European Fandom and Fan Studies Calls for Papers

Comic Fans, TV fans, film fans  - you're being studied! European Fandom and Fan Studies, a one day symposium, will take place on 10th November 2012 at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and University of Amsterdam Department of Media Studies - and they have just issued their "Call for Papers".


The symposium will be held in the centre of Amsterdam, easily accessible from Amsterdam international airport.

Fan Studies is growing but primarily focused in North America. This one day symposium at the University of Amsterdam seeks to explore the state of Fan Studies and the variety of Fandoms focussed within the broader social and geographical boundaries of Europe.

Inter-disciplinary papers are invited to explore the nature of the field itself or how different fandoms function within Europe. Potential avenues of exploration may include how Fan Studies is represented, studied, and received within European universities, by funding bodies and publishers.

Papers on Fandoms may explore how European (English and non-English speaking) fans of European and non-European objects of fan appreciation participate in fandom, the differences between internet fandoms and local/national/international fan practices, and the different objects of fan appreciation.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Transformative Works
• Fan History
• Fan Infrastructures
• Fan Charity and Activism
• Fan Cultures and Identities
• Impact on Public Policy and Industry Practice
• Economies within Fandom and/or Fan Studies
• Students as Fans
• Fan Studies within Higher Education courses
• Crossing national, cultural, and language boundaries in Fandom and Fan Studies

The symposium is associated with a special issue of the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures tentatively slated for 2015, with full papers due 1st January, 2014 (now that's what I call planning ahead).

Transformative Works and Cultures  is an international, peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. TWC publishes articles about transformative works, broadly conceived; articles about media studies; and articles about the fan community. 

 

Aside from this planned project, the organisation has a general invite for papers in all areas, including fan fiction, fan vids, film, TV, anime, comic books, fan community, video games, and machinima.

• Submission Process:  Please send a 300 word abstract along with a short (100 word) biographical note to Anne Kustritz (A.M.KustritzATuva.nl) or Emma England (E.E.EnglandATuva.nl) by 10 September 2012

Keep Me In Caramacs!

Sparked by a quick debate on a Yahoo comics group comes news that the British small press might be failing in its legal obligations by not sending copies of their magazines - however short the print run - to the British Library.

Publishers and distributors in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland have a legal obligation to send one copy of each of their publications to the Legal Deposit Office of the British Library within one month of publication.

Paul Scott, editor of UK fanzines Solar Wind and Omnivistascope, reports he recently received a letter from the Agent for Legal Deposit Libraries in London demanding five copies of each issue of his comics "for various institutions", as well as a copy for the British Library.

In addition to the British Library, there is a legal requirement to send copies to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the University Library, Cambridge, National Library of Scotland, Library of Trinity College, Dublin and the National Library of Wales.

While the Legal Deposit office offers no compensation the National Library of Scotland has, apparently, contacted Paul separately and has offered some payment for past issues.

The request has Paul steamed up on the Omnivistascope blog.

"The Cambridge and Oxford libraries should go on and get on with some real work instead of bothering me because they want the status of having all this crap in their basement," he feels. "Birmingham University, the redbrick I went to certainly doesn't care - they just want to know how much I'm earning so they can sell me a credit card.

"The National Libraries of Wales and Scotland I can understand [but] Trinity College in Ireland is completely beyond me - that's a completely different country!

"Under the Legal deposit law of the UK the British Library should receive two copies of all publication published in the UK. Who knows why. Perhaps its for posterity, perhaps it's just in case the government wants to know what you're up to?

"If they are kept for the rare moment when someone wants to read the comic while I'm alive, then they should help to keep me in sugar free Red Bull and Caramacs and buy one," he fumes.

Still, Paul wonders just what will happen if he doesn't comply. "Perhaps they'll send uniformed officers to comic conventions to seize these comics that have print runs in double figures," he suggests. "I feel a Space Lord story coming on..."

The Legal Deposit Office make it clear on its advice page that, within the terms of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, a 'publisher' is to be understood as anyone who issues or distributes publications to the public. Items published in the United Kingdom and in Ireland are liable for deposit, as are items originally published elsewhere but distributed in the United Kingdom and in Ireland.

