We’ve been unveiling our special plenary roundtables for the 2024 conference all August. This week, we’re pleased to announce we will be joined by one of the OG Monsters of Fan Studies: Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, Education, and East Asian Language and Cultures at the University of Southern California and author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (among many, many contributions to fan studies, cultural studies, and new media studies). Henry will be in conversation with his USC colleague Robert V. Kozinets, Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic PR and Business Communication. Their roundtable – Where Cultural Studies Meets Consumer Culture Research – will draw on themes emerging in their forthcoming series of co-authored books, Frames of Fandom.
Fandom Studies has its roots in cultural studies, tends to keep anyone in the business school at arm’s length, and wants to separate fans from consumers at all costs. Yet consumer culture research represents an alternative research tradition, started at more or less the same time, deploying some of the same foundational texts and methods, asking some of the same questions, but representing an alternative body of literature on fandom and participatory culture. In this public conversation, we will consider the potential and consequences of breaking down the walls by focusing on some core questions such as:
- Do we have a shared understanding of what a fan is and how we might define the term?
- Should we study fans as individuals or collectives?
- Do the distinctions between fan and consumer, fandom and fanship really work for the majority of cases?
- What models of consumer and consumption might productively guide our work?
- What might be the relationship between theoretical work in the academy and applied work beyond, including consulting with industry?
- Which scholars in each tradition lay the foundations for the work we do now?
Fandom scholars Henry Jenkins (Fandom Studies) and Robert Kozinets (Consumer Culture Research) delve into these and many other questions in their new book series, Frames of Fandom. This 14 book series represents a comprehensive exploration of fandom, seeking to unpack the multifaceted reasons why fandom matters in contemporary culture. Through their collaboration, Jenkins and Kozinets aim to advance fan theory by merging insights from cultural studies and consumer culture research, bringing together decades of insights and observations. The books both look backwards to sum up our trajectories as fields and looks forward to new directions for research and scholarship. By the time this conference happens, we anticipate some of the first books will already be available online and so we hope to use this time to join a conversation already in process.
Come back next week for the fourth and final plenary roundtable!