Several Consortium blog readers may have followed the Gender and Fan Studies/Culture debates that happened over on Henry Jenkins' blog, with some rounds cross-posted here, last year. There have been a variety of developments that have taken place coming out of that series. For me, I particularly feel there has been a better understanding of a wider community, from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, interested in what we are calling "fan studies." Another is a sense of collaboration between multiple ways of approach fan studies that has informed projects.

At the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference that I'm going to be doing several forthcoming posts on, for instance, there were panels whose approach was directly informed by those series of conversations, such as the panel which featured C3 Consulting Researchers Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell, along with Louisa Stein and Kristina Busse. I'm going to be joining Stein, Bob Rehak, Suzanne Scott, and Julie Levin Russo in a workshop at the Console-ing Passions conference in Santa Barbara next month to more explicitly talk about that series of conversations through Henry's blog and the corresponding LiveJournal page and its potential legacy in media studies and fan studies, as we strive to capitalize on some of what we learned from the conversation.

Another great development, based on that conversation, is the composition of the board for this Transformative Works and Cultures.

The board for this new journal, whose first issue will be published in September 2008, includes C3 Director Henry Jenkins, myself, and C3 Consulting Researchers Nancy Baym, Abigail Derecho, Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington, Derek Johnson, Jason Mittell, and Aswin Punathambekar, as well as a variety of other academics who participated in that series on Henry's blog. See the full list here.

Since the journal is envisioned to be open access, I wanted to pass along the call for papers more broadly. As editors Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson describe, the journal's aim "is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community."

According to the call for papers:

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. [ . . . ] We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing.

Again, see the full CFP here. Inquiries may be sent to editor@transformativeworks.org.