What is an abstract? What should go into it?
In academic terms, an abstract is a short overview/blurb which tells the reader what to expect from your work. When applying to conferences, an abstract should provide a broad overview of the specific project you hope to present, including:
- the main question or point of curiosity driving your research;
- the primary source(s) you have used/anticipate using, whether as case studies or as the primary focus of your paper;
- the theoretical frameworks and methodologies you use to answer it;
- a preview of the arguments you make or anticipate making, including your sense of the significance of those claims; and
- a gesture toward the larger scholarly dialogue in which you’re intervening. (For FSNNA, we ask for a short bibliography/reference list that will help a lot with this step!)
For a conference with a theme like FSNNA, it can be helpful to think about linking your work clearly and explicitly to some aspect of the theme. Sometimes the connection may seem obvious, but at other times, thinking about the keywords and questions from the original call for papers (CFP) can help you to more clearly identify how your paper resonates with our theme.
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Q: Where will my abstract go post-submission? Who reads it, and how will it be assessed?
A: To understand the purpose of an abstract, it will be helpful to first explain our process.
When you submit your application to FSNNA, the materials will all go to the Organizing Committee, a group of fan studies scholars whose interests and areas of expertise span a wide variety of home disciplines, methods, and areas of study. We read through all of the abstracts and look for promising work that seems to fit in well with the year’s conference theme.
A good abstract will make clear not only the suitability of your work for this conference, but also the level of thought and care that has gone into your work. It’s important to address both fit and intellectual promise. A really smart, interesting project is great, but we need to understand why FSNNA is the right home for that work! At other times, it’s clear that someone is very interested in FSNNA, but the project is in such an early stage of development that it isn’t clear to us what kinds of arguments or scholarly interventions it will make. A successful abstract does both!
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Q: What kinds of things, if any, should I avoid in an abstract?
A: There aren’t necessarily hard and fast rules, but in general, it’s helpful to think about the abstract as a meta-level summary of your project. While certain kinds of details are helpful to provide to clarify the scope of your arguments (e.g., are you looking at one specific fandom or a particular element of a fandom to make an argument about that fandom, or are you putting forward case studies that you consider representative of some larger phenomenon to make a more generalizable argument, flagging its potential limitations?), you don’t need to walk us through the minutiae of your arguments.
Similarly, you’ll want to make sure your own voice and argument come through in your abstract, rather than having it read like a literature review of existing scholarship. The bibliography will give you a chance to name your scholarly interlocutors, so we’ll be able to see and intuit how your project connects to the larger field. What’s brand new to us is your work, so tell us all about it!
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Q: Are there limits on the kinds of projects we can do?
A: For the purposes of FSNNA, we’re looking for research-based work. As we note on the CFP, personal experiences can often be a great starting point, and it may well be that your own observations are what lead to that initial research question, but the project needs to expand beyond the personal to the scholarly for the conference. This requirement helps to create a basis for community dialogue among participants and attendees. Here, scholarship from the field of fan studies forms a kind of shared language that helps work about a wide array of sometimes unfamiliar fandoms, fan spaces, and fan practices to become accessible to a variety of audiences.
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Thanks for reading! Below are some sample abstracts to show what we mean by all this.
Sample Abstracts
Quarantine Fic and Ambivalent Intimacies
As countries across the world entered lockdown in 2020 in the face of a global pandemic, more and more people moved online as a balm for the sense of isolation, anxiety, and fear they were feeling. Fandoms, already deeply embedded in online spaces, offered not only an escape into fictional worlds, but also a model for forms of community and intimacy that were not reliant upon in-person networks. This paper considers those fic writers who brought their experiences of digitally mediated intimacy into their fan works. Specifically, I turn to a selection of fanfiction written, posted, and set during the pandemic to consider how authors used their favorite characters and ships to imagine new forms of intimate and erotic sociality under pandemic conditions. Even though these works frequently culminate in in-person meetings, the typical romance arc is disrupted under the “new normal” of the pandemic, shifting the temporal ordering of the usual story beats and forcing eroticism into new and unexpected places. Yet these fan works are also deeply ambivalent; despite being suffused with all the anxiety and existential dread that Covid-19 brought with it, they offer tendrils of hope to their characters and readers alike. In fics, Zoom remains clunky and awkward, but it’s also a platform for flirting and dates. Six feet becomes a border line to flirt with and possibly transgress. The removal of masks is a risk and a revelation in one. Two weeks of strict quarantine carries both fear and hope—a kind of protracted foreplay under conditions of exposure. Again and again, characters find ways to derive pleasure and satisfaction from their interactions, and readers, in turn, find solace (as well as pleasure and satisfaction) in witnessing it individually and as a readerly community.
[From Emily Coccia, FSNNA 2022: Inside Voices]
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Nice For What? A Critical Analysis of Drake, Millennial Feminism and the Negotiation of ‘Wokeness’ in Female Hip-Hop Fandom
As fourth-wave feminism proliferates, audiences are negotiating and performing their socio-political identities, beliefs and personas in an online realm. For those who identify both as feminists and hip-hop fans — a genre rapidly becoming the world’s most popular style of music — these chosen identities hold the potential for internal conflict. Often, such fans develop a type of ‘moral dissonance’, ‘poaching’ the elements of hip-hop fandom that most appeal while disregarding more disturbing elements. By examining the work and public presentation of problematic rapper Drake, this case-study research paper reflects upon in-depth interview data to explore how millennial female hip-hop audiences adopt varying forms of moral dissonance when consuming contemporary hip-hop. In exploring Drake’s representations of ‘emotional’ masculinity and romantic vulnerability, I consider the way that fans perceive an artist who both challenges and upholds forms of normative gender politics, picking and choosing his modes of allyship. As such, this paper explores the concept of performative feminism and supposed ‘wokeness’ as both an artist marketing tool and a fan coping mechanism, questioning the extent to which fans can reconcile their socio-political beliefs with their listening habits in a cancel culture context.
[From Jenessa Williams, FSNNA 2020]