of the SCA in the 1960s and 70s. Jeff was particularly interested in one photograph of a space known as "the Bullpen."

Jeff Watson: The Bullpen was the central workspace of the Stables, the building which used to house the cinema school back in the day. It was a wild, unruly place, covered in graffiti, littered with junk, and full of creative energy. We felt like that kind of space was missing from the SCA of today, and so we decided to re-create it -- virtually, as a kind of social networking system on the game's website.

Simon Wiscombe: In the Bullpen, players are can comment on both deals and cards, participate in impromptu discussions, and upload pictures. Some of this is publicly visible through the site's "Photoblog" feature, but much of this discussion is kept in a walled garden, both to create a safe space for venting, and to extend the "exclusive" and "mysterious" narrative that envelops the game. Finally, there's a whole slew of other forms of engagement, much of which we can't track (but we know is going on), such as collecting sets of cards, lurking on the website, participating in deals without registering for the game, and so on.

Essentially we wanted to foster an awesome interconnected community of already amazingly talented people, and it seems to be working for players at a variety of engagement levels.

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What roles do faculty and staff play in this process? How might the kinds of playful interaction the game is encouraging shift the relations between students and faculty? How have faculty integrated aspects of the game into their own curriculum?

Tracy Fullerton: When we designed the cards for the game, we purposefully included some prominent faculty, past and present, in the deck -- as you know, since you've given your own card out to students as part of our "Hey, Henry convergence" meet-up. It's a nice opportunity for us to involve faculty from all over the school in the game. We've found that the faculty have a tremendous curiosity and interest in what's going on in the game. Some are participating on the site, commenting on deals or cards, joining in the general discussion. Some are coming to the class to hear speakers, and some have helped with deals. It's an interesting opportunity because in this situation there are no predefined power structures. The game is presented by the mysterious "Reality Committee" which may or may not be comprised of faculty, it is very unclear. So the faculty are free to participate at any level they feel comfortable.

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What aspects of this game could be ported to other educational contexts, and how does a game like this scale?

Simon Wiscombe: This type of game can be modified, with very simple tweaks, for any creative endeavor. We've had discussions about how we could specify it to any of the film school's departments (interactive media, film, animation), or how we could port it to art, music, dance, or theater schools. At its core, it's a game that relies on fostering and promoting the creativity of its participants through prompts that eventually lead to projects. What form those projects take could be anything. And in regards to scale, while this game was designed specifically with 130 or so players in mind, it could easy be for smaller or larger groups, although one would likely have to rethink its purpose. For smaller groups, I've found it's great as a brainstorming or creative sprint tool, and larger groups might embrace the idea of maximizing collaborators. This game is fairly simple in its construct, so I'm sure there are methods of applicability we haven't even dreamed of yet.

I have to ask: Early on in the game, you asked me to meet some students at a "secret location" on campus and give them some "Shared Universe" game cards -- which also happened to have my picture on one side. What did they end up using those cards for?

Jeff Watson: Well, so far, your card has been used in 5 different Deals (see the card's archive page here. Each of these Deals spins the notion of "Shared Universe" In a different way. For example, in the Justification for the stunningly-photographed music video, "Space Bound," , the players explain that the characters and story elements in their music video cross over with characters and story elements from a "Character Artifacts" project they previously created in the game. Other projects, such as the 10-part transmedia extravaganza, "Chronoteck", use the "Shared Universe" card to link together multiple projects across many platforms, connecting artifacts such as the fake Facebook group, "Stop Chronoteck!" to other story-rich artifacts such as the fake promotional video for the "Chronoteck Tach C," a new brand of cell phone that "receives messages from the future." It's a daily thrill for us to see amazing transmedia projects like these emerge out of our game.

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is an experimental game designer, professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment. The Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night Journey -- a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola. Tracy is also the author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide.

Jeff Watson is a PhD candidate in Media Arts and Practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His research focuses on investigating how mobile and social media can enable new forms of storytelling and participation. Reality Ends Here (A.K.A. "The Game") is Jeff's dissertation project. He can be found online at http://remotedevice.net or via @remotedevice on Twitter.

Simon Wiscombe is an experimental game designer, Annenberg Fellow, and MFA candidate in the Interactive Media Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His research focuses on exploring the idea of meaningful interactions and experiences through the blending of games and reality. You can find him at http://www.simonwiscombe.com or on twitter via @simonium.

A Virtual Bullpen?: How the USC Cinema School Has Embraced ARGs To Shape The Experience of Entering Students (Part One)

A few weeks ago, I was sent a pack of collector's cards -- with my picture on them! -- and asked to show up in the courtyard outside the USC Cinematic Arts facilities so that I could pass them out to students who showed up and said "convergence." I camped out and soon small clusters of students started showing up, enthusiastically saying "convergence" and waiting for me to hand them their tokens. Very quickly, I gave out of cards and for the most part, the students did not mind. In fact, a bunch of those who arrived later hung out and started a conversation, which kept growing until at its peek I had twenty or so undergraduates sitting all around me asking questions about transmedia storytelling, fan culture, new media literacies, spreadable media, and an astonishing array of other topics from my blog. This photograph was shot surreptitiously by Tracy Fullerton, one of my Cinema School colleagues, who was staking out a vantage point not far away.

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All of this cloak and dagger stuff was part of an innovative game -- an Alternate Reality Game of sorts -- which is being conducted amongst the entering Cinema School undergraduates this year. If my own experiences are any indication, the game is proving to be enormously successful at getting students involved, excited about entering the Cinema School, more aware of its resources, more connected to its faculty, more engaged with its research, more connected across different divisions. It is also getting them involved in collaborative and production like activities than most entering students who have had to wait for a bit before they would be allowed to take production classes. I've seen lots of discussion over the past few years about the potentials of using ARGS for pedagogical purposes. But, this is the first time I've seen such a large scale experiment in integrating ARG activities across an entire school to orient entering students to a program and to serve a range of instructional goals. The passion the game is motivating in USC students is palpable. And I can tell you that many of the faculty, who have gotten pulled into the game through one play mechanic or another, are feeling a real pride in their school for its willingness to embrace this kind of experimentation and innovation.

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I've wanted for some time to share with you some of the insights of the people most involved in this project -- Jeff Watson, Tracey Fullerton, and Simon Wiscombe, who wish to be identified here as the "co-designers/conspirators" behind the Game. In this interview, they tell us more about how the game came about, the design and teaching goals shaping it, the core mechanics, and the impact it has had on the school and especially this remarkable group of entering students. I have a feeling we are going to want to track its impact for the next four years to see what kind of difference it has made in their relations to each other and to the school.

The three of you have been co-conspirators in the development of an alternate reality game which has captured the passions and interests of the incoming students at the USC School of Cinematic Arts this fall. Can you give us some background on the project? What got it started?

