Transcript
Lori Morimoto: Hi and welcome to “It’s a Thing!”, the podcast where we talk about fan studies and how it’s a thing.
[music]
LM: It’s a thing is the result of enthusiastic response to a tweet I made a couple of months ago, wherein I said I wanted to start a fan studies podcast. The slightly passive-aggressive title comes from a discipline-wide frustration with the fact that people keep discovering fans, proposing that we talk about them seriously, when in reality we’ve been talking about them seriously for upwards of a quarter of a century.
The podcast will have a lot to interest fan studies scholars, but it’s really intended for people who are outside fan studies: media studies scholars, who perceive us as being something of a bastard child, journalists who have recently discovered fans and are desperate to talk about it… We have been having these conversations for a very long time, and this podcast is designed to let you know what we’ve been talking about and what we are talking about today.
I look forward to welcoming a variety of guests, not only established fan studies scholars, but up-and-coming researchers, people who are working as independent scholars on the fringes of academia, and a variety of people who are in one way or another engaged in the serious consideration and study of fans.
I’m Lori Morimoto, I’m an independent scholar of transcultural and transnational fandom. I also work behind the scenes at the Fan Studies Network North America Conference, which is coming up at the end of October. It will take place in Chicago at DePaul University, and we welcome participants who are not presenting. For more information, please have a look at fsn-northamerica.org.
So that’s what “It’s a Thing!” is all about, and I hope you’ll give it a listen.
It's a Thing! 