Ajnabieh - The Foreigner

Posted by Henry Jenkins

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/6/29/frames-of-fandom-an-interview-on-fandom-as-audience-part-one

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

The books (esp. book 1) straddle autobiography and autoethnography. In your minds, is there a separation between the two (and does there need to be?) and how does your own personal background affect the books?

Henry: It would be hard to exclude the autoethnographic/autobiographical voice from a book on the field of fandom studies. As we discuss in Fandom as Subculture (not yet published), the aca-fan stance has been a founding and defining trait of fandom studies. We pay tribute there to the work of Angela McRobbie, whose influence I have come to see as absolutely foundational to my own work in Textual Poachers. In her “Settling Accounts” essay, she calls out the male researchers at Birmingham who were writing about various British subcultures without acknowledging their own involvement with them. She advocated a feminist standpoint epistemology as the intellectually honest way to approach such terrain. I would say the passages in the books where we write about our experiences as fans are a fulfillment of those principles.

I have often been reluctant to go full autoethnography in the past when writing about, say, female fan fiction writers in Textual Poachers, for fear that as a male scholar I would be taking up too much space or redirecting attention away from the feminist/feminine project of fan fiction. But, here, I can tap my own participation in, say, the monster culture of the 1960s as we examine the ways it deployed a range of domestic technologies and practices – from monster models to my mother’s eyeshadow, which I appropriated for monster make-up, to a super-8 camera or a Disney record of haunted house sounds or the photocopier from my dad’s company – to encourage and enable new forms of participatory culture.

Our use of the first-person is also a challenge to the anonymous voice with which most textbooks are written and the reason why such “nonhuman” prose becomes deadly to read. We often use first person to call attention to the forms of association between people that shape our scholarship, seeing scholarship as emerging through conversations, debates, and even confrontations between human beings. This is something I never got from a textbook: understanding here who our mentors were, who our students were, who our collaborators are, to help readers grasp the collaborative nature of scholarship. We don’t like the mind/body split implied when we focus exclusively on ideas without acknowledging the people behind them. 

Rob: There is a distinction between autobiography and autoethnography, and it’s a meaningful one, although perhaps it is not always a hard and fast boundary. We certainly do straddle it in Defining Fandom and across the series, and we do that very intentionally. Autobiography, traditionally, is about self-expression and narrative coherence, where the telling of a life, or a slice of it, foregrounds the personal and the idiosyncratic because it is interesting and entertaining in itself. Autoethnography, on the other hand, takes that personal slice and uses it for a purpose–it refracts it through conceptual lenses and asks, “What does this story help us understand about culture, media, society, technology or something else? What frameworks does it offer to us, which does it challenge, which does it expand upon?” 

Our series, and especially the first book, mobilizes autobiography in the service of autoethnography. So we are not just telling stories about our youthful engagements with Batman, Gilligan’s Island, or Pogo comics because we think they might be charming tales or nostalgic trips down memory lane (which, sometimes, they might be). We're using them to get at some of the finer conceptual points of fandom, to calibrate, through the lens of our own experiences, its meaning across personal, cultural, commercial, sacred, and other territories. 

This requires a kind of careful attunement. We are aware that who we are—our backgrounds, identities, affiliations, fascinations, values, emotional repertoires, and much more—shapes how we understand fandom, and even what aspects of fandom we consider meaningful. But rather than bracketing that influence, we try to make it central. Positionality in qualitative research doesn’t eliminate subjectivity (that is inevitable in all research) but it does seek to make it visible so that we can make it count in our interpretations. It acknowledges that who we are shapes what we see, how we interpret, what we choose to write down and leave out. Like I tell my students when I teach qualitative research methods, positionality isn’t a bug: it’s a feature of cultural inquiry. By placing our subjectivities in full view, we treat them not as something which distorts or “biases” our perspectives but as instruments that can be adjusted for, cross-checked, and interpreted in light of their specific strengths and limitations–something we are doing constantly behind the scenes as we write this book series and try to adjust for our mutual blind spots. 

That said, although we have some key similarities, we don't speak from a single unified voice. Instead, we use our two voices to emphasize the divergences between us—our different relationships to religion, for example, or to particular genres (like sports, videogames, and music), or even to what counts as “serious” academic work. These differences aren’t obstacles to understanding; they actually are our understanding. We are modeling through our voices and their perspectives what it looks like to build theory in dialogue, across perspectives, with attention to friction and resonance.

That’s also why our approach embraces a diversity of fan practices, motivations, and intensities, just as we show our own attachments as uneven, sometimes ambivalent, and always transforming. The personal becomes meaningful when it is not only deeply felt but also when it is analytically situated as a formation we can use to ask better questions about how people form attachments, how meaning circulates, and how cultural structures shape affective life.

In this way, the autobiographical and the autoethnographic come together for us as complementary modalities. One provides raw material we enjoy writing and feel passionate about, while the other encourages us to be judicious and consider its processing into a more conceptual form of understanding. One brings the reader closeness and the specificity of particular examples; the other offers some degree of distance and a space for abstract reflection and considerations. Our books use both, not to collapse the personal into the scholarly, but mainly to explore how one can clarify and deepen the other. 

Can you discuss what impact you want the books to have? Why these topics for the fifteen books – how did you come up with those, why not others? They are semi-academic, semi-personal; they are short, but still longer than (say) the Fandom Primer series; they are built around the two of you, but tell stories of fandom across a spectrum of ideas. How should readers “place” the books in their categorization of books about fandom?

Rob: The impact we hope for is both intellectual and practical. We want these books to help reframe how fandom is understood and approached across multiple fields. That means deepening the conversations already happening in cultural and fan studies while also extending them into marketing, consumer research, and communication studies. We want the work we’ve each done separately to meet here, in dialogue. Not fused into some hybrid middle but sharpened through contrast and coordination. These books aim to do that work out in public, so to speak.

