ABSTRACT

We asked three innovative fan scholars with tremendous experience as fan scholars and as editors of fan scholarship, Will Brooker, Mark Duffett and Karen Hellekson, to engage in a discussion of issues they feel are central to the methods and ethics of fan studies scholarship. Will Brooker has written about fan communities that have developed around Batman, Lewis Carroll and Star Wars, and his scholarship on David Bowie is methodologically innovative. He is a collaborator on the comic book series My So Called Secret Identity and currently serves as editor of Cinema Journal. Mark Duffett’s Understanding Fandom offers a useful introduction to the field of fan studies; additionally, he has explored fan identities and popular music fandom in two edited volumes and written broadly on popular music figures, including Elvis, boy bands, Paul McCartney and Bryan Adams. Karen Hellekson has written extensively on fan culture, fan communities and science fiction. She is founding coeditor of the journal Transformative Works and Culture and has edited two books, The Fan Fiction Studies Reader and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. In this conversation, they discuss best practices and methods for fan studies, the impact of scholars’ fannish identities on methods and ethics in fan studies, scholars’ relationships to fan objects and communities and the responsibilities scholars should assume when studying fan communities.