Media Fandom
UW 1020 Spring 2022
Section M25 (T/R 8:30-9:45 - Ames B 201)
Section M13 (T/R 10:00-11:15 - Ames B 201)
Section M48 (T/R 11:30-12:45 -Ames B 201)
Instructor: Katherine Larsen (klarsen@gwu.edu)
Office: Ames 223
Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays by appointment*
*Office hours will be held virtually via Blackboard Collaborate.
Instructional Librarian: Vakil Smallen (Smallen@email.gwu.edu)
Research Appointments: https://calendly.com/smallen-2
In other words, if you're a fish, you probably don't think about the water you’re swimming in, how deep the pond is, whether it’s a pond or an ocean. However, I argue that it's important to consider the water in which we swim - which increasingly equates to the media that we consume. What do we do with the media we consume? How do we interact with it, talk back to it, reshape it, pull it to pieces and then put it back together? The answers to these questions have the potential to offer insight into what we value (or devalue) and why. (For another take on this topic check out this article.) And this is where an examination of fandom comes in. What captures our imaginations? Why do we love Doctor Who or Mass Effect or Kim Kardashian?
An exploration of what fans do is ideally suited as the topic for a writing course. After all, one of the primary modes of fan participation has become writing (fan participation in online forums, blogs, Twitter, and through the writing of fan fiction among other venues). Fandom is about publicly sharing thoughts and feelings with others. It is also about the move from consumption to production, from passively absorbing information to working with a text to make it one's own. In short, it is the very model of university writing. The topic is also multi-disciplinary; sociologists, psychologists, media scholars, and journalists, among others, have all had input into the field. Therefore academics drawn to the field also must wrestle with issues of audience and tone, issues with which we will also engage over the course of the semester.
By the end of the course it is my hope that everyone will have learned to think like a writer, to think critically about the media we consume, as well as how and why we consume it, to treat every engagement with the world as an opportunity for research and reflection and, above all, to be inquisitive about things we might otherwise take for granted.
Below are the learning objectives from the University Writing Program template along with a breakdown of what these objectives lead to in practical terms.
#1 Apply sophisticated critical, analytic, and evaluative thinking in both reading and writing
- Identify an author’s claims and conclusions
- Recognize the structure of an author’s argument
- Assess the sources an author uses in order to construct his/her argument
- Identify the ways in which an author deploys sources (forwarding, countering, etc.)
#2 Locate, identify, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, and employ information resources appropriate for and relevant to whatever writerly task is at hand
- Identify scholarly vs. non-scholarly sources
- Identify a peer-reviewed journal article
- Locate a book review
- Comfortably use the databases available from Gelman Library
- Understand how to deploy non-scholarly sources as both evidence and analysis
#3 Recognize and differentiate various genres of writing and types of audience that are common in the academic and professional worlds
- Write a proposal for a research paper
- Write an annotated bibliography/assessment of previous research
- Write a research paper employing a variety of sources from divergent fields
- Write a blog post
#4 Recognize and apply rhetorical principles and stylistic conventions that prevail in whatever genre or discipline in which you are asked to write
- Identify an appropriate academic peer reviewed journal for their work
- Understand the documentation conventions required by different disciplines
- Be able to deploy different documentation styles as needed
- Identify hallmarks of unfamiliar genres.
- Comfortably switch between different genres.
#5 Formulate and implement an intellectually defensible agenda appropriate to a specific writing task
- Identify issues within a field of research
- Develop an appropriate research question based on those issues
#6 Proofread and edit carefully and effectively, through a deliberate process of drafting and revision
- Develop a rubric for effective writing in collaboration with classmates and instructor
- Apply that rubric in peer-review groups when assessing the writing of others
- Effectively employ that rubric to your own writing.
For a full view of the template that all UW20 sections share, please go here.
How Can You Succeed in This Course?
- Participate! – Look around you when you come to class. We are few in number. This means that for this class to work, all of us need to be pulling our weight. Everyone is expected to contribute.
- Communicate! – It’s up to you to let me know if you are struggling, if you need help, if there are muddy concepts that need clarification. There are many ways you can do this: ask questions in class; email me; come to my office hours. I may not know until you are very far down a dark and lonely path that you are lost and need a GPS. Don’t wait!
- Treat all the World as a Research Experience! – You are researching real world communities in real time. S&%# will happen! Developments may occur daily, weekly. Keep on top of the community you choose for your project. You can do this simply by checking your Twitter feed everyday, by going to your favorite Tumblr pages, by weighing in on discussions about the latest episode of a television series, keeping abreast of the buzz surrounding the release of that new film, by following the response when a favorite author says something about a beloved character (I’m looking at you J.K. Rowling).
Assignments
In this class you will engage in a loop of reading, research, writing, feedback, revision, more feedback, refinement, and eventually, because we live in an imperfect world that never gives us enough time, the production of final products. Every UW1020 course requires 25 to 30 double-spaced pages, or their equivalent, of “finished” writing. In this course, this requirement will be fulfilled by completing the following assignments:
- Hybrid assignments (ongoing throughout the semester). The hybrid assignments are designed to familiarize you with tools that will facilitate your ability to do effective research and effective critical assessment of sources. You'll be introduced to a variety of Gelman Library’s databases, annotation tools such as Scrible, A.nnotate and Annotat.it, and bibliographic management tools such as Zotero, Refworks, and Mendeley as well as the tools available in Word.
- Peer Review Workshops. There will be several rounds of peer review workshops during the semester for both the proposal and research paper. You will provide both written and verbal feedback to your working group members for each round.
- Research Proposal. The proposal consists of four discreet sections and will be produced over the course of several drafts, a new piece added with each draft. Please note that sample proposals are available on Blackboard/Assignments/Proposal folder.
- Research Paper. This 12-15 page (approximately 6000-8000 word) paper is the culmination of your work over the semester. Please note that sample research papers are available on Blackboard/Assignments/Research Paper folder.
- Blog Post/Genre Switching. This will consist of a "translation" of your final research paper into a blog post directed at a specific *non-academic* audience. Please note that sample blog posts are available on Blackboard/Assignments/Genre folder.