Tracy Fullerton: The project actually came out of a committee established by the dean of the School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) in 2009 after a full faculty retreat. The charge for that committee was to envision the future of the SCA, and one of the key initiatives was to establish a "gateway experience" for incoming students that introduced them to the changing media landscape, the history and future of the school, the possibilities that can emerge from the SCA network of current and past students, and the importance of bridging the divisions of the school while they are here, both socially and academically.

The gateway course was envisioned as introducing a new kind of social networking for SCA students, both on and offline, that would become critical to their involvement in courses and with each other. As the class developed, it became clear that a game layer would be a perfect way to achieve all of the goals set out by the committee without falling victim to the general survey or lecture class tradition we wanted to move beyond. So, while the curriculum for the gateway class and the game aren't "officially" linked, they are intertwined in vision and purpose and serve to bring students from all divisions together in multiple ways that will purposefully drive the social dynamics and the cross-media collaboration.

From its inception, the gateway class was envisioned as having a companion social network, which linked to a digital library of information about media history and theory and SCA's past and future. The design of the card game, with its "high touch" in-person mechanics, is just the beginning of implementing that vision. On each card, history and theory are linked to practice with a piece of knowledge on one side and a prompt to creative practice on the other. This bridge between theory and practice, like the ones we hope to forge between divisions here, is a critical statement at the heart of the game.

Jeff Watson: As an iMAP PhD student, finding ways to bring together theory and practice is central to my doctoral research. Over the past couple of years, I had been looking for a dissertation project that would enable me to put into practice my research into transmedia interaction design and alternate reality games. I wanted this project to be something that played out in the real world and had a tangible and measurable impact. I didn't want it to be a demo or a proof of concept. I wanted to play with real stakes, real players, and real outcomes. I wanted the project to be able to fail if it wasn't designed properly. So when Holly Willis, the chair of the Future Committee, came to me with the mandates that Tracy just outlined and asked if I would be able to come up with a pitch for an ARG that could be played by all the incoming students of the SCA, I jumped at the chance. This was a real design challenge that touched on all the corners of my research, from participatory culture to social and mobile media to interventionist art practice.

What were the core learning goals for the design and deployment of this game?

Tracy Fullerton: The core learning goals for the game are all around fostering the kind of complex skills that are sometimes called 21st century skills. Of course, these skills, such as team-building, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and innovation, are not unique to the 21st century and they have been at the heart of the curriculum here at SCA for a very long time. The difference here is activating students right from the start of their SCA experience with the knowledge that these skills are critical building blocks to their success as media makers, and also that the development and improvement of these skills is something they need to take responsibility for themselves from day one.

The game wraps these learning goals into a kind of induction into the SCA culture of networking and support which is something students certainly leave USC with, but we wanted to use the game to start surfacing these ideas for them earlier in their development.

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Jeff Watson: When we first met to brainstorm what we wanted students to be able to discover through this game, we filled up a 16 foot whiteboard and still felt like we hadn't scratched the surface. On top of the kinds of building block skills Tracy just mentioned, faculty members from each division of the SCA had very granular lists of the kinds of things that they felt Cinematic Arts students should be aware of as they commence their tenure as undergraduates. Writing professors wanted the game to encourage the exploration of character and story; production faculty wanted to make sure all students acquired basic knowledge about cameras, editing, and safety; critical studies pushed for more opportunities for analysis, historical contextualization, and reflection; animation wanted to make sure their students would have more ways to connect with students from other divisions; and interactive media pushed for a deeper integration of notions of iterative design and systems thinking. At the end of the meeting, I took a picture of the whiteboard with my iPhone. It was a crazy tangled bird's nest of inspiration.

To make sense of it all, we took the mass of ideas generated during that whiteboard session and started looking for connective tissue. We noticed that all the learning goals we had brainstormed fell into one of three broad categories, which we ended up calling Literacy, Craft, and Social. Literacy goals were those that pertained to knowledge of all kinds: from highly local lore about the school and its resources, to basic understandings about the history and theory of media-making. Craft goals were those that had anything to do with the act of making -- from writing prose to shooting video to designing board games. Finally, Social goals were all those that related to the discovery of and connection with peers, alumni, faculty, and the broader community. Since the "content" of each of these categories of learning was agnostic with respect to the various divisions of the SCA, the first challenge of breaking down divisional/disciplinary boundaries had been met. The question became how to make a game that would motivate players to traverse the networks of Literacy, Craft, and Social goals that we had identified for inclusion. This became the starting point for our prototyping.

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Can you describe some of the basic mechanics of the game?

Simon Wiscombe: The game is, at its core, a project creation game. When players elect to join, they're given a pack of cards containing green "maker" cards (e.g. "30 second short," "Board Game," etc.), pink "property" cards (e.g. "About love", "In the SCA Courtyard", etc.), and one orange "people" card (which contains the name of one first year undergrad in the USC film school). These cards can be combined together or with other players' cards to make a "Deal," the simplest of which is composed of one maker card and one property card -- although an almost unlimited number of property cards can be attached so long as there are enough connectors. After laying out a Deal, players go out and actually create it (i.e. "A 30 second short about love in the SCA courtyard"). They then submit it to the site, and justify it in the game office -- at which point it's uploaded, they get points for the Deal, and everyone in the game can see it.

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Jeff Watson: This whole process is outlined with pictures and video on the game website . Since it's such a highly visual interactive experience, readers who want to get a good sense of how it feels to play should head over there and check out the intro materials.

Simon Wiscombe: Yes, visit the website -- it explains everything and also showcases the amazing work the players have created so far.

What relationship does this game have with other alternate reality games which have been used for entertainment or training purposes in the past?

Jeff Watson: The "meat" of this game is structured creative improvisation. As Simon has described, the core interaction here involves players trading, sharing, and combining collectible playing cards in order to generate creative prompts known as "Deals". Responding to these prompts by submitting completed artifacts results in advancement on the game's various leaderboards, unlocking special game content. This special content constitutes what might be called the "sauce" on the meat of the game.

This "sauce" is the closest we get to "traditional" alternate reality game content. For example, toward the end of the second week of gameplay, we sent clues to several players who were leading in key Deal-making categories. The clues provided the players with a time and a location and nothing else. Bravely enough, the students showed up. Once there, they were greeted by a formally-attired Oud player. Accompanied by the Oudist, the players were transported without explanation to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Once in the museum, the players encountered two alums of the SCA, Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago (designers of critically-acclaimed games such as Flow, Flower, and Journey), who were wandering around in the darkness wearing sequined masquerade masks. Upon discovering them, the players were presented with a special game power which enabled them to score additional points on subsequent Deals, and were then treated to 90 minutes of informal discussion about game design, art, and media making.

