Review of Liza Potts, Melissa Beattie, Emily Dallaire, Katie Grimes, and Kelly Turner, Participatory memory: Fandom experiences across time and space. Intermezzo, 2018. Online at http://participatorymemory.org/book/index. e-book $0.00 (ISBN 978-0-9864333-6-8).
[1] This uniquely ambitious digital work blends pedagogical tool, multimedia resource, and an analysis of fan memorials and tourism sites, all while remaining accessible to a diverse audience. Potts and Beattie, scholars of fandom who locate themselves primarily in academia, join here with three of Potts's recent undergraduate student fieldworkers, to synthesize data from long-term research projects and study-abroad courses conducted in 2014 and 2016. Beattie's long-standing interest in and past work on Ianto's Shrine, dedicated to the Torchwood character Ianto Jones, and Potts's expertise in digital composition and social media are evident, as are the passions and experience-based learning of coauthors and former student fieldworkers Dallaire, Grimes, and Turner, particularly regarding Harry Potter. The result is an engaging interdisciplinary work investigating the nature of participatory memory spaces dedicated to texts, celebrities, and fan communities that should be of interest to both (as they put it) fan-scholars and scholar-fans.
[2] Participatory Memory is especially distinctive in that it is a free, open-access work specifically designed for interactive online publishing. Its three main chapters (on the memorial to Princess Diana in Paris, Harry Potter sites Platform 9¾ and The Elephant House, and Torchwood landmark Ianto's Shrine) incorporate videos, photography, and audio clips to help immerse readers in the experience of being there. The authors make careful use of the Scalar platform to annotate their images, highlighting particular details that support the text. The platform also permits detailed crediting of photographers and recordists, thus acknowledging the work of the undergraduate study-abroad groups. User experience is self directed: though structured with chapters and subsections like a typical book, the table of contents page also includes a visualizer that allows users to navigate directly to media and skip easily from topic to topic, blazing their own path through the text. Although descriptive text for images would be an important accessibility addition, the authors otherwise take advantage of the available technological affordances to create an absorbing reading experience.
[3] We can best understand the project's impact by approaching it thematically, examining the work's dual contributions to fan tourism and pilgrimage research and fan studies pedagogy. While a longer, print (or solely text-oriented) book would likely produce more in-depth analysis of the specific sites explored, this experience-centered, accessible analysis focuses on topics likely to provoke conversation among students, PhD-trained academics, fan-scholars, scholar-fans, and those in between. The authors consequently embrace their investments as fans, a venture that might also be interrogated in more detail in another type of work (as discussed below), but that suits their pedagogical purposes and highlights the often challenging intersections of fan scholarship and being a fan.
[4] Potts, Beattie, Dallaire, Grimes, and Turner define fans' activities, and particularly their written messages, at the sites covered in this book as "participatory memory," "the ways in which people memorialize, celebrate, and reflect across physical and digital spaces" (Introducing Participatory Memory) (note 1). Drawing on theoretical paradigms from writing studies, memory studies, and fan studies (an unusual and yet well suited combination), they argue that these sites are constituted by "community-making activities that create microworlds in which fans engage" (Exploring Participatory Memory). This focus on the creation of microworlds through writing and memorializing practices differs productively from approaches situated in tourism and pilgrimage studies. Stepping away from these broad established categories—which would need to be addressed in a longer work—allows this shorter text to immerse readers in the details of the specific places profiled. The theoretical paradigm thus suits (and is suited by) both the visually and aurally rich nature of the multimedia publication and the pedagogical goals of fieldwork that stress participant-observation, reflection, and archaeological examination of spaces and memorial materials. It enables the authors to investigate the connections between written expressions, agency, location, and curation at sites shaped by varying levels of commercial, government, and fan control, while maintaining the focus on experience.
[5] This paradigm is applied to different sites in different ways, primarily focusing on the placement, content, and erasure of written messages and material objects left by fans. At the Paris memorial marking the site of Princess Diana's death, the authors consider claims of ownership and conflicts in culture-making between Diana's followers and local authorities who want to keep the memorial clean of graffiti and mementoes. In the case of Harry Potter sites at The Elephant House café (where J. K. Rowling wrote some of the Potter novels and fan graffiti decorates the restrooms) and the more commercially driven Platform 9¾, they explore fans' sense of realness and authenticity. Consciously examining what it means to put on and take off one's fan goggles, fieldworkers reflect on the differences between their personal experiences of "fan driven" sites, where visits are primarily shaped by fan-generated practices, and "fan pushed" sites, where fieldworkers feel that certain types of experiences are pushed on fans, and where boundaries and activities are circumscribed by property owners. Beattie's past archaeological cataloging of shrine objects (in "A Most Peculiar Memorial" [2014]) meets the experiences of fans new to Torchwood at Ianto's Shrine. Proximity to an unfamiliar fandom gives student fieldworkers critical distance to see the complex relationships of fans, passersby who mock the Shrine, and property owners who endorse it. Each case study produces valuable insights regarding sites that have been thoroughly investigated and others that have not. Often these insights concern the specific ways in which objects and messages at the sites—or their removal—convey negotiations of ownership and authority that always subtly influence visitors' experiences, even if they are not overtly announced by commercial sponsorship.
