As the weekend draws to a close, I wanted to point the way to a few interesting conversations that have been taking place of late around the Convergence Culture Consortium. For those who follow our work through the blog, C3 is made up of a core team here at MIT comprised of myself and research manager Joshua Green, in conjunction with Henry Jenkins, and a team of four graduate students, all of whom post here on the blog. In addition, we have a variety of consulting researchers who provide work through our internal weekly newsletter and who act as "guiding lights," so to speak, on our thinking along the way.
As usual, I like to point to some of the public work those folks have been doing, for those who have regular blogs. For a complete list of our consulting researchers, look here. We will be bringing more updates to this page soon, including putting up the student bios for each of our grad student researchers.
Over at Henry Jenkins' blog, the Gender and Fan Studies conversation continues into the 21st round, this time featuring Old Dominion University profesor Avi D. Santo, as well as Lakeland Community College adjunct faculty member Barbara Lucas. The first round of the discussion is posted here and the second round will be available here in the coming days. In the first part of their discussion, Lucas and Santo talk about their own backgrounds, the ways in which the blogosphere and online means of communication transforms academic discourse, slash fiction, "the canon," and a variety of other issues facing fan studies and fandom.
Meanwhile, over at The Extratextuals, the blog which C3 alum Ivan Askwith posts at, Jonathan Gray has started an interesting conversation about what a WGA writers strike might mean for the television industry. I left some comments to weigh in on what this means for the worlds of soap operas and pro wrestling, and I came to the sad realization of what this might mean for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report in the process. I look forward to hearing more from what you all might think about the matter as well.
Finally, Jason Mittell has provided a draft of an essay for an upcoming anthology on Lost, edited by Roberta Pearson, through his blog. For those who are interested in discussions of complex television, whether you follow Lost in particular or not, this is worth a read. The piece is called "Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Television Studies)."