In short, our approach uses a rule-based play system (the card game) to drive the bulk of the experience, and employs more traditional ARG techniques around the edges, as rewards and tonal elements. This approach is in many ways a practical implementation of the ideas and critiques I presented last year on your blog in my essay, "ARG 2.0". In most "traditional" ARGs, our "sauce" is the full meal. The player experience in such games unfolds around a kind of scavenger hunt activity wherein game runners moderate and manage player communities as they plow through a sequence of puzzles, curated action prompts, and side-quests.

While this logistically-complex structure is appropriate for certain team-building and talent sourcing applications, we wanted to make something that would have the capacity to perpetuate itself without relying on the constant generation of puzzle and narrative content by game runners. More importantly, we wanted our game to emphasize an active engagement with media-making: while scavenger hunts might help to build social bonds and search/analysis skills, we felt that they are inherently about solving puzzles or responding to prompts created by someone else -- and as such are a kind of consumption-oriented form of play. We wanted to make this game about the players' creativity, not ours.

"What Is Civic Media" Revisited: A Conversation with John Palfrey (Part Two)

JP: One of the tensions that emerged from my interviewing was around this issue (broadly) of what community means. It operated as a tension on various levels. One was a sense among the staff that they weren't quite sure what Knight Foundation had in mind about where to focus: locally near Boston, around the US, abroad. (I'm sure that Ethan Zuckerman's focus in his own work will have an impact on future thinking in this regard.)

Another hard question related to the term "communities": what are they, do they really exist in the ways that paradigmatic examples might suggest, and so forth. I think there's good, hard, conceptual work still to be done about what it means to "meet the information needs of a community" and what empowerment looks like in the C4 model. I love the approach taken so far, and I think it can bear fruit in terms of informing theory, too.

HJ: John, your questions about whether communities exist is a key one which I've struggled with from the start. Benedict Anderson tells us that communities are "imagined" in that no member of a community in practice has regular contact with every other member of the community but they act as if there were strong social ties and a shared identity among this somewhat abstracted group of people.

So, when we talk about doing projects in "communities," what are we talking about? Are we describing an actual group of people who interface regularly with each other? Are we dealing with a population, such as prisoners, who are locked out of the dominant social institutions and yet seek some kind of interface with a community beyond the prison walls? Are we seeking tools, such as Hero Reports, which seek to strengthen the imagined ties between people who pass each other on the subway? Are we seeking to decrease social conflicts or to give people tools to more meaningfully engage with those conflicts, as seems to be the goals for some of Chris's projects?

The mandate for the center assumes that we are working within existing communities, yet often we may be helping to constitute the communities the projects serve by giving them resources through which they may better "imagine" and start to more fully realize the potential ties between them. The range of projects the center has developed so far suggest many different understandings of what a community is and how media relate to communities, though we have a way to go before they/we articulate fully the theoretical implications of this work.

JP: This concept of in fact "constituting" communities by giving them resources is completely fascinating. I think this is one of the common beliefs about the web, in particular: where there are humans who are far-flung in geographic terms, share an interest, find one another through the web, and then work together, have we "constituted" these communities in the process?

An interesting case study might be Global Voices, the signature project that Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon founded and which joins an extraordinary network of citizen journalists and activists around the globe. Was there a GV community before GV? Or was it in fact constituted by the creation of tools, the services, and the passion that went into the founding of GV?

I realize that this is not exactly on point, vis-a-vis much of the existing work of the Center, which has defined much of what it's done in geographic terms, but I wonder if there might be insight there. Diaspora communities, connected by digital media in richer ways, might be another case to consider.

HJ: I am struck as I write this weekend by the contrast between the Center's view that civic media may enhance a sense of community among participants and the fears being expressed by political leaders and news media in Great Britain that social media may have contributed to the riots which have disrupted community life across England in the past week or so. How might we contrast between these two models for thinking about the impact of new media technologies on community life?

There seems to have been a persistent strand of criticism that new media is leading to greater social isolation, that it is inspiring anti-social behavior, that it contributes to the disintegration of traditional civic associations, etc. In what ways can we see what the Center has done as an effort not simply to question those claims on a theoretical level but also to demonstrate on a practical level how new media can be used in the service of strengthening social ties?

JP: This too is a tension worth exploring in my view. I've had the Arab Spring uprisings alongside the riots in the United Kingdom in my head. In terms of our reaction to these two events, why do leaders like the Prime Minister in the UK on the one hand say that we should be studying the Egyptian marches in our schools, while raising the specter of restricting social media use when people take to the streets in his hometown?

OK, so the politics of the situation are obvious; also, there are ways to distinguish the two types of uprising. But the core problem remains the same: it's dangerous for us to make any assumptions about how a given "community" will use digital media tools in any given circumstance. They may have a salutary effect on one day, and a disruptive one on the next -- if your perspective if law-and-order. And from a social fabric perspective, we ought to note the possibilities for multiple outcomes as well, as you note.

HJ: I am struck in your report by some comments which Chris makes about "disruptive technologies" rather than "gradual change." And that points to another creative friction that shaped the early days of the Center. It's not clear that we would have agreed about the model of social change underlying our work.

Chris, certainly, embraces disruptive uses of technology, yet there is also an argument to be made for the use of civic media as a way of sustaining traditional institutions and practices, of maintaining social ties, which are being disrupted by other forces in contemporary life. This is not necessarily conservative in a political sense, but it may be conservative in the sense that it seeks to protect something vital in our communities which is being threatened by changes that are not under the control of community members.

For example, I used to talk about town pageants as an old civic ritual which connected current residents of a town to their past -- and not simply on the level of representing their history. If the same pageant is performed year after year, there is a social sharing across generations that take place - shared memories, even shared identities (as people feel close to others who have played the same character in the performance). We don't have such rituals any more and so it is easy for people to lose sense of their own history or to feel disconnected across generations. I wondered what the contemporary equivalent of a town pageant might look like. And I am not sure whether this line of inquiry has born fruit yet in terms of the projects the Center has developed.

JP: I like the connection around the word "disruption" between these various points. Of course, I was most influenced by what I heard from those in the Center as of the end of 2010 and start of 2011, so Chris's approach was dominant in the discourse and in the shape of the projects that I observed. I don't think that means that the questions you posed have been asked and answered yet; they seem to me still out there for exploration.

HJ: Bringing on Ethan Zuckerman as the new Director of the Center almost certainly means a further expansion of our notion of community -- one which moves the Center much more decisively towards global interventions and pushes it further from a focus on its own backyard. There will be radically different conceptions of community life at play as we deal with national contexts radically different from the U.S.A. and where we will encounter a different set of challenges to community life.

A central concern across such projects should be with who gets to participate, who gets to be a member of a community, given that all communities exclude as well as include, and given that access to and familarity with technologies are a central dividing line in our culture. As I sign off, I want to press the Center to remain attentive to the digital divide and the participation gap and to use technologies as a means of bridging between sectors of communities.