[6] As a reader invested in both Participatory Memory's subject matter and the pedagogical possibilities of collaborative fieldwork with undergraduates (note 2), I locate the book's main purpose—and its most notable contribution—in its closing lines: "at the end of this book, the authors…firmly believe these students, and others like them, hold the future for work as fan scholars and scholar fans" (Navigating the Futures of Participation). While the work should indeed be read as a study of culture-making at fans' spaces of memory, it should equally be seen as an exploration of fan studies as pedagogy. The project is clearly geared toward teaching research skills and ethics, with students discussing stance in participant-observation, what it means to manage insider/outsider status, and how to work ethically in fan spaces. It is a model—an implied syllabus—for teachers at the university and even secondary levels who want to implement a large-scale experiential project to teach a variety of skills like writing, video and audio production, digital composition, critical analysis, thick description, and interviewing. Such potentials of teaching through fandom have been discussed by Paul Booth in a chapter of Fan Culture: Theory/Practice (2012) and in Katherine Anderson Howell's new anthology Fandom as Classroom Practice (2018), but rarely described elsewhere.
[7] Indeed, the project does an admirable job of highlighting and stimulating the contributions of investigators who represent a range of scholarly positions. The authors identify themselves as a mixed group of scholar-fans, who study fandom from inside the academy while also identifying as fans, and fan-scholars, fans who produce knowledge about fandom from an insider perspective (see Matt Hills's Fan Culture [2002] on these categories). While Participatory Memory runs the risk of overemphasizing the position of student fieldworkers as fan-scholars rather than trainee scholar-fans, it includes comments from those students reflecting on the experience of shifting between these identities that illuminates the complexities of scholarship and self in fan studies. In addition to such comments (typically credited to specific authors), the work of emerging self-identified fan-scholars and established scholar-fans is blended cohesively. While at times it would be helpful to know which author is primarily responsible for a given subsection, the evident high level of investment of the undergraduate authors generated by coauthorship is pedagogically invaluable.
[8] The authors' attention to their intended audiences is also noteworthy. Considering academics, nonacademic fans, and curious onlookers, they employ a writing style that is generally accessible to all readers who have some knowledge of the fandoms in question, the theoretical paradigms, or both. (The exception is the review of theory in the first chapter—although this section also includes a helpful glossary of key concepts.) By maintaining a consistent structure and incorporating a variety of media and voices as well as moderated commenting, the work invites engagement from these audiences and remains easy to follow. The authors also think expansively about who constitutes the audience for a research project like this: not merely those who consume the final project but also people who were (perhaps unwittingly) observers of the research in the fieldwork phase or who accessed the study-abroad courses' social media presence. Project audience and research ethics are rightly seen as closely intertwined.
[9] A project that seeks to bridge so many intellectual paradigms, audiences, and authors raises questions about what exactly those bridges connect or pass over. As previously stated, the authors of Participatory Memory have made conscious and justifiable choices about the perspectives they include and the types of analyses they present, which may be atypical for an academic book, but aim instead to inspire conversations between scholar-fans, students, and fan-scholars. However, this approach does raise some critical questions that the authors do not address. As discussed below, the work's ambiguous positioning runs the risk of valorizing certain types of fan experiences (creative and direct) over others (commercial or programmed). Its analyses also do not engage with disputes within the fandoms profiled about texts, authorship, and what spaces of memory mean, though these are often evident in graffiti and objects at such spaces.
[10] One case where these absences are evident is the discussion of the photo op attraction at Platform 9¾, in which the authors write that "the conflict between fan experience and fan consumerism for the students was very apparent" and "the space felt 'fan-pushed'…forced and fake because it was so detached from the fan space" (Moments of Memory for Harry Potter). By implicitly critiquing commercialism (in contrast to the positively portrayed graffiti at The Elephant House), highlighting a perceived distinction for fans between the real and the fake, and focusing on written messages over other types of engagement, the authors ascribe greater value to individualistic and creative forms of participation. This is not to say that their conclusions are incorrect (Larsen [2015] has documented similar responses to Platform 9¾) or that the authors are unaware of the weight they give their own experiences; they carefully own rather than generalize their perspectives and acknowledge the tricky balance between their own experiences as fans and the critical distance demanded by academic study. Nonetheless, further consideration of counter-perspectives, such as fans who value the officialness of commercial attractions, would enhance the analysis and balance the writers' understandable emphasis on their participant-observer experiences.
[11] Certain theoretical issues and terminology choices are also subject to question. One of the opening questions—"how do fans respond to spaces that are sacred to their fandoms?"—begs consideration of what is meant by the word sacred (by fan-scholars and scholar-fans) and how sites acquire that status. The concern with real versus fake spaces deserves more attention, taking into account work in tourism studies that asserts many tourists seek out experiences they know are constructed rather than the opportunity to get to a backstage local reality. A research project like this is in fact particularly well positioned to explore how fans' experiences with perceived authenticity (or lack thereof) might complicate such scholarly arguments.
[12] Such caveats aside, Participatory Memory is an excellent example of how a long-form work can approach multiple audiences, integrate pedagogy and analytic content, and make use of exciting new affordances of digital publishing. As an illustration of how fan studies pedagogy can encourage critical thinking and generate deep student investment in their own learning, it is an invaluable resource for any teacher looking to bring fandom into course design. The book's collection of case studies and its unusual theoretical approach should also inspire further work. Some of the sites that have been investigated less in other studies are worthy of in-depth looks, particularly considering the power dynamics to which the book calls our attention. The theoretical paradigms of participatory memory will prove an insightful approach to the mediations, rhetoric, and activities of organized tours regarding other diegetic landmarks, even those unmarked by memorial messages. Overall, this is an innovative and stimulating contribution to literature on fan pilgrimage, tourism, and teaching fandom that is well worth reading.