In the past few days, a few interesting pieces have appeared on C3 Director Henry Jenkins' blog that I thought would be of particular interest to consortium readers.
The first is an interview with C3 Affiliated Faculty Ian Condry through Henry's blog yesterday. Jenkins, the director of the consortium, talks with Ian about his Cool Japan project and both his 2006 book Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization and his new book project Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Culture. I have written in the past about Condry's work on Japan.
See my six-part series on pop cosmopolitanism and cultural flow from the United States to Japan in relation to World Wrestling Entertainment Japanese tours here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Also from Henry Jenkins' blog comes the second part of the ongoing conversation between male and female fan community scholars, with the second round featuring Louisa Stein and Robert Jones. Stein has focused her work on video game interfaces in media fan authorship, while Robert wrote on machinima, in the book Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Internet Age.
Stein says all the talk about fan behaviors in video game studies often overlooks technological innovations in fan communities, and that these distinct focuses have a gendered component.
She writes:
Now that fandom has moved online, technological innovation and authorship within the context of female communities continues to expand, and yet its validity as a subject of study--not only cultural but also aesthetic, literary, and technological--still seems to be contested and unpopular, at least compared to the burgeoning field of videogame studies, which as you point out maps more easily onto traditionally masculine values of competition and innovation.
The full discussion is available here and here.
Last week, the first part of this ongoing series featured C3 Affiliated Faculty Jason Mittell and Karen Hellekson. See my piece on the launch of the series here.
