Fandoms and Platforms (3/15/2024; 1/1/2023)

2022-03-09

Fandom today is often entangled with digital platforms, which offer spaces and features that make some aspects of fan culture more widely accessible amid increasingly globalized communities and models of consumption. Fans are perceived to be early adopters of new technologies, particularly those that provide space for gathering and community building. Likewise, many types of fan works, fan labor, and fandom participation depend on certain platforms for hosting, sharing, distributing, and discussing such content. However, fans also have complicated relationships with platforms, whether because their needs and uses are in conflict with other stakeholders or because platforms can generate and challenge notions of access,
accountability, and community.

This special issue seeks to explore how, in the broadest sense, fans and fandom communities engage with platforms. We are particularly interested in essays that complicate a “black box” view of platforms or that engage critically with what platforms make possible for their users, as well as how and/or why. Ideally, such contributions will further understanding of how interactions among fans, fandoms, texts, and fan works are coconstitutive of the spaces in which they operate. We encourage contributions from fans as well as from fan studies scholars; we are particularly interested in works that cover or draw from global contexts.

Topics may include:

  • Connections between fans/fandoms and the platforms they utilize.
  • Fan/fandom migrations, practices, and communities enabled by platforms.
  • Platform policies, governance, affordances, and/or architectures as experienced by fans.
  • Platforms and questions of access (TOS, content moderation, etc.).
  • Networked harassment and other negative practices enacted on and/or enabled by platforms.
  • Genealogies and histories of fan communities and fan works shaped by specific platforms.
  • Platforms and fandoms less frequently addressed in fan studies.
  • Nondigital platforms, including relationships between digital and nondigital spaces.

Submission Guidelines

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) is an international, peer-reviewed, online Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works, copyrighted under a Creative Commons License. TWC aims to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community. TWC accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing.

Submit final papers directly to Transformative Works and Cultures by January 1, 2023. 

Articles: Peer review. 6,000–8,000 words.
Symposium: Editorial review. Under 4,000 words.

Please visit TWC's Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines, or e-mail the TWC Editor (editor@transformativeworks.org).

Contact—Contact guest editors Maria Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, and Lesley Willard with any questions before or after the due date at fandom.and.platforms@gmail.com. 

Due date— January 1, 2023, for March 2024 publication.