News/Research

Alum Andrea Horbinski Guest Editor for Mechademia

28 Jan, 2019

Alum Andrea Horbinski Guest Editor for Mechademia

BCNM Alum Andrea Horbinski is Guest Editor for the "Transnational Fandoms" issue of Mechademia! The journal focuses on Japanese popular culture, and the issue focuses on the global consumption, creative (re)production, and widespread redistribution of East Asian popular culture.

From the call for papers:

Media fandoms arose in Japan and the United States contemporaneously, growing out of the proliferation of mass media in the twentieth century, particularly after the spread of the television in the 1950s and 1960s. As the work of scholars such as Marc Steinberg has made clear, the origins of what is known in Japan as the “media mix” and in the United States as “convergence” or “transmedia” (after the work of communications scholar Henry Jenkins) lay in the rise of Astro Boy and its associated merchandising in the 1960s. From the cross-cultural science fiction fandom scene of Worldcon, brought home to Japan in the 1970s, to the European obsession with Takemiya Keiko, Hagio Moto and the Izumi Salon in the same decade, fandom in the broadest sense has always been transnational. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and with increasing simultaneity of access enabled by the rise of fandom cultures online since, transnational fandoms focused on East Asian media have proliferated globally. At the same time, the media mix model has increasingly conquered Hollywood, as is evident in the global success of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” at the box office.

Find out more about this excellent journal here! The issue will be published this Spring!