BOOK CONTRIBUTORS
The experience of Tumblr is one multiplicity. Accordingly, we developed a multimodal, multivocal structure for our book in order to represent the diversity of Tumblr’s voices and styles and enable Tumblr’s users to speak for themselves as much as possible. We have also kept the contributions short in order to facilitate the inclusion of a greater number of voices than a standard scholarly collection, including people in industry (including Tumblr staff), journalists, user-scholars, and, especially, the non-scholarly, devalued or socially marginalized users (activists, fans, queer and nonbinary/trans people, people of color) who have largely defined the platform. Having a range of sixty-plus contributors rather than the ten to fifteen authors of a standard academic collection means we have been able to develop substantial topic areas that offer multiple points of view.
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In terms of scholarly contributions, we recruited a new generation of social media scholars whose ability to navigate Tumblr’s interface came from being part of Tumblr communities before they began their research of them. Tumblr studies have come from the bottom up in the academic world, and our scholarly authors are generally younger scholar-practitioners from around the globe who represent a variety of different disciplinary and institutional affiliations. Since contributing to our book, these scholars have gone on to become leaders in their fields, particularly the next generation of internet and digital media scholars. We have taken note of many of their subsequent activities and publications below and provided links to it as much as possible.
Dr Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, especially influencer cultures, internet celebrities, online visibility, and social media pop cultures. She is Senior Research Fellow & ARC DECRA Fellow in Internet Studies at Curtin University. Crystal has published over 60 articles and chapters on various aspects of influencer cultures, and her books include Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (2018, Emerald), Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame (co-edited with Megan Lindsay Brown, 2018, Emerald), Instagram: Visual SocialMedia Cultures (co-authored with Tama Leaver & Tim Highfield, 2020, Polity), and Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media (co-edited with Katie Warfield & Carolina Cambre, 2020, Bloomsbury). Crystal works closely with industry, and her internationally-acclaimed research has been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia, Pacific Standard Top 30 Thinkers Under 30, ABC Top 5 HumanitiesFellowship, and the ICA Pop Comm Early Career Scholar Prize. Reach her at wishcrys.com.
Finn Alpin is an illustrator, 2D concept artist, games development graduate, rhythm game enthusiast, and can be found @mojavemeat across most social media.
Amanda Brennan is Tumblr’s internet librarian and trend expert. After graduating with her MLIS from Rutgers University, she began her career at Know Your Meme, researching the history of internet phenomena and niche subcultures. She has been at Tumblr since 2013 where she spearheaded The Fandometrics, Tumblr’s weekly ranking of entertainment fandoms on the platform, which Paste Magazine asserted should be "given a permanent place in pop culture’s critical metrics tool belt"; She has spoken about internet history at conferences across the US about topics ranging from Slender Man to cat videos, the latter of which she discussed in the recent documentary Cats the Mewvie. She lives in New Jersey with her spouse and their three cats.
Lee Brown is a premed student in the class of 2022 at a small liberal arts college in the northeast United States. They are transgender and Black. In addition to being a moderator for Trans Youth Resources (TYR), they run cross-country, work as an LGBTQ space manager, and as a lab assistant.
Julian Burton is a PhD graduate in Childhood Studies from Rutgers University-Camden and is now a part-time lecturer in this program. His dissertation; Making Space on the Digital Margin; "focuses on how the perspectives and experiences of the young people of fandom Tumblr provide a window into the broader transformative power of digital youth cultures, encouraging us to consider the myriad ways in which young people use these emerging social spaces to shape their lives, their communities, and their world. He is currently working with CELCIS, Scotland's Centre for Excellence in Children's Care and Protection, developing online learning tools and programs for professionals and policymakers on a range of topics relating to young people's rights and wellbeing. He also continues to research and publish on young people's media cultures, particularly their role in social activism. His recent work includes an entry on “Mobile Digital Technologies” for the SAGE Encyclopedia of Childhood Studies and an article in the Journal of Childhood Studies entitled Look at Us, We Have Anxiety: Youth, Memes, and the Power of Online Cultural Politics.
Paul Byron is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney. He is researching LGBTQ+ young peoples digital cultures of peer support, with a view to inform national mental health policy. Paul's research interests encompass digital cultures of care, friendship, dating and relationships, peer support, and everyday social media intimacies. His publications on Tumblr include “‘How could you write your name below that?’ The queer life and death of Tumblr” in Porn Studies (2019) and “Hey, I’m Having These Experiences;: Tumblr Use and Young People’s Queer (Dis)connections";, co-authored with the Scrolling Beyond Binaries team and published in the International Journal of Communication (2019). His book, Digital Media, Friendship and Cultures of Care (Routledge), is due for release in late 2020. He can be found on Twitter at @paulibyron
Kendra Calhoun is a Ph.D. Candidate in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a sociocultural linguist who studies the intersections of language, identity, and power in face-to-face and mediated contexts with a focus on race, social media, and institutional discourse. Her scholarship brings together theories and methods from fields including sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, critical discourse studies, media studies, and Black Studies. She has analyzed Black linguistic and cultural practices on multiple platforms including Vine, Tumblr, and Twitter. Her article “Vine Racial Comedy as Anti-Hegemonic Humor: Linguistic Performance and Generic Innovation” is published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. Her dissertation is an examination of institutional diversity discourses and practices in U.S. higher education and their impact on graduate students of color in the U.S. She can be
found on Twitter at @_kendracalhoun or on her website at kendrancalhoun.com.
Alexander Cho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a digital media anthropologist and human-centered design researcher who studies how young people use social media with an emphasis on issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Cho is co-author of The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality and several articles and book chapters about Tumblr, such as "Default Publicness: Queer Youth of Color, Social Media, and Being Outed by the Machine" as well as "Queer Reverb: Tumblr, Affect, Time." He is an affiliate of NYU’s Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and lead author of UNICEF’s report on Digital Civic Engagement by Young People. Cho has recently taught classes on media and cultural studies, Asian American Studies, and information studies at the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Asian American Studies and Department of Radio-TV-Film, as well as UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics. Previously, he was the Editor of the Southern California LGBT newsmagazine Frontiers, where he oversaw a comprehensive relaunch as well as secured the worldwide exclusive coming-out interview with Star Trek icon George Takei. Cho can be found on his website, http://alexandercho.net/, or on Twitter at @alexcho47.
Brendan Churchill is a research fellow in sociology at the University of Melbourne, where he researches the intimate and working lives of young people.
The Cimmerians is employed by an intersectional feminist nonprofit as a Professional Irritant, and by two cats as a Devoted Lackey. In her spare time, she can be found on Tumblr, being vastly amused by the ridiculousness of the
human condition.
Avery Dame-Griff is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Appalachian State University. His current manuscript concerns how the emerging commercial internet changed transgender politics in the 1980s and 1990s, and he also serves as the primary curator of the Queer Digital History Project (queerdigital.com). Dame-Griff received his PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. He also holds a BA (2010) in English from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and an MA (2012) in American Studies from the University of Kansas. In 2016-2017, Dame-Griff was the Winnemore Digital Dissertation Fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), where he studied how transgender-identified people used Usenet, an early digital communication platform. His research interests include social and new media, sociolinguistics, gender and transgender studies, and discourse analysis. His work has appeared in Internet Histories, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Language and Sexuality, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. He served as Assistant Editor of AMSJ: American Studies from 2010 to 2012. He can be reached on Twitter at @adamegriff and on his website at http://averydame.net/
Morgan Fisher spends a lot of time obsessing over fictional characters, thinking about mental health, and staring into the Void.
Annie Galvin is a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and the associate editor and podcast producer at Public Books. Her academic and public writing focuses on contemporary global fiction, gender and sexuality studies, violence, critical theory, visual culture, and popular music. Galvin’s career has combined teaching, academic research, arts journalism, editing