FSNNA24 will feature four plenary roundtable sessions, each curated by a specially invited conference “headliner.” The first MONSTER OF FAN STUDIES is Rukmini Pande, Associate Professor of Literary Studies and Writing at O.P. Jindal Global University. She is the author of Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race and the editor of Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices. Also featuring Poe Johnson, Stitchmediamix, Yvonne Gonzales and CedarBough Saeji, Dr. Pande’s Thursday roundtable session is entitled, Is a Critical Fan Studies Possible?
Fan studies as a discipline has gone through a significant amount of soul searching in the last five years, spurred by various events both within and outside the discipline as well as fandoms. Most notably, there has been a strong call to reckon with the field’s institutional whiteness, as well as its historical focus on the Global North. As a result, there have been many exhortations for scholars to rethink their methods, theoretical frameworks, and baseline assumptions about fandom spaces. Following in the tradition of the “critical turn” of many scholarly disciplines this panel asks, is a Critical Fan Studies possible?
Some questions that the panellists will consider are: What are the continuing challenges involved in producing scholarship that pushes against the established focus of the field with regard to language, location, participant identity, etc? Are there specific difficulties faced by scholars who engage with fandom in critical ways in increasingly polarised times? Even as fandoms themselves move ever more fluidly across geo-political borders, are fandom scholars adequately equipped to understand issues of intercultural/intracultural complexity, without falling back into relativism? Further, what institutional difficulties are faced by scholars in marginal positions in academia, be it as independent scholars, graduate students, early career researchers, those located outside the Global North, or indeed those that fall into multiple categories at once? How is the discipline of fan studies interfacing with the increasingly precarious position of many of its scholars within and outside academic institutions? These are, of course, starting points and the discussants will bring their own ideas to nuance them further.
Check back next Thursday for the next roundtable reveal!