The requirement for deposit remains, irrespective of the place of publication or printing, the nature and size of the imprint, or the extent of its distribution.

It also claims there are several advantages to pubishers, no matter how small, to fulfilling the requirrments.

• Publications deposited with the British Library are made available to users in its various Reading Rooms, are preserved for the benefit of future generations, and become part of the national heritage.
• Publications are recorded in the online catalogue, and will remain an essential research tool for generations to come.
• Most of the books and new serial titles are listed in the British National Bibliography (BNB), which is used by librarians and the book trade for stock selection, is available in printed, CD-ROM and MARC Exchange formats, and has a world-wide distribution.

It would certainly be interesting to hear if fanzine editors now plan to comply with the law and innudate the Deposit Office with their publications. You have to wonder what they'll make of Solar Wind, FutureQuake, Zarjaz and Tozzer, to name but a few!

"These libraries would have to build a new wing if they took all of the small press publications produced in the UK in comics alone," Paul Scott suggests.

Paisley Who

The rather self-explanatory Adventures In Time And Space - An Exhibition Of Doctor Who Memorabilia is currently on in the Paisley Museum and Art Galleries in the Scottish town of Paisley near Glasgow. Free to enter and running until Sunday 26 August, the museum is displaying a selection of props, merchandise, models, costumes and figures from the television series.

Paisley Museum has a surprising history of promoting the television programme. In 1988, as part of the celebration of 500 years of the town, they celebrated 25 years of the programme by presenting a similar display of items organised by the three central Scotland local groups of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, complete with an exhibition booklet with cover art by Raymond MacFadyen. The then Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, opened the exhibition and the museum even opened up their lecture hall on the Saturday of the exhibition closest to the actually anniversary date for a fan event which, while not advertised as such, was rapidly dubbed PaisleyCon.

Raymond MacFadyen would go on to organise Doctor Who exhibitions in Kilmarnock, Nairn, Forfar, Dunfermline, Stirling and Motherwell, while one of the people behind PaisleyCon, Stuart Halliday, persuaded the Museum Of Childhood in Edinburgh that the capital shouldn’t be left out. Their exhibition ran through the summer of 1990 and included a visit from Sophie Aldred who played companion Ace. The tour buses in the capital even began stopping on the road outside the museum so that their passengers could photograph the Dalek in the window.

Meanwhile back in Paisley in 1992 the museum brought the Behind The Sofa exhibition from London’s Museum Of The Moving Image north of the border and this time it was opened by the third Doctor, Jon Pertwee. The associated convention with the new exhibition was organised by ex-Who producer John Nathan-Turner who, under the banner of The Doctor Who Roadshow, brought the Brigadier, Nicolas Courtney, the Doctor’s grand-daughter, Carole Anne Ford, and the fourth Doctor himself, Tom Baker, to a sell-out crowd.

It does leave you wondering though if that young Paisley Doctor Who fan, David McDonald, ever made it to any of those events back then. Perhaps, perhaps not. Maybe he was too busy listening to the Pet Shop Boys and changing his name to David Tennant.

Racing Rockets!

Anyone interested in getting costumes based on comics characters might be interested in this interview with designer Ruby Rocket, who has developed a deserved web-wide reputation for her creations based on the likes of Marvel's Black Cat etc.

Ruby has, not surprisingly, got some pretty stonking web traffic for her ComicSpace and MySpace sites but seems totally unphased by all the attention, even from mainstream magazines such as Maxim. (She's also got her own web site, rocketsagogo.com, but it's not live yet).

Speaking as someone who last dressed up in a costume back in the 1970s (Darth Vader, if you must know) - well, apart from appearing in a strange green costume from Blake's 7 during a convention auction while I was editing Doctor Who Magazine - I have to say the energy some genre fans put into this kind of stuff is pretty admirable, even if it is of course the one thing the news media always latches on to in an effort to keep us all firmly in the "nutter' category when reporting on science fiction, comics etc.

Strange then, that the same reporters who simply must have a Klingon for their next piece on Star Trek don't see football fans in scarves and England cricket team's "Barmy Army" in the same light but just harmless fun. C'est la vie....