Evandar

Remember this?

My postgrad symposium was last Wednesday. It was a long and exhausting day, but everything went off without a hitch and we've had some really good feedback from our lecturers and supervisors.

My paper...went very well. Far better than expected, given my issues in regards to public speaking (read: crippling anxiety). The paper itself is something that my supervisor is encouraging me to publish once I reach PhD level - and that is incredible.

And.

And none of this could have been achieved without you guys. Your responses to my interview questions, your signal boosts, and your words of support have all meant so much to me over the last couple of months. I couldn't have done any of this without you guys, so thank you. Thank you all so much for your help and support.

Thank you


( Programme Photos )

(Comments are screened for continuing anonymity purposes.)

Hi!

I'm writing (and presenting) a paper on fannish views on their representations within mainstream media. This includes representations from characters such as Becky Rosen from Supernatural and the Big Bang Theory guys, to newspaper articles.

To complete this paper, I'm looking for anyone who would be willing to discuss fandom and its place in their lives with me in a qualitative interview. Any and all participants will be kept entirely anonymous - they will be allocated a random number, and all RL names and online handles will be kept entirely confidential.

If you're interested, or want to find out more before committing to anything, please comment below with an email address. Comments are (of course) screened. Also, please pimp this out to anyone who you think might be interested in participating.

Due to ethical considerations and the UK's Data Protection Act (1998), all further information and interviews will come from my university email address, so keep an eye out for anything ending with northumbria.ac.uk

Thank you!

One of the strangest things about embarking on this degree has been the fan studies aspect of it. Don't get me wrong, it was entirely my choice to include a chapter on fandom in my thesis. It's just...the hoop jumping? I had to fill out an ethics form and have it signed off by a committee in order to do something that I've already been doing on a daily(ish) basis for the last fourteen years - that is, talk to people on the internet.

It's all for a very good reason - one that I'm 100% behind - but that doesn't mean it's not surreal.

Also surreal is the ability to turn around and go 'oh hell no' to some of the books I have to read and then proceed to nitpick the fuck out of them.

I mean, a book of essays on Harry Potter crossed my To Read pile earlier this week. (I say that like I hadn't checked it out of the library weeks ago and then only just got round to reading it yesterday, which is what actually happened.) And yeah. My thesis isn't even on Harry Potter, but thanks to the sheer span of fandoms covered in transmedia and fandom studies, I kind of had to read it anyway. (At least it wasn't Star Trek. Again.) And I couldn't take it seriously. At all. I ripped it to shreds and then handed it back feeling vaguely guilty like I should be ashamed of myself for landing so hard on the fan side of aca/fandom.

I mean, there was this one essay that could have been fantastic - it was all about the medical side of the Potter series - had the author...read the books first? Just tiny details that didn't really detract from his point but that turned me into that person regardless.

( Meta, in which I actually defend Dumbledore, under the cut... )
TL;DR: I'm still more of a fangirl than I am an academic and I waffle a lot.

(Crossposted to my LJ.)