Call for Papers

Forthcoming Themed Issues

Fan Personas: Vol. 10, No. 2, 2024

The entanglement of identity and performance within fandoms have been central components of fan studies, whether these fans are focused on sports, music, film, television, literature, celebrity, or something else. Their shared interest and investment in the fan object provide fans with common ground on which to build a collective identity, while the fan object can be a rich source of identity markers, from logos and colour schemes to moral values and philosophical positions. As argued by Busse and Gray in The Handbook of Media Audiences (2011, p. 426), being a member of a fandom facilitates “a particular identity that affects and shapes its members in ways beyond shared media consumption”.

In this issue, we invite scholars to bring understandings of identity from fan studies into conversation with ideas of a strategic performance of self, extending existing work on fan personas from both within the Persona Studies journal and beyond. In doing so, we wish to explore how a ‘fan persona’ might be utilised by fans for specific purposes or in different interactions, or to frame individual perspectives, beliefs or interpretations within collective spaces.

In tandem with Christopher Moore’s (2020) call in Transformative Works and Cultures for a “persona-inflected fan studies”, we are making space in this issue for a fan-inflected persona studies. In clarifying the potentials offered to fan studies scholars by engaging with persona studies, Moore (2020, ¶ 1.9) points to P. David Marshall’s exploration of “the move from representational media (print, film, radio, and television) to presentational media (the internet, social media, and streaming platforms, among many others)”, as well as the concepts of intercommunication, micropublics, and the dimensions of persona (see Marshall, Moore & Barbour 2020). Similarly, research and theorisation around fan objects, names, performances, and communities, and the impact of these on movement between collective and personal identities (see Busse 2017, Chin & Morimoto 2013, Hills 2002, Jenkins 1992, Peyron 2018 among others), can usefully be deployed from fan studies into persona studies.

In this Fan Persona themed issue, we invite both traditional article and creative practice submissions that engage with personas in (and beyond) the following areas:

Mediatised fans
Embodied performances of fandom
Fannish behaviour and practice
Fan communities
Niche fandoms
Mainstream fans
Performing anti-fandom
Intersectional analyses of fans
Materiality and fandom
Fan status
Theorising fan personas
Platforms, infrastructures, and fans
Contested fandoms
Toxic fans/fandoms
Conflicting fandoms
Representing fans
Fan parasociality
Fan investment
Celebrity fandom

Works cited

Busse, K 2017. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

Busse, K & Gray, J 2011. ‘Fan Cultures and Fan Communities’. In The Handbook of Media Audiences (eds A. Sreberny & V. Nightingale), pp. 425-443. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444340525.ch21

Chin, B & Morimoto, LH 2013. ‘Towards a Theory of Transcultural Fandom’. Participations, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 92-108. https://www.participations.org/10-01-07-chin.pdf

Hills, M 2002. Fan Cultures. Routledge, London.

Jenkins, H 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, New York.

Marshall, PD, Moore, CL & Barbour, K 2020. Persona Studies: An introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ.

Moore, CL 2020. ‘An approach to online fan persona’. Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 33 https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1703

Peyron, D 2018. ‘Fandom Names and Collective Identities in Contemporary Popular Culture.’ In The Future of Fandom Special Issue (eds K Busse & K Hellekson), Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 28. https://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1468

Submission guidelines:

Initial abstracts should be 150-250 words long, with full papers to be between 5000 and 8000 words in length, inclusive of reference list, or an equivalent for creative practice submissions. When submitting for consideration, please identify how your work is responding to the theme of the issue. We encourage scholars to engage with, build upon, and/or challenge existing persona studies scholarship, including (but not limited to) work published in this journal. You can find information about the journal’s focus and scope as well as our peer review policies here: https://ojs.deakin.edu.au/index.php/ps/about.

Submission timeline:

Abstracts (or full papers if available) submitted issue editors	22 July
Author notification and invitation to submit for peer review	2 August
Full submission due for peer review	7 October
Review and revision period	October-November
Issue publication	December 2024

Contact:

For further information or to submit an abstract, please contact issue editors Dr Kim Barbour, University of Adelaide (kim.barbour[at]adelaide.edu.au) and Dr Mark Stewart, University of Waikato (mark.stewart[at]waikato.ac.nz).

Open Submissions

The journal welcomes abstract, full manuscript and creative practice submissions on a rolling basis submitted to personastudies@gmail.com, and in response to calls for papers around a central theme. We recommend that you review the About the Journal page for the journal's section policies, as well as the Author Guidelines and Peer Review process. Submissions will be vetted by an editor, and if your proposed paper is considered a fit for the journal, you will receive log-in details for the website via email to allow you to submit to the journal website for peer review. Those submissions accepted for publication after peer-review, but which do not fit into a themed issue, will be published in the rolling issue.

Issue Proposals

If you would like to propose an issue theme, either for public call for submission or stemming from an event or research group, please contact us at personastudies [at] gmail [dot] com for further details. We recommend allowing 12 months for the issue development process.