The initial goal was modest. We needed a textbook for our Fan(dom) Relations course at Annenberg. But very quickly, the project expanded. It became an intellectual voyage, one that it seems we could only take together. The idea of “frames” gave the whole notion structure as well as depth. Each book would examine a different paradigm for understanding fandom: Fandom as Audience. Fandom as Subculture. Fandom as Activism. The frames overlap, they build on one another, and sometimes they even conflict with one another. That’s okay; we actually wanted that level of complexity and depth. This wasn’t a master theory of fandom we were putting together. It was always meant to be a way for us to think about and across fandom’s many multiplicities.

Fandom today is multifarious—it is strong, great, and numerous. We think that, for better and worse, has moved from the margins to the center of culture, economics, identity, and politics. We wanted to write books that reflected that shift. These books had to find a balance between being focused, teachable, grounded in prior thinking, up-to-date, future forward, and conceptually rich. The books are short but not light. They are accessible but not simplistic. And yes, they’re personal. We appear in them because we believe that theory is better when it’s situated, when it has a voice, a history, and a perspective. 

The fifteen topics we chose reflect a kind of mapping exercise. They trace out the dominant ways scholars and practitioners have tried to understand fandom. Some frames, like Fandom as Participatory Culture or Fandom as Co-Creation, reflect well-established paradigms. Others, like Fandom as Desire, Fandom as Devotion, Fandom as Technoculture, or Fandom Relations, push into less charted territory that we think is important or will be. But every book tries to say something new. We are trying to use these books to develop a novel perspective, not just report on or overview existing ones. 

We’re aware that this series doesn’t fit easily into existing categories. It’s not quite academic publishing, but it’s also not a fan primer or how-to. These are conceptual books written by researchers, who are also fans, and by fans, who are also researchers. We’re building on decades of work that has argued—we think correctly—that fandom is not a deviation from everyday life, but a powerful and productive mode of engaging with culture. That argument has been made and what we do here is trace in a variety of new ways its implications for scholars, students, managers, and certainly for fans themselves. 

Where should these books be placed? Maybe in the space that doesn’t yet exist: a shelf for works that take fandom seriously as a global social form. That speak across disciplines. That engage theory without detaching from lived experience. That are willing to argue, to speculate, to build, and to risk being wrong. This, as I see it, is the Frames of Fandom series. 

Henry: Our initial discussions on the project centered on the high costs of textbooks and especially student frustration when only small portions of books are used. Most students have not yet learned to think of books as long-term investments not restricted to the benefits to be gained within the context of a particular class. But what if we could deconstruct the textbook, allowing people to, in effect, buy chapters a la carte, paying for only the portions they need? This question is what started us down the path towards self-publishing.

As we got into it, our idea of selling a book chapter by chapter evolved into the concept of short-ish books focused around a single frame but looking at that frame from a number of different angles, thus incorporating a broad array of different literatures.

So, the book on fandom as an audience largely foregrounds how the approach grew out of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, but it also considers some other parallel developments from consumer culture research, reader-response theory, or formalist film theory, each of which taught us things we needed to know to understand fandom. We hit the big names, but we also are reintroducing writers who have often dropped out of the conversation about fandom within fandom studies, considering for example Dorothy Hobson’s advocacy on behalf of the audiences for soaps or Martin Barker’s potential contributions as a critic of fandom studies methodology.  

When John Fiske asked me to write a book about fans in the early 1990s, he wanted a grand theory of fandom, which was not something I could write given the state of research on fans then. Textual Poachers became a study of a relatively discrete set of fans – the women who wrote and read fan fiction – though there are mixed signals throughout as it tends to universalize these fans or incorporate material from research on other kinds of media audiences. Many of the criticisms writers like Matt Hills directed against the book locate contradictions, uncertainties, inconsistencies, and hesitations that emerged from those competing ideas about the book’s project.  

Now, we are at a place where there is a massive body of scholarship on fans, and so we can begin to map this as a field while, at the same time, constantly pushing for a more inclusive understanding of what fandom studies might learn from other adjacent bodies of literature. Simply bringing consumer culture research and fandom studies together, which is at the heart of our initial vision, is a large contribution. Trying to keep up with the writings about fandom beyond the Anglo-American world, say, requires active searching and careful contextualization of the similarities and differences that emerge. Debates within fandom require us to go back to intellectual roots, to consider roads not taken, works not read or discussed, that might allow us to expand our research in productive new directions.  

Often as we are writing these books, we have in mind a reader being introduced to the field for the first time, someone in graduate school who is searching for where they might make their ‘original contribution.’ We are leaving many, many breadcrumbs here. But also, as a scholar in my, erm, late 60s, I am trying to trace my own journey through this space, consolidate ideas developed in scattered publications, weigh ideas to see how I might modify them if I were writing these works today, acknowledge old debates and heal old wounds. I have made many different contributions to fandom studies at different phases of my career, as has Robert, and these books function as introductions to our body of scholarship as well as maps of the field more broadly.

One challenge, though, is that these books are coming out on a rolling basis. The core of each book is drafted, so we can point to what topics will surface in what book, but we are also adding and reflecting as we prepare them for publication. About a third of the content or more comes at that stage. We are writing as if the whole project had been completed, including pointers to what’s in the books not yet published. We hope people will be patient since all of this apparatus will be helpful once the project is completed. I also worry that people will get upset because we did not include a person or topic in book 2 that was always planned to be discussed in book 10. So, bear with us…

More to come in Part Two.

Biographies

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/6/29/frames-of-fandom-an-interview-on-fandom-as-audience-part-one