Call for Participation: Undergraduate Showcase

Fan Studies Network North America Conference 2025 (virtual)

October 26, 2025

Fandom REPUTATION: Influence, Power, and Capital

For the first time in FSNNA conference history, we are offering an Undergraduate Showcase, highlighting the efforts of undergraduate students across disciplines who have undertaken fan studies work both in and out of the classroom.

Fandom, the community or individual practice of being a fan, is something many of us participate in every day–from our fervent support of a sports team (and hatred of its rivals) to our speculation with friends of what will happen next in our favorite show, to the video game soundtracks we listen to in our rooms. 

When fan studies kicked off, fandom was a more niche activity whose practices – and even existence – still had to be explained to general readership. But today, fandom is a widely recognized phenomenon across popular culture and scholarship.

As our virtual conference enters its seventh year, FSNNA invites undergraduates to submit proposals about the research they’ve done in fan studies.

Some potential topics we hope to see submissions about include (but are not limited to!):

• What is fandom to you? Is it in the ways you participate, the people you engage with, the representation you seek? Is it fun? Is it stressful? 
• What reputations do fandoms hold? Has there ever been a community you know not to engage with because of their reputation? What about communities you found welcoming to both new and old fans?
• What impact does representation have in fandom?
• How has fandom changed during/since COVID lockdowns?
• Where do you find fandom?
• What power/influence does fandom have?

How you approach and seek to respond to these questions can take many shapes. Your project might be more theoretical and broadly applicable to fandom as a phenomenon, or it might take up case studies of specific fandoms to explore in greater detail. 

[NOTE: While we hope undergrads can use their experiences to shape their projects, these must be primarily research/argument based projects and not solely personal reflections.]

 Format of the 2025 Conference

FSNNA allows undergraduate researchers to submit under two potential options:

• Participants will be grouped into roundtables for a live conversation based on overlapping fandoms, research methods, or issues. Each roundtable participant will have an opportunity to introduce themselves and their work for 5–7 minutes, followed by some moderated discussion and Q&A with the audience.
• Participants will also prepare a digital poster summarizing their research contribution. More specific guidelines about poster formats will be available soon! Posters will be available asynchronously throughout the conference in our Discord server, where attendees can ask questions and share feedback.

Further, we are committed to mentoring and fostering research with undergraduate participants and will host optional workshops closer to the date to offer feedback, support, and structure. 

Submissions for the Undergraduate Showcase are due by Friday, May 16. SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MONDAY, MAY 19.

Submission Details

Ready to submit your work for FSNNA 2025? Here’s what the application form will ask for: 

• An abstract of ~200 words (include a clear explanation of your research project)
• A bibliography of 1-2 references
• A bio of yourself (~50 words)

We’ve also prepared a document about writing an abstract: check it out HERE

Get Ready for the 2025 Conference! 

Thank you for reading this call for papers. We’re excited to consider your work for the 2025 FSNNA conference!

Still have a question? Please feel free to contact us at fsnna.conference@gmail.com.

Ready to submit your work? Visit our submission form HERE

(Or if the link above doesn’t work, copy and paste this into your browser: https://forms.gle/jsf5ySX1ncHKnZq46)

The post NEW – Undergraduate CFP for FSNNA 2025! appeared first on Fan Studies Network North America.

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: 

1. the main question or point of curiosity driving your research;
2.  the primary source(s) you have used/anticipate using, whether as case studies or as the primary focus of your paper; 
3. the theoretical frameworks and methodologies you use to answer it;
4. a preview of the arguments you make or anticipate making, including your sense of the significance of those claims; and 
5. 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]

The post Guidelines & FAQ for FSNNA Abstracts appeared first on Fan Studies Network North America.

