#aca fan

[dv-kelp-face]

If you're a Percy Jackson fan from Brazil, India, Mexico or Philippines, then this is for you!

Take part in a short survey to share your experiences with PJO and help fans out with their project!

Click the link to take part!🔱🩵

The Researchers We, Deekshitha and Varsha, undergraduate students from the Department of Psychology, St. Francis College for Women, India, a

[chapscher]

Slash Fiction Questionnaire

This questionnaire is designed to determine the reading habits and preferences of those who read slash fanfiction.

I am currently working on a project at my university. I am in fan studies (a branch of cultural studies), and I want to look at the practices of fanfiction readers (how often they read, what they like to read, etc). I would really like to involve you guys in this research, so I have developed a survey. It takes about a half-hour to complete, but it mostly asks you about what kind of fanfiction you like, so it's not too taxing. (also, if you are part of other fan groups, it would be amazing if you share this. This survey isn't specific to any one fandom)

[lunastnquarterly]

Bringing Back Issues (Zine Culture)

Bringing Back Issues (Zine Culture)

Fan-made zines have been made and distributed since some of the first inceptions of fandom culture. In a way, zine culture is fandom  culture, and it’s almost impossible to separate zines like Spockanalia from Star Trek itself. Zines were the place where fans could show off and explore the parts of media they loved and wanted to see more of. While modern zines have roots in the commonplace books…

View On WordPress

[lunastnquarterly]

A Fandom History Primer (Part II)

A Fandom History Primer (Part II)

(This is the second of a two-part series on fandom. Read the first part here.) Star Trek launched fandom into the public spotlight once again. Fan conventions, slash zines, articles, meta, analysis, and praise — all of this came into the collective lexicon of the fan in the late ’60s. The very first all-Star Trek fanzine was launched and written in 1968, named the Spokanalia. Conventions were…

View On WordPress

[lunastnquarterly]

When Your Spec Lit is Academic

When Your Spec Lit is Academic

When I was in undgrad, speculative fiction bled into my literature courses. What I mean is, in my literature courses we read literary fiction and I wrote about speculative fiction. In a Literary Theory course, we were told we could write our final paper on anything. So I chose Sarah Monette’s Doctrine of Labyrinths series (unsurprising, if you know my love and adoration for these books). In a…

View On WordPress

[keewritesathesis]

Stories of Significance: The Process and Practices of Sense-Making in the Sherlock Fan Community

Last year I wrote my Master thesis in anthropology on Sherlock fans and their (our) evolving interpretation of the text. It occurs to me it might be prudent to share the results with any interested parties. You can read it here, if you are so inclined.

Thanks to all my lovely informants.  You guys were the most generous, helpful and clever bunch of fans I could ever have hoped for. <3

Abstract:

Building on professor of psychology Kenneth Pargament‘s claim that people actively seek to establish a sense of significance and strive to minimize its loss, this study argues that fans of fictional  works  continually  create  a  (subjectively seemingly)  coherent  interpretation  of  the source  text  that  both  builds  upon and  supports  meaningful  themes  and  phenomena  found  in the  text.  This, in turn,  generates  a subjective  (though  often  communally  negotiated)  sense  of significance. However, such meaningful/meaning-creating interpretations – and thus the sense of significance generated by them – are constantly running the risk of being disturbed by new information or  perspectives  that  contradict them. This  risk  is  particularly  high  when  the source  text  is  still  evolving,  as  in the  case  of a  current book  series  or  TV-show,  which necessitates an on-going  process of interpretation and coping.  In this thesis I examine how a sense  of  significance  is formed  and maintained  by  fans  of  an  evolving  text by  studying  the various interpretative strategies employed by fans of the BBC  TV series Sherlock. Combining in-depth  interviews with  data  from  a three-month  participant  observation of  fan  interactions primarily but not exclusively on the social network platform site Tumblr, this study aims both to   deepen  the  understanding  of  some  of  the  psychological  mechanisms   behind  the  creation, negotiation and transformation of meaning, and to examine its expressions in a specific case. 

Keywords: coping theory, production of meaning, virtual anthropology, sherlock, tumblr, fan studies, fan psychology