Lovely post, thank you so much for your comments. Please accept my apologies for being so slow to reply!
1. Meta as a continuum - yes, precisely. I very much locate "academic essays" not as a qualitatively separate category, but rather as one of multiple traditions spiraling out from the text or semiotic resource that inspires them -- which in this context could be either the fandom source material, or fanfic, or other aspects of fandom and its work. Like fanfics and as you say, any LJ comment, scholarly works have their own semi-established conventions of style, tone, citation, etc.
I'm not sure I don't find them less formal and rigid than the macro-cat or l33t traditions of some fandom communities :-) (At least in academia, people will copy-edit your efforts before they're posted, rather than eagerly sharing it with fandom_report. Although perhaps academia needs something like that: imagine "summary_executions," for abstracts. ;-)
2. Recognition and reward are issues complicated by the fact that our society overwhelmingly focuses on monetary forms of measurement, which can barely grasp social values as existing, let alone figure out how to 'measure' them. I like your suggestion: let's see how "recognition" actually circulates in the economy of social capital, how it is translated into financial rewards, to what extent, and under what conditions. In most cases, I suspect that the translation is at a distance and hard to correlate. "Everyone knows her and likes her work!" is a statement with social impact, but what precise weight does it have in getting someone a job? I hate to quote scientists, but ...needs more research.
Perhaps one fandom study, which could be started relatively soon, is to assess what impact involvement in fandom (including fanfic, art, RPG, etc., and/or fanscholarship) is perceived to have on young and established scholar careers (thus including students). We know anecdotally (*waves at ithiliana, above*) that fan ties have often been a negative for faculty. We'd expect them to become more positive.... Qualitative research would be a straightforward approach to this issue, which would parallel much existing work in areas like higher ed (e.g., perceptions of non-traditional women students) and workplace differences (e.g., changes after laws like Title IX and ADA).
"(3) The third point has me slightly confused again. I'd love for you to start a public post raising these issues, because I think there's something central you're getting it, but I'm not sure I fully know where you're heading here."
Haha, I don't entirely know either, or at least not right now. I'll put this on my to-do list! I'm interested in unpacking -- probably through much dialogue describing people's varied definitions, and actual instances -- the "rules as well as conventions, both fannish and scholarly, about how and when to quote, link, remix, and comment." It's a project that intrigues me. There have been radical shifts in ethical reasoning, social practice, and technological possibilities around some of these terms, but I think there's solid and defensible ground beneath. Postmodern, postcolonial, and postpositivist, perhaps. That would make for problems hooking it up with current economically-inflected legal views, which are decided not "post."
BTW, I have nothing but love for the high-ground term "transformative." Bricoleurs FTW!
As for "objectivity," science taught me long ago to reject its spurious claims of "value neutrality"; I'm with you there that the claim "Only an X can teach about X" is as invalid as "Only a non-X can speak truth about X." Certainly, a scholar's familiarity with her subject - like fandom - would seem relevant to her claims about it! It's very local and contextual, though. Meta-ethics and -epistemology make a pretty good case that just the idea that there is some ideal place from which some ideal person can see universally, without any bias, is a myth. It fantasizes an ideal state that should never have been taken as a possible reality.
no subject
1. Meta as a continuum - yes, precisely. I very much locate "academic essays" not as a qualitatively separate category, but rather as one of multiple traditions spiraling out from the text or semiotic resource that inspires them -- which in this context could be either the fandom source material, or fanfic, or other aspects of fandom and its work. Like fanfics and as you say, any LJ comment, scholarly works have their own semi-established conventions of style, tone, citation, etc.
I'm not sure I don't find them less formal and rigid than the macro-cat or l33t traditions of some fandom communities :-) (At least in academia, people will copy-edit your efforts before they're posted, rather than eagerly sharing it with fandom_report. Although perhaps academia needs something like that: imagine "summary_executions," for abstracts. ;-)
2. Recognition and reward are issues complicated by the fact that our society overwhelmingly focuses on monetary forms of measurement, which can barely grasp social values as existing, let alone figure out how to 'measure' them. I like your suggestion: let's see how "recognition" actually circulates in the economy of social capital, how it is translated into financial rewards, to what extent, and under what conditions. In most cases, I suspect that the translation is at a distance and hard to correlate. "Everyone knows her and likes her work!" is a statement with social impact, but what precise weight does it have in getting someone a job? I hate to quote scientists, but ...needs more research.
Perhaps one fandom study, which could be started relatively soon, is to assess what impact involvement in fandom (including fanfic, art, RPG, etc., and/or fanscholarship) is perceived to have on young and established scholar careers (thus including students). We know anecdotally (*waves at ithiliana, above*) that fan ties have often been a negative for faculty. We'd expect them to become more positive.... Qualitative research would be a straightforward approach to this issue, which would parallel much existing work in areas like higher ed (e.g., perceptions of non-traditional women students) and workplace differences (e.g., changes after laws like Title IX and ADA).
"(3) The third point has me slightly confused again. I'd love for you to start a public post raising these issues, because I think there's something central you're getting it, but I'm not sure I fully know where you're heading here."
Haha, I don't entirely know either, or at least not right now. I'll put this on my to-do list! I'm interested in unpacking -- probably through much dialogue describing people's varied definitions, and actual instances -- the "rules as well as conventions, both fannish and scholarly, about how and when to quote, link, remix, and comment." It's a project that intrigues me. There have been radical shifts in ethical reasoning, social practice, and technological possibilities around some of these terms, but I think there's solid and defensible ground beneath. Postmodern, postcolonial, and postpositivist, perhaps. That would make for problems hooking it up with current economically-inflected legal views, which are decided not "post."
BTW, I have nothing but love for the high-ground term "transformative." Bricoleurs FTW!
As for "objectivity," science taught me long ago to reject its spurious claims of "value neutrality"; I'm with you there that the claim "Only an X can teach about X" is as invalid as "Only a non-X can speak truth about X." Certainly, a scholar's familiarity with her subject - like fandom - would seem relevant to her claims about it! It's very local and contextual, though. Meta-ethics and -epistemology make a pretty good case that just the idea that there is some ideal place from which some ideal person can see universally, without any bias, is a myth. It fantasizes an ideal state that should never have been taken as a possible reality.