2024/10/15: The conference program has been updated!

This year’s conference program is now available for download! Check out the full schedule, including plenary sessions, roundtables, and social events, as well as important information on our conference policies.

For ease of reading, there are two versions available:

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All month we’ve been unveiling the special, plenary roundtables for our 2024 conference. Our fourth and final plenary session will be True Crime and Fan Studies, featuring Bethan Jones, Megan Hoffman, and Naomi Barnes and curated by none other than Monster of Fan Studies Judith Fathallah!

Fandom and fannish engagement around true crime media is currently understudied. Part of this neglect may stem from discomfort with the topic and attempts to avoid the stigma associated with the pathologized fandom of criminals, notably serial killers, into which this engagement can shade. But fan studies as a field should not overlook forms of fandom that discomfort and challenge us as researchers and as consumers of popular media. The current resurgence of the true crime in forms spanning amateur podcasts to high-budget Netflix specials indicates that the time is right for us to consider such questions as:

• What forms of fannish engagement are taking place around true crime?
•  What makes this engagement fannish?
• What are the implications of such phenomena for fan studies?
• What are the implications for media industries?

The panel is convened by Dr. Judith Fathallah, author of Killer Fandom: Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer (mediastudies.press 2023). Judith has also published on serial killer fanfiction, gatekeeping in true crime communities, and the curation/collection of artefacts associated with true crime, known as murderabilia. The panel features Dr. Bethan Jones, co-editor of Participatory Culture Wars: Controversy, Conflict and Complicity in Fandom (University of Iowa Press, 2025) and author of work on true crime, forensic fandom and “dark” fandom; Dr. Megan Hoffman, co-editor of the forthcoming collection #TrueCrime: Digital Culture, Ethics and True Crime Audiences and author of Gender and Representation in British “Golden Age” Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2016), among other work on post-#MeToo true crime, true crime hybrid YouTube videos and true crime activism on TikTok; and Naomie Barnes, whose work has explored the tensions involved in identifying as a “fan” of true crime content, such as in “Killer Folklore: Identity Issues in the True Crime Community” (Ethnologies 41, no 1: 153–72).

Dr. Fathallah’s true crime roundtable will be held on Sunday, Oct. 20.

We’ll be releasing the full conference program soon!

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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!

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All month long, we’re unveiling the FSNNA24 headliners and the special plenary roundtables they’ve curated. On Friday, Oct. 18, we are pleased to welcome the voices behind the Fansplaining podcast, Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel, for a discussion on Studying Fans Outside the Academy.

Fansplaining—the podcast by, for, and about fandom—put out biweekly episodes from 2015 to this past spring (currently on hiatus!). Co-hosts Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel met on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2015; Klink was working in Hollywood, explaining fans to networks and studios, while Elizabeth was covering fan culture as a journalist at a moment when fans had been thrust into a mainstream spotlight. The podcast was meant to talk across these intersections: to industry-side professionals, to members of the media, and from within and about fandom. It also was meant to talk between fan studies practitioners and fans: while both Klink and Minkel had studied fandom at the graduate level, neither were pursuing an academic career, and the podcast was an opportunity to follow the continuing trends of fan studies, and highlight emerging voices in the field. 

Over the course of the podcast’s near-decade-long run, Fansplaining hosted dozens of academic guests from fan studies and beyond—but also welcomed a large range of guests who study fandom outside the academy. These conversations revealed different framings and definitions of fans and fan behaviors, and different goals and outcomes for analyzing fandom. From Hollywood, those perspectives came from people like Everybody At Once’s Kenyatta Cheese or screenwriter Javier Grillo-Marxuach; from the media, journalists like Aja Romano, Keidra Chaney, Stitch, or Gavia Baker-Whitelaw; and from fandom itself, the stats work of DestinationToast, or Tiffo from the Renegade fanbinding collective, or the hundreds of listeners of different ages, backgrounds, and corners of fandom who wrote in with smart, nuanced perspectives on the ever-shifting dynamics of fan culture.

This panel will draw on the contributions of Fansplaining’s many guests to look at those different framings. What are the metrics and ethical boundaries for fandom analysis in the entertainment industry? How do fan-journalists balance fandom and non-fandom audiences? When fans turn inward, what questions are they asking about fannishness—and how are their studies of fandom inherently fanworks themselves? And how can people who study fandom outside the academy work better with those who study fandom within it? 

Check back next Thursday, Aug. 22 for our next MONSTER OF FANDOM!

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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!

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One of the many highlights of our annual conference is the special guest speakers we’ve been able to spotlight over the years.

This year, in lieu of a traditional keynote lecture, we’ve invited four leading voices in fan studies to each curate a plenary session. Our headlining “Monsters of Fan Studies” were given carte blanche to decide what conversation they wanted to have and who they wanted to be in conversation with.

Each Thursday in August, we’ll be revealing another one of these special plenary sessions, so keep checking back!

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