Call for Participation

Fan Studies Network North America Conference 2025 (virtual)

October 23-26, 2025

REPUTATION: Influence, Power, and Capital

FSNNA Annual Conference 2025

When fan studies first emerged as an undisciplined discipline, fandom was more of a niche activity whose practices (and even existence) still had to be explained to a general readership. Today though, fandom is a widely recognized phenomenon, a frame of reference for popular culture, and a desirable market demographic for new cultural products like music, films, and games. These broader cultural shifts are often mirrored within fandom itself: experienced fans observe that multifandom peers move from interest to interest faster, while new fans might enter fandom(s) without any knowledge of community norms. 

As participation in fandom has broadened, changing fan experiences and fan cultures, many reckon with questions about what it means to be in fandom and to be a fan today. While most seem to embrace and accept the idea that fandom can be fun, there’s a shared sense that it is also so much more. But what does that entail? Is fandom a form of activism? Slacktivism? Representation? Social justice work? Moral stance? Popularity contest? Some combination thereof?

As we consider the shifting understandings and reputations of fandom(s), fan studies has much to offer. Who holds the most influence? Who wields what kinds of power? How do social, subcultural, and financial capital intersect with grassroots activity and forms of production? And how does all of this change fandom in turn? 

As this conference enters its eighth year, FSNNA invites proposals exploring these avenues into fandom and fan studies. We are especially interested in work that considers how fan communities, activities, and works interact or engage with the reputation of fandom itself – for better, for worse, or for both. 

Submissions for the 2025 FSNNA Conference

Fan Studies Network North America (FSNNA) warmly welcomes submissions from early career researchers, graduate students, and independent scholars, as well as established scholars. (This year, we’re also offering a track specifically for undergraduate students: check out the parallel cfp HERE!) Contributions are welcomed from across disciplines, not just fan studies: we are interested in work from media studies, the humanities, the social sciences, library science, and more.

Some topics that we hope to see submissions for include (but are not limited to!):

• Capital and fandom participation: financial/economic capital, social capital, cultural capital, etc. 
• Influence in fandom: parasocial relationships, BNFs, microcelebrities, 
• Power in fandom: politics, policing, gatekeeping; who speaks, creates, listens, learns  
• Having a platform: platform migration, features, community roles, moderation
• Intersectional identities: fans, fan-creators, performers, authors, actors
• Antagonisms and Fandom: the changing language and nature of “anti-fandom” 
• Fandom during crisis: in continuing “post-Covid” era, during rise of global fascism, during online platform precarity
• Internal and external perceptions of fandom: media representations, stigmatization, celebration, misinformation
  
  

This work may focus on specific media texts (e.g., film, television, print texts/series, games, video streaming, etc.) or other fan-objects (e.g., sports, music, celebrity culture, etc.). Alternatively, it may consider specific national or regional contexts, theoretical approaches to studying fandom, investigations of fanwork genres or fan practices, and more.

Format of the 2025 Conference

FSNNA 2025 is once again a discussion-focused online conference with accessibility, interdisciplinarity, and global participation at its heart. However, based on participant feedback from previous years, we are moving towards a format that allows for longer conference presentations of roughly 10-15 minutes apiece. Essentially, you can choose one of two options. 

1. Presentation Track (Roundtable Talk + Poster)

Participants on the presentation track will be grouped into roundtables based on overlapping objects, approaches, methods, or themes. Each presenter will have an opportunity to introduce themselves and explore their work for 10-15 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion and Q&A with the audience.

Participants will also prepare a digital poster summarizing their research contribution. (More specific guidelines about poster formats will be available after submissions are evaluated.)

2. Poster Track (Poster ONLY) 

Participants on the poster track will prepare a digital poster summarizing their research contribution. They will not be assigned to a roundtable or introduce their work during a talk. 

All posters from both tracks will be available asynchronously throughout the conference in our Discord server, where attendees can post questions and share feedback.

PLEASE NOTE: As part of your application, you will be asked to stipulate which track you are applying for – presentations or poster only. Likewise, once a submission is accepted, the participation format cannot be changed (i.e., you cannot move from poster only to presentation, or vice versa).  

As in past years, we also welcome the submission of pre-constituted roundtables, which are a group of 3-5 talks that are already organized around a shared topic, text, and/or method. Please note, however, that participants in a pre-constituted roundtable must still contribute posters.

Submissions are due by Friday, May 16.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MONDAY, MAY 19.

Submission Details

Ready to submit your work for FSNNA 2025? Here’s what the application form will ask for: 

• An abstract of ~300 words (include a clear explanation of your research, methods, and the project’s relevance to fan studies and fan studies scholars)
• 3-5 keywords about your poster (may include topics, texts, theories, methods, etc.)
• A bibliography of 3–5 references
• A biographical statement (~50 words)

Get Ready for the 2025 Conference!

We’re excited to consider your work for the 2025 FSNNA conference! We also encourage you to check out a new offering this year: a parallel cfp for undergraduates interested in presenting their fan studies work at FSNNA.

Still have a question? Please feel free to contact us at fsnna.conference@gmail.com.

Ready to submit your work? Visit our submission form HERE

(Or if the link above doesn’t work, copy and paste this into your browser: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdtiTvsJS6_dIOdAGyfjeVM-_i7QGwOhi3ICmLHfWfRYRrlGA/viewform?usp=sharing)

The post Get Ready – CFP for FSNNA 2025! appeared first on Fan Studies Network North America.

Fan Studies Network North America (FSNNA) is excited to announce that we are seeking new members of our organizing committee!

FSNNA held its first conference in October 2018 to gather fan studies scholars in one place to meet, share new research, and promote the study of fanworks and fan cultures. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we ran successful online conferences with a focus on accessibility and community. Since then, we have continued implementing new online conference formats that allow us to bring together fan studies scholars from North America and around the world every year. 

Continuing a process of organizational renewal, we are actively recruiting volunteers willing to work on a North American timezone who will bring fresh perspectives and ideas to the organization, expand the interdisciplinary breadth of our team, and make a commitment to its continued success. 

Experience and knowledge in one or more of the following areas is a plus: 

• Accessibility (especially in online settings)
• Graphic design
• Finance (especially in connection with not-for-profit status)
• Vidding, vid shows
• Newer social media platforms, creating newsletters and/or similar outreach communication 

We welcome and encourage students, independent scholars, and members of underrepresented communities to apply. 

Terms begin in February 2025.

FSNNA Conference Committee Responsibilities and Expectations

1. Commitment to Mission – serve to promote the development and maintenance of FSNNA as a community by organizing and publicizing its events, hosting conferences or other special events, generating new initiatives, and/or serving as a mentor for its community members
2. Conference Participation – commit to attending FSNNA’s annual conference during your term 
3. Virtual Meeting Participation – commit to participating in monthly virtual meetings 
4. Communication and Online Participation – communicate professionally with other committee members and the FSNNA community; keep in contact with the committee asynchronously via email and/or Discord to coordinate tasks in between meetings; help organize, promote, and/or attend virtual events hosted by FSNNA
5. Decision-making – collaboratively shape the annual conference and the future of FSNNA as an organization
6. Peer Review – read and evaluate proposals for FSNNA conferences in a timely fashion
7. Length of Service – commit to serving a 2-year term, with the possibility of renewal

Application Process

Please answer the following questions in writing (answers can be up to 150 words each) 

1. How does fan studies, as a discipline, inform your professional life? (For example, do you teach, write, research, create, and/or do service in the field?)
2. What has been your experience thus far with FSNNA, either as a conference attendee, a participant in a virtual event, or in some other form?
3. What skills, ideas, and aptitudes would you bring to the board? What aspects of the conference are you most interested in helping with?

Please also attach a 100-word bio.

Submit applications by January 31, 2025 to: <fsnna.conference@gmail.com>. Please put “Committee Application” in the subject line.

Anyone wishing to ask questions or discuss the responsibilities of serving on the board is welcome to contact: fsnna.conference@gmail.com 

New committee members will be announced by mid February. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

These policies and guidelines were inspired by and adapted from various sources, including Console-ing Passions.

The post Call for FSNNA Committee Members! appeared first on Fan Studies Network North America.