The Extratextuals

A shout-out and pointer to a new journal, set to grace the net in September: Transformative Works and Culture. A project of the Organization for Transformative Works, a fan-run nonprofit organization established “to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms,” TWC will be an online journal, free and accessible to anyone online (not just in academic libraries, not just a year after publication, etc.). They’ll publish

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.

The journals editors are Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (editors of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays), and their goals, they announce, are twofold: “to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.” More below the fold

I don’t know Karen, alas, but Kristina is one of the more impressive people in the field, a keen-eyed critic, a hugely supportive friend and colleague to many, and someone who cares deeply about fans, aca-fans, and fan scholarship. She’ll make a great editor, and is exactly the right sort of person to be behind the wheel of this project.

Its board is also an impressive bunch. I don’t just say that because I’m on it (oh, sweet vanity!), or even because fellow Extratextual Derek Johnson is on it, but because it’s stacked with gifted scholars and lovely people. Having edited Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture for about 18 months now, I’ve co-opted many of these people into reviewing for us at one time or another, and while I’m worried that I must now compete with Karen and Kristina for their time, I can attest that they are fair, collegial, and savvy critics who give you the kind of reviews you actually use and appreciate, not the type you curse or use only in elaborate rituals of punishment and excision.

For the record, the board at present consists of: Nancy Baym, Will Brooker, Wendy Chun, Melissa Click, Abigail Derecho, Catherine Driscoll, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Sam Ford, Jonathan Gray, Judith Halberstam, C. Lee Harrington, Heather Hendershot, Matt Hills, Henry Jenkins, Derek Johnson, Roz Kaveney, Derek Kompare, Anne Kustritz, Elana Levine, Farah Mendlesohn, Helen Merrick, Jason Mittell, Lori Morimoto, Roberta Pearson, Sheenagh Pugh, Aswin Punathambekar, Bob Rehak, Robin Anne Reid, Sharon Ross, Cornel Sandvoss, Avi Santo, Louisa Stein, and Catherine Tosenberger.

The greatest obstacle this journal will have to overcome is people thinking they’d rather submit elsewhere, to a paper journal, something that their department or university merit committees are more likely to be impressed by, etc. But let me offer my own reasons why to consider publishing in TWC:

• It’s open access, meaning not only that fan scholars at universities can read your work, but independent fan scholars, and fans in general can read it too. If you’re writing on fans, why not address a wider audience? Fans are too often spoken about, not to, so let’s change this.

• Fan scholarship is often beaten and battered around by other journals, sent out to reviewers who haven’t read anything on the topic since the big year of 1992, and regarded with suspicion from the outset. While we should challenge this lack of knowledge and these prejudices by publishing great stuff in broader-based journals, TWC promises to be a more nurturing space, where you won’t have to explain the obvious, and can instead get down to real business.

• TWC will have an audience who know their shit too, so why not share your work with them, and get feedback and commentary from them, rather than chasing down positivist interpersonal communication scholars reviewing for and reading Journal of Communication?

• It’s a Field of Dreams thing: build it, and it will come. Or maybe I can get away from the profoundly boring Kevin Costner and go to more inspiring Barack Obama: we are the change we’ve been waiting for. In other words, if we wait for others to start it, it’ll die. Start writing, make this a good journal, and do so now, not in three years.

So, follow this link for their CFP, think of something to write about, make sure it’s excellent (since no journal editor wants crap), and then submit.

Uncategorized journals, TWC