JP: And as I sign off: thanks so much to everyone in the Center's community for letting me and Catherine Bracy go so deep into your work. It was fascinating. Plainly, what you are doing -- regardless of whether it is disruptive or gradual, local or international, place-based or virtual -- is so very important to the future of our culture and societies. And thanks, Henry, for the chance to reflect together on this great set of issues. You always push me in my thinking (your critique of the digital natives frame comes to mind, among many other examples) and I consider myself lucky to be able to learn from what you say and do.

John Palfrey is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, vice dean for library and information resources, and the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He led a reorganization of the Harvard Law School Library in 2009. He is a principal investigator on the Open Net Initiative, a collaboration between Harvard and the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge that studies the Internet filtering of countries such as China, Iran, and Singapore, among many others He is co-author or editor of several books, including Access Denied (MIT Press, 2008), Access Controlled (MIT Press, 2010), and Born Digital (Basic Books, 2008).

"What Is Civic Media" Revisited: A Conversation with Harvard's John Palfrey

Henry Jenkins: On September 20 2007, we officially launched the MIT Center for the Future of Civic Media, a joint venture of the Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies Program.

Our launching event include myself, Chris Csikzentmihalyi, Mitchell Resnick, Beth Noveck, and Ethan Zuckerman. At the time, Chris, Mitch and I were the co-directors of the Center. It was announced several months ago that Ethan Zuckerman would now be taking over the leadership of the lab starting this fall, and a review of the first four years of the Center's research by John Palfrey was made public. I was asked if I would be willing to participate in a conversation about the nature of Civic Media and the work of the Center with Palfrey, which will run on both my blog and the blog for the Center.

As I thought about how to initiate this conversation, I went back to my original blog post about the Center, which asked the core question, "What Is Civic Media?" And this is a question which everyone who has been affiliated with this project continues to ask. My answer at the time was deceptively simple:

Civic media, as I use the term, refers to any use of any medium which fosters or enhances civic engagement. I intend this definition to be as broad and inclusive as possible. Civic media includes but extends well beyond the concept of citizen journalism which is so much in fashion at the moment.

I left the Center when I left MIT, though I've continued to do work on civic media through my new post at the University of Southern California.

Here's how I defined the concept of Civic Media at the head of a syllabus of a class I taught last year on this topic:

Civic Media: any use of any technology for the purposes of increasing civic engagement and public participation, enabling the exchange of meaningful information, fostering social connectivity, constructing critical perspectives, insuring transparency and accountability, or strengthening citizen agency.

This much more elaborated definition reflects the conversations which took place through many meetings with the Lab's affiliated faculty, students, and researchers, especially through the exchanges I had with Ellen Hume, who was for a time the Research Director at the Lab, and Colleen Kamen, a CMS graduate student whom we asked to help think through our vision of civic media. It also has emerged through my classroom practice at MIT and now USC and more recently, my involvement in a MacArthur Research Hub focused on better understanding youth, new media, and participatory politics. For a rich snapshot of our early attempts to define "civic media," check out the series of videos at the Center's homepage.

What the two definitions share is the idea that civic media is not simply citizen journalism, a framing which seems to limit the kinds of community practices we are describing and the ways they meet the information needs of communities, to use a phrase the Knight Foundation has been exploring in recent years. Both are technology agnostic -- which is to say any set of practices around any set of technologies can become civic media if it is applied towards certain ends. The more recent definition offers some expanded sense of what those ends are which grows out of a much deeper dive into the literature around the notion of the informed citizen and around participatory politics more broadly.

From the start, I was most interested in understanding how the emergence of new media and participatory practices might be reshaping our understanding of the civic, responding to some of the disruptions of community life which had characterized the second part of the 20th century. It seemed like an important conversation to be having, and it was a key theme which emerged through the early Communication Forum events and conferences hosted by the Center.

John Palfrey: Henry, I think your starting point, pushing on the definitional issue and driving from there, is right on. In my review of the Center's first four years, I worked with a close colleague, Catherine Bracy, to interview as many of the people involved in the Center as we could. Taken as a whole, the overwhelming view of the community was how valuable C4 has been in the lives of individuals involved and also in many of the environments where C4 faculty, staff, fellows, and students have been active.

A secondary finding was a hunger for understanding civic media as a concept. People had plainly been drawn to what you'd set up, even with a nascent definition; I think a lot of participants came to help in the active shaping of what it would become. I like very much your refinement over time. I've found myself, also, puzzling over the definitional issues and enjoying the process of thinking about them.

HJ: There was from the start some, hopefully productive, tension between the Media Lab participants who were strongly invested in the idea that we could design new tools which would be especially conducive to serving civic needs and the bias of the Comparative Media Studies participants who felt that we needed to be more focused on the social and cultural practices by which people integrated those tools into their everyday lives. We used to have heated debates about whether we should build the tools first and then apply them to communities or whether we should start with a deeper understanding of the community's existing practices and needs and then design to serve them better. Such debates are inevitable when working in an interdisciplinary space and could be generative or distracting depending on how well the people involved dealt with them.

JP: Yes! This productive tension jumped out of the review that we did. I think the idea of tempering one approach with another, in a way that made more of whole, is a deeply profound concept. The critical nature of the CMS discipline and the "let's go build it!" nature of the Lab's discipline have a peanut butter-and-chocolate quality to them. I think those debates have been, and can be in the future, extremely textured and important. One question I have is how C4 can tease them out and make them more public than they've been so far, so others of us can share in them somehow.

HJ:From the start, Knight wanted to keep the focus on geographically localized communities rather than more dispersed communities of interest, though we debated among ourselves how easily the two could be separated. For example, as the Center launched we were still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. George Lipsitz had described the working class communities of New Orleans as being "network rich and resource poor," that is to say, very strong social networks had emerged over decades which supported the sustainability of that community and insured the well-being of its members. But the hurricane had disrupted these networks on the ground, scattering the people across the country, and had done so in a way that made it difficult to imagine these communities ever being put back together again in the ways they had once functioned.

So, for me, the question was always whether we could separate out the local community in southern Louisiana from the more dispersed, diasporic community of folks from New Orleans, still strongly identified with that city, now living across the country, once part of strong social networks which they now tapped into via digital and mobile technologies. Surely, any technology-enhanced practice which strengthened the bonds between these communities would be civic media.

John Palfrey is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, vice dean for library and information resources, and the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He led a reorganization of the Harvard Law School Library in 2009. He is a principal investigator on the Open Net Initiative, a collaboration between Harvard and the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge that studies the Internet filtering of countries such as China, Iran, and Singapore, among many others He is co-author or editor of several books, including Access Denied (MIT Press, 2008), Access Controlled (MIT Press, 2010), and Born Digital (Basic Books, 2008).

Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part One)

I have had a chance to watch Anne Balsamo at work in many different contexts -- as a junior faculty member at Georgia Tech focusing on cyberfeminism and reconceptualizations of the body; as a designer in residence at Xerox Parc where she was developing devices intended to embody alternative conceptions of the future of publication and reading; as someone dispatched by the MacArthur Foundation to encourage us to reflect on the nature of "design literacy"; and most recently, as a colleague at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC where we are working together to launch an expanded ebook project. She is someone who has been able to pursue a shared research agenda in a range of different contexts (both academic and industrial) and in the process, to build upon the work of others around her, to carry with her what she's learned into these new spaces. What I love about Balsamo is her fearlessness in moving beyond her own comfort zone and her ability to inspire creativity and reflection in those she finds around her. I am so blessed to have a chance to work with people like Balsamo and her other colleagues at the Innovation Lab on a regular basis.

Her newest book, Designing Cultures: The Technological Imagination at Work, could only have come about as a result of her experiences working in these many different environments. It is one part autobiography, one part portfolio (she shares some of her great projects through an attached disc), and one part theoretical reflection. Above all, it is an intervention by someone deeply rooted into the humanities into the current debates about technological innovation. Her conceptual models and frameworks are sure to spark discussions at digital humanities labs around the world, but my hope is that they do not end there, that they offer engineers and programmers and designers a way to reflect on their own contributions to culture (and their own contexts of innovation).

In this interview that follows, we talk together about some of the key themes of her book, which, as the title playfully suggests, deals both with the design of culture and with the cultural contexts where design takes place.

Designing Culture: the Technological Imagination at Work from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

Early in the book, you make the statement, "the wellspring of technological innovation is the exercise of the technological imagination." Can you break that down for us? What is the "technological imagination" and how does this concept bridge between technology and culture?

Inspired by the concept of the "sociological imagination," first developed by C. Wright Mills in the 1960s, I define the technological imagination as a mindset that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible. This imagination is performative: it improvises within constraints to create something new. It is through the exercise of their technological imaginations that people engage the materiality of the world, creating the conditions for future world-making. Most importantly, this is the capacity to understand that all technologies come from somewhere, that they could always be different from what they are, and that they always have multiple and contradictory impacts.

In the active engagement between human beings and technological elements, culture too is reworked through the development of new narratives, new myths, new rituals, new modes of expression, and new knowledges that make the innovations meaningful. When people participate in the activities of producing "innovation," their technological imaginations are engaged in a complex process of meaning-making whereby both technology and culture are created anew.

Throughout the book, you talk about "innovation," which as you note is a widely deployed concept these days. What do you mean by "innovation" and how does your use of the term differ from some of the notions currently shaping industry and government discourse?

Innovation is a process, not a product. Innovation changes how life will be lived in the future. I think that many people--industry pundits and government spokespeople--believe that innovation is a "thing." I make the distinction between "invention" which implies the creation of new things--new applications, services, devices, processes--and "innovation" which is the process whereby the elements of human life are rearranged such that life in the future is lived differently.

You suggest that a key aim of the book is to get your humanities colleagues more engaged with the process of technological innovation. Why? What will they gain from participating in a process which may seem alien to many of them? What will humanities people bring to the table that is currently missing from our conversations around technology?

I argue that the process of technological innovation is actually NOT at all alien to humanists; it is the process of engaging with technologies to change the shape of the way culture is lived, reproduced, and expressed in the future. This is an abiding interest and contribution of the humanities that is more commonly understood as the process of education through their engagement with a range of technologies of literacy (i.e., the book, historical narrative, aesthetic materials of expression). If one believes, as I do, that innovation is the process whereby culture is rearranged, then it is easy to see the valuable role of humanists in providing the tools and the critical frameworks for understanding not only how culture might change in the future, but also how current cultural arrangements structure conditions of possibility of any effort of innovation.

How a Robot Got its Groove from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

Our colleague, Tara McPherson, has argued that issues of gender and race tend to be pushed aside when people talk about designing new media. How and why do these questions surface throughout your book?

This book, indeed the entire project that goes by the name "Designing Culture" is a direct outgrowth of my earlier work on the biotechnological reproduction of gendered bodies. In my first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke 1996), I examined the cultural implications of what were then (in the 1980s-1990s) emergent bio-technologies. What I learned through that project was how to critique the technocultural arrangements that reproduced gendered identities for the bodies that engaged with new technologies (body building, cosmetic surgery, surrogate motherhood, computer-mediated communication, and virtual reality). By the time I finished, I realized that if I were to take my feminist political commitments seriously, it was not enough for me to critique the ideological work of emergent technologies, I had to go further to examine how the critique might suggest ways of doing things differently in the future.

In some sense, all my work is influenced by Donna Haraway's assertion that "all technologies are reproductive technologies." Whereas the first book examined a broad range of BIOLOGICAL reproductive technologies that were innovative during the last two decades of the 20th century, the new work examined what I believed were going to be the DOMINANT reproductive technologies of the 21st century: digital media technologies. This "turn to reproduction" is but one way in which feminist theory--as a way of thinking gender--informs all my research.

Thus I formulated new research questions that directed my attention to study and participate in the processes whereby new technologies are developed which enabled me to build a framework to understand the techno-social-cultural conditions of technological innovation. Put simply, I continued to study the processes of technologically-assisted cultural reproduction...but with the new project the focus was on the creation of new digital media technologies rather than on biological technologies.

To follow these questions, I turned my attention to the investigation of the practices of technological design and I immersed myself in projects that would allow me to learn how to use new media technologies to create new digital applications. My first project--to create the interactive documentary called "Women of the World Talk Back"-- was the result of my experiments with a range of (what were then) innovative new media digital authoring tools for the purposes of creating feminist activist interactive media. Through collaborations with colleagues and students--who had a much more developed set of technological design skills than I did--my technological imagination was inspired and shaped to think differently about the cultural possibilities of new technologies.

Anne Balsamo holds joint appointments in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Her interest in the relationship between technology and culture informs her work as a scholar, teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, and new media designer. She is the recipient of a recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interactive tangible interface for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In 2008 she received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study the future of museums and libraries in a digital age. Her next project investigates tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a digital age. Her on-going research-design projects focus on the role of public interactives as a stage for technology transfer from sites of innovation (university labs and research centers) to the general public.

Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part Two)

You worked at Xerox PARC, which, as you note, has become a mythic locale in the early history of digital technology. What do you think the current myths about Xerox PARC get right and what do they misunderstand?

Among the many lessons I learned during my time working at Xerox PARC is the understanding that the future is created first in the imagination, and then is enacted through the many activities of the research laboratory (among other places). Contrary to the old adage--that the best way to predict the future is to invent it--what I came to appreciate is the important role of narrative in creating an imaginary relationship between the FUTURE and the present. The first act of innovation is an act of story-making--which involves the spinning of a narrative that features technologies, materials, beliefs about "needs" and "opportunities," and is performed by researchers who (as in the case of Xerox PARC) are employed in the business of innovation. I'm not sure how that matches with the cultural work of Xerox PARC today--the scene has changed in the decade since I left. But I suspect that the researchers there are still eagerly engaged in the cultural processes--and performance--of innovation.

You argue that technologists should "pay attention to the technological literacy of the intended users off the technology-under-development." What advice can you offer to technologists about the best way to "pay attention"? What are the "ethical responsibilities" of technologists in regard to those who will be left behind if their tools and platforms are more widely adopted?

My approach to the topic of "paying attention" is grounded in the theory of "strong objectivity" developed by the philosopher of science, Sandra Harding. This argument is best situated within the debates about objectivity, scientism, and relativism of the late 1990s that were spurred by important work in critical feminist science studies. Harding argues that we need NOT to abandon ideals of "scientific objectivity"--as some feminists might have than been accused of advocating--but rather we need to be more RIGOROUSLY objective in understanding that reality is multidimensional; and that science, to be a truly objective explanatory enterprise needs to engage the minds and points of view of people who have been trained (socialized) to see the matter of the world from different perspectives.

Perhaps the key issue here is that what we are to "pay attention to" is multidimensional; thus the ethical responsibility of any technologist is to actively seek to see the world through different eyes, and not to assume that the point of view that one embodies is privileged as the only "point of view." Haraway calls this the "god trick." The ethical response is to understand how one's perspective is always partial, and to seek out other points of view (as it were) when developing or experimenting with the creation of new technologies.

I don't see the issue as one about people who will be "left behind"--because I understand that technologies are not simply objects, but rather a whole technocultural formation. Everyone lives in a current technological cultural moment that is constantly unfolding; an individual's position within that technocultural formation is what we really need to address when we think about "access to technology." No one is actually "left behind" in a cultural formation; they are differently positioned, constrained, enabled, empowered, with different (and often unequal) access to resources such as tools, knowledge, economic goods. I would argue that issues that are framed in terms of "people left behind" do not reflect a complex understanding about the nature of technoculture and cultural reproduction. To frame this question in this way presupposes an answer that puts the emphasis solely on "access to technology." Yet we know that simply providing access--dumping computers into classrooms for example--doesn't work to address the broader issues of inequality in power, economic resources, and intellectual support. Its time to start thinking more complexly about strategies for rearticulating dominant technocultural formations to allow for more liberatory and equal participation.

What is Literacy? from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

What does your book's focus on "design" contribute to the larger conversation around New Media Literacies and Digital Learning which has been sparked by the recent interventions of the MacArthur Foundation?

As I elaborated in the book, I make explicit the connections between the processes of design thinking and the skills and sensibilities that you list as key 21st century literacies. I argue that we need to teach designing practices across the curriculum; I support the notion that "design is a new liberal art." The issue of designing (design thinking, critical design skills) emerges as an important topic as we come to appreciate the many ways in which young people use new digital technologies to create and participate in innovative learning experiences. As they are called to be "designers/authors" of their own learning experiences, they will be well served (I assert) by learning also important design methods and critical frameworks for the analysis of their designed efforts.

The central premise of the book is that the work of design is one of the most important sites of cultural reproduction in a digital age. When I turn my attention to the designing/authoring efforts of students, I understand that even when these students think they are making it all up for the first time, they are actually engaged in the process of reproducing cultural understandings that came before them, and setting up the conditions for the reproduction of these understandings in the future. Thus for me to teach design also requires the teaching of ethics and the training of the historical imagination....both of these concepts are less fashionable to speak of these days

DML efforts might cast these concerns as "civic engagement" or as topics for "learning games." While there is nothing wrong with that approach--who could argue against "civic engagement" as an important topic for contemporary new media and digital learning--as I elaborate in the book I believe that there are additional insights to glean from discussions about ethics and about history in the context of understanding the praxis of designing and the reproduction of culture.

Given your discussion throughout about the need to reimagine the book, I am curious about the process which led you to develop Designing Culture as a print based book with digital extensions. What do you see each medium contributing to our experience of the whole?

The book and the digital projects were designed/authored simultaneously; but at any point, one creative project would take precedence over the others. This is because I'm not really good about multitasking at the broadest levels. It is also because the knowledge making process that is invoked during the course of creating digital media applications is different for me than the knowledge making process that emerges through the act of writing/authoring.

I wrote the book, as I explained in the conclusion, for personal, professional, and theoretical reasons. One of the most salient theoretical reasons is that the book is well suited to one of the most critical, but most commonly overlooked stages of designing: the stage when the designer returns to the design effort (and outputs) to critically assess the lessons learned and the cultural impact of the project. This stage of self-reflexive assessment is not easily accommodated in digital media genres of the museum exhibit, videos, interactive applications, and such.

The technological form of the printed book allows for the theoretical elaboration of abstract concepts and of self-reflexive accounts of designing practice. The book I wrote was neither a factual account of a series of moments long past, nor was it a simply a work of speculative design fiction. It was an authored account that was both factual and fictional; that was highly determined by my own biography and set of theoretical commitments, but not able to be reduced to either biography or theory.

If we return to C. Wright Mills notion of the "sociological imagination" we will hear him call for this kind of disposition--the sociological imagination for him was the capacity to make the connections between one's own personal biographies and the broader social and institutional forces and formations that invariably shape those biographies. This is the deep theoretical tradition I was trained in as a cultural theorist: to seek to make connections between my personal investments and biographical moments and the broader technocultural formation that I participate in as a subject/author and that I am "subjected to" through the work of ideology and other shaping forces.

Moreover, the DESIGNING CULTURE project is an example of the technological imagination at work in that the project manifested across a range of media technologies: where each part of the project was realized and expressed in the modality that was best deployed for my particular authorial objectives. Here I borrow Mill's insight to suggest that the technological imagination is the disposition that allows one to make the connections among technological forms and more personal/authorial objectives. Other people might call this paying attention to the "media specificity" of different modalities of cultural expression. Indeed that is what a good story teller always does: chose the best medium for addressing the desired audience that is matched with the story one wants to tell.

You are part of the leadership of the Annenberg Innovation Lab. What opportunities does the Lab offer you to push your concepts to the next level?

My work with the Annenberg Innovation Lab is very exciting for me because it offers an opportunity to collaborate with other people on the project of technological innovation that begins by taking culture seriously. This is the challenge that is laid out in the book: it is time to treat culture as a serious concept in our discussions, learning activities, design projects, and technological inventions.

Jonathan Taplin, Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, invokes the mantra for the lab as such: Every day culture eats strategy for lunch. This assertion resonates strongly with the main thesis of the Designing Culture project and sets the stage for a whole range of interesting experiments in the design of innovative technologies and the exercise of the technological imagination.

Anne Balsamo holds joint appointments in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Her interest in the relationship between technology and culture informs her work as a scholar, teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, and new media designer. She is the recipient of a recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interactive tangible interface for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In 2008 she received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study the future of museums and libraries in a digital age. Her next project investigates tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a digital age. Her on-going research-design projects focus on the role of public interactives as a stage for technology transfer from sites of innovation (university labs and research centers) to the general public.

Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part Two)

Conversation

Jason:

In reading over Alex and Gail's excellent provocations, I find myself reading fairly fannishly - not because I'm an admirer of their work (although I certainly am), but because even though they each present arguments that might seem to contradict my own stated position, I highlight and (to evoke our host) poach the moments and examples that confirm my own ideas. In Alex's post, I see evidence of the usefulness of writing what you believe and feel without a label - he might be framed as an acafan fore-parent, but the work that inspired so many of us didn't need that label to forge a model.

And his post points to another example of a slippery term that has had much more semiotic utility than either acafan or postmodern: queer. As we all know, this was not a term coined for academic convenience or trendiness, but rather a reclamation of an already powerful signifier that has come to define a field in seemingly (for a sideline observer like myself) coherent, pragmatic and politically efficacious ways. The semantic history of queer proves that terms can matter, but suggests that we should also engage with terms that already matter and fight the important fights, rather than coining and squabbling over new ones.

Both Gail and Alex's posts highlight the role of affect in writing about culture, and the importance of owning up to our personal engagements. But while Alex chose to "inject the I" into his work through both political and emotional investments, Gail chooses to speak Vulcan over Klingon, tempering affect while foregrounding her taste and identity. I'm sure that adherents of the term acafan would allow for both styles of fannishness under its rubric, but that points to challenges of the concept: either you must delineate the category in a way that excludes some significant modes of engagement, or you create a large umbrella that loses its explanatory power. I'm left unsure why labelling either of their approaches, or those of the many others who have participated in this series, as "acafan" helps us understand or justify the resulting work.

So I'm left with a question for both of my esteemed co-provocateurs: what would be different for the type of work you do without the term acafan to categorize it?

Gail:

Oh, quite simply, I think of myself as an "acafan" because Henry employed that term. He could have called it "lorax" and I would have said, "Yes, that's what I'm trying to do with my work, with my career. I'm trying to be a lorax!" As Alex is the fore-parent of so much great cultural studies and queer studies work, so Henry is the fore-parent of so much great work in fan studies. (Thus it is so great to have these two strands of genealogy touch points through this conversation, though of course their work has always been relevant to each other's.) I came into fan studies through the Henry route, and so Henry's terminology is mine.

But actually I would like to take up the question of using "queer" as a possible descriptor for "acafan." I know that's not literally what you suggested, Jason, but I have often wondered about drawing a connection between the two terms. On the one hand, "acafan" "queers" both academic and fan, Henry has explicitly referenced the origins of his early fan studies work in the emergent queer studies movement, fans generally use terms like "outed," there is something real at stake for those of us who are academics who "come out" as fans, and one of Henry's landmark contributions was showing that it could be done with respect to popular media, that one could and maybe MUST "out" oneself in academic work as a fan.

On the other hand, earlier in this discussion, John Edward Campbell asked "those who identify as 'acafans' to be a bit more reflexive about comparisons of fans to sexual minorities," emphasizing rightly that the dangers for people who "out" themselves as sexual minorities are far more acute and severe than for people who "out" themselves as fans.

If either of you has any thoughts on the intersections of "queer" and "acafan," as two terms that could be brought to bear on one another or may support or serve one another, or as two terms that are and must remain very distinct and separate, I would be really interested in them.

Alex:

I'll begin with Gail's provocation about how she tries to have her academic work speak critically about fandom and things she is a fan of rather than have her speaking as a fan, and how this particular positioning as an acafan (one I think most acafans take on) runs the risk of reinforcing "the old equivalences" of fan with "irrationality" and "overemotionalism" and academic with "rationality" and critical "distance." I agree with you, Gail, that this positioning may be a matter of "tone," and I will add "degree," rather than a wholesale denial or repression of emotion, but I have always been frustrated by how deploying this position always seems to demand we "control" our expressions of enthusiasm because they are, somehow, antithetical to the intellectual work we do. Is it really be impossible to conceive of a piece of work that veers between Photoplay and "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," and that is taken seriously in the academy?

Jason, you really are being a provocateur when you ask if we would really lose anything in terms of how we go about our business without the term "acafan" (or "postmodern"). I suppose I would say "no" and "yes." No, in the sense that those of us who were/are intent on combining "the personal is the political" type investments in our work would have proceeded (and did proceed) without a concept to work within or under.

But, yes, in the sense that it is handy to have a term like "acafan," or the earlier "scholar-fan," to indicate a "performance" option (as you put it, Gail) for scholarship. Once a term like this is established, it can provide some added weight to the struggle to legitimate certain types of scholarly performance. (I know, even while writing out "legitimate" I was cringing, but a girl's got to eat, so. . .) While, as Jason points out, this term (whether applied to a person or to a product) can mean many things to many people, it does gesture toward a group of people (self-identifying and not) and body of work that has attempted to expand and complicate just what constitutes a "scholar" or a piece of "scholarly" or "academic" work. And I do feel a kinship with these folks and with this project--though I guess don't really need a term to describe all this, I suppose. How's that for equivocating?

As to understanding acafandom, the acafan, and acafan production as "queer" somehow, I don't see why not, for the reasons Gail outlines, primary among them the impulse to critique categories with an eye to deconstructing them. Following this line of thinking, then, the queer goal of acafandom should finally be to trouble the categories of "fan" and "academic" (and academic and fan discourse) so much that we are left with exactly what Jason is calling for--a space that allows "our arguments and ideas to speak for themselves" no matter what their approach, methodology, for form. So, Jason, maybe you can just wait a while for acafandom to do its queer work!

Jason:
I appreciate that both of you equivocate about my question, and even though I'm skeptical of the term, I'm similarly on the fence. Such labels certainly have their uses for community-building, group identification, and signalling a set of sympathies so that others can find like-minded fellow travellers - I imagine that on some social network like Academia.edu, tagging yourself as an acafan could be useful (as would tagging ourselves as Loraxes for that matter!). But as academics in the critical humanities, we need to be careful in how we use our labels, as today's marker of convenience is tomorrow's site of political factioning or terminological warfare: when will we see articles positing that we are now in the era of post-acafandom, to be followed by neo-acafandom?

To pull out another term that emerged from the theoretical stew of postmodernism (but I'd argue need not be labeled as such to be useful), what I think is going on around these acafan conversations is a form of strategic essentialism. There is a tactical utility for scholars, especially in vulnerable untenured positions, to be able to grasp onto a term like acafan and highlight how prominent figures in our field like Henry & Alex embrace it - it helps situate ones work & identity within an area of study that has validity and legitimation. But what happens when a hiring or review committee asks "so what does that mean?" I think it's most useful and honest to be able to embrace labels not just for their pragmatic utility, but because they actually help explain what it is you do and how you do it.

As for the queer question, I get the parallel in terms of issues of visibility and categorical instability, but echoing John Edward Campbell's point that Gail cited, I fear that it might unintentionally belittle the huge power differentials between being a fan and being a sexual minority. The odds that someone would suffer tangible discrimination or violence for being a fan are so much less than for being queer, and the fandoms that would probably carry the greatest stigma are themselves already queered. In other words, nobody's going to care that I "outed" myself as a sysop for a Lost fan wiki, but a scholar who writes BDSM slash fanfic has legitimate reasons to keep that aspect of her fandom closeted - but I'd argue that's less because it's a fan activity than because it's a queer type of fandom. Might a strategic use of the term acafandom would help her by validating such activity within an established community? Perhaps, and if so, that's as good of a justification for the term as I could imagine - although my skepticism about the incoherence of the category remains.

Gail: Jason, you're such a hater! It's awesome - I like the "hater" position and use it very frequently myself (cf. Jonathan Gray's outstanding work on "anti-fans" and "non-fans"). You're a non-fan of the "acafan" term and an anti-fan of the potential for terms like "post-acafan" (!) and I respect that. I actually don't use the term "acafan" to refer to myself in any promotion review-type situation, or to define myself or my work to non-acafen, but I do *think* of myself as an acafan and I like that a term exists as a "tag" that other scholars use so that I can find them and their work and understand something about their methodologies and what their goals are.

"Acafan" works well for me as a kind of search term (though I've never typed that into Google) - if someone is called an "acafan" or refers to themselves using that term, even in passing, it's helpful for me to recognize them as someone whose work may have some relevance and importance to my own work.

But just going back to the lorax example quickly, I am also fine with other tags like "fan studies scholar," "scholar-fan," "fan theorist," "fan cultures scholar," etc. And that circle of terms can widen outward quickly to "cultural studies scholar," "media studies scholar," "digital culture theorist," "Amy Pond who studies online communities," etc. I just find terminology useful for a quick assessment of whether someone's essays or books or blog entries or LiveJournal posts or conference papers are worth time and attention - Are they working on projects that are of interest to me, or not? Are they using approaches and frameworks that I might want to learn about, or not?

But I do think that as the acafan approach gets to be more and more common, with new generations of scholars emerging for whom the question of whether or not they should declare their fandoms is not even a question, that the term may become specific to a time frame. "Some scholars and fans in the late 1990s and early 2000s, sensing commonalities and overlaps in their theoretical and critical work, used the term 'acafan' to define themselves. Today, it is well-known that everyone who studies media of any kind is a fan, a non-fan, or an anti-fan, and that anyone who thinks that passion and emotion are not integral to media criticism and analysis is an idiot." (from the Future Encyclopedia of Media Studies, copyright 2042).

I do hope, though, that if and when "acafan" goes away, that we who were acafen remember that academics and fans can and should talk to one another, that they/we are not that different from one another, that the "meta" done in fandoms and the "studies" done in academia are similar kinds of work. I am especially concerned here about fans' possible marginalization from future academic discussions, since academics have access to (some) institutional legitimacy and research funds that many fans do not.

Thank you both, Alex and Jason, for weighing in on whether "queer" can or mustn't be thought of as pertinent to "acafan." Both of you suggest that much acafan work can do, and is already doing, queer work - and so inspires discomfort and encounters disapprobation because of its queerness, not because of its acafanishness. To me, that means that it is useful to think about "acafan" and "queer" together, and to articulate their relationships, but that in any discussion of the two concepts together, it is crucial not to mistake the social positioning of one for the social positioning of the other.

Alex: Well it looks as if I am bringing up the rear (to coin a phrase). It seems as if where we are leaving "acafan" is understanding it as a concept that might have certain uses for academic fans if not for "civilian" fans (sorry, I was an Army brat) when it is used carefully and strategically--but that it may have a shelf life, so we shouldn't get too attached to it. I think that between and among them, our provocations and responses have compellingly suggested some of the potential benefits of using "acafan" as well as some of its limitations or problematic aspects.

Reading both of your follow-up comments on "acafandom" and/as "queer," I realized that I probably sounded a bit flippant in my last response on this. As a queer and an acafan--yes, I will hold onto that label for a while longer though I don't really need it to do what I do, even though I still think it helps explain what I do to some extent, although Jason is correct in suggesting that sometime you need to define "acafan" for people before talking about your specific acafan work-- I agree that while as concepts they can be interestingly compared to each other, this should not suggest that "open" acafans leave themselves open to anything like what "open" queers do--except, possibly, as Jason suggests, when the acafan/acafan work is itself queer.

I like Gail's encyclopedia entry for "acafan(dom)," especially the final sentiment, which is an interesting reversal of what many undergraduate students think: that analysis and criticism have no place in expressions of (their) fan enthusiasms. That is, they will no longer enjoy (or enjoy less) popular culture texts or personalities once they have certain (academic) critical and analytic tools. Hey, this might be something else the concept and products of acafandom are useful for--showing students that you can simultaneously think critically and emote when you watch a film, listen to a song, contemplate a celebrity, etc. etc. etc. A carefully selected acafan article or two--along with a general discussion of "acafan(dom)"--have done wonders in my undergraduate classes along these lines.

Abigail (Gail) De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a joint appointment in the Berkeley Center for New Media (http://bcnm-dev.berkeley.edu/) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (http://tdps.berkeley.edu/). Her current LJ userpics are: The Beatles, Don & Peggy, Starbuck & Apollo (Kara & Lee), Rogue, Blair Waldorf, Torvill & Dean, Lisbon & Jane, Tony & Pepper, Daniel & Betty, and Mal & Zoe. At this time, she's looking for a good Arya Stark icon.



Alexander Doty is Chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University and a Professor in this department and in the Department of Gender Studies. He has written Making Things Perfectly Queer and Flaming Classics, co-edited Out in Culture, and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas. An old fogey, he is currently not active in any web-based fan communities, but in the past he has been known to put his 2-cents up on broadwayworld.com, and to indulge the consumer side of his fandom by buying risque postcards of 1920s stars George O'Brien and Ramon Novarro on Ebay--and, yes, he will end up writing something on at least one of them in order to justify these purchases to his "aca" side.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College, and a Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen, Germany, for the 2011-12 academic year. As an aca, he's written Genre & Television (2004), Television & American Culture (2009), Complex TV (in process) and the blog Just TV (ongoing). As a fan, he's been active in the Lostpedia community, transforms Wilco songs for the mandolin, and calls his fantasy football team The Heisenberg Helmets.