Journal Committee Announced

[femmequixotic]

We'd like to announce our new Journal Committee, whose function is the launching of an international, blind peer-reviewed journal published online twice a year by the OTW. The journal will be committed to publishing high-quality academic research as a way to document and analyze fan histories, cultures, and artifacts. Its first issue is slated for publication in September 2008.

Journal Committee:
Chair: Karen Hellekson
Kristina Busse
Cynthia W. Walker
Deborah Kaplan
Alexis Lothian
Cole J. Banning
Julie Levin Russo

The journal has been named Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC). The committee is in the process of appointing scholars to the journal's advisory and review boards. They plan to have a call for papers by February 2008.

Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at MIT, author of such works as Textual Poachers; Fans, Gamers and Bloggers; and Convergence Culture and member of TWC’s advisory board, says:

The field of Fan Studies has come of age: there are dozens of gifted young scholars from a range of different disciplines doing groundbreaking work in the field at the moment, each bringing their own distinctive theoretical and methodological perspectives to the topic, each connecting the study of fans to larger debates surrounding media and society. The time is ripe for a journal which will bring all of these researchers together and provide them with an intellectual home. And ideally that journal will come bottom up—from the community of fans and fan scholars. Given this context, Transformative Works and Cultures is a dream come true—an exciting chance to consolidate this field and at the same time, bridge the gap between fans and fan scholars.

TWC will publish articles about transformative works and related areas, including fan fiction, fan vids, fan communities, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and machinima. The journal invites a variety of critical approaches and encourages authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hyperlinked articles, or other forms that test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC’s aim is twofold: to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community, and to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics.

TWC plans a mix of traditional academic articles and shorter contributions in a Symposium section. We hope to solicit contributions from leading figures in the field, emerging scholars from a variety of disciplines, and theoretical-minded fans. Like OTW, TWC has an expanded notion of fair use. The publication permits the duplication of stills, and the journal will include the ability to embed video clips. TWC will be copyrighted under a Creative Commons license.

ETA: From the Journal Committee... The journal accepts four types of contributions: theory, practice, Symposium, and reviews. Theory is comprised of full-length research essays that are 6,000–9,000 words long. Essays in this section propose novel ideas that are placed within a coherent theoretical framework and add something new to the field.

Practice is comprised of 3,000–6,000 words long essays that apply a specific theory to a community; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate practice to theory within a theoretical framework. Theory and Practice essays are blind peer-reviewed by up to three reviewers, who are scholars in media studies, fan studies, English, communication, and related fields.

Symposium is named in homage to the fan-based collection of meta essays and in its spirit collects collects short, thematically contained essays. These 1,500-word essays provide insight into current events on any topic.

Reviews are of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies and include a description of the item's content, an evaluation of its importance in a larger context, and an assessment of the likely audience. Symposium essays and reviews will be editorially reviewed.

---femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

Comments

Re: Amusing: Plus ca change ... .

[khellekson.livejournal.com]

I assume, however, that the collective and very bright minds in OTW's 'management' have noted that yes, even such a small (?!) thing as the journal's comment function can be as transformative as the work OTW supports, or can simply default into the structures of control that already exist to suppress fandom, feminism, and other social movements for new forms of col/laboration.

I love your feminism/fandom recasting!

I don't really know what to do about the structures of control. The journal will be less fannish and more academic, because we want the journal to be authoritative and important. It will be geared to that acafan-meta intersect mostly. But we want to be sure we have timely, accessible, shorter content too. So we're trying to have a little something for everybody thinky.

I haven't experimented much yet with the software's commenting feature, but we need the software for a bunch of things other than commenting, like tracking MSS through peer review and keeping a database of subscribers so they can RSS feed the articles. We need a lot of functionality, and we have to make compromises while keeping within our #1 priority, which is open access and freedom of exchange of information. I have no idea if commenting is going to be such a compromise. I hope not.

I also hope that the people who want to discuss the articles will do it within the purview of the journal and its software, to keep it all together (TEXT and COROLLARY permanently linked, so the COROLLARY becomes part of a DIALOGUE). LJ is so easy, so comfortable, and we all know so well how to handle it—I personally get irritated at, say, WordPress or Blogger because they are so stupid. But I'd hate to see discussion moved elsewhere simply because the software is annoying. Work with us here!

Of course, we're not live yet, and so who knows how it will all play out? I'm just really excited that people are excited. How bad is it that we had to start a new journal because fan studies is so inadequately represented in media studies outlets? What is that even about??

There's a niche that we need to fill, and we want to do it right.