Saturday 16 June 2012

Up, up, and away! Transformative Works and Fan Activism

May the Fourth Be With You published on May 4, 2012 by
Read Henry Jenkins' and Ashley Hinck's articles about the Harry Potter Alliance.
Many fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than the more overtly political term activism to describe their pro-social efforts. Our goal is not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices, social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking, mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement. [Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, 'Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism' [1.9], Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)]
Film Studies For Free is a very big fan of the open access journal of Transformative Works and Cultures, so it is delighted that there's a new issue out.

It's a themed collection of studies of transformative works and fan activism, edited by media studies superheroes Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova. Links to abstracts of the articles (and from there to the articles themselves) are given below.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012): Transformative Works and Fan Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, University of Southern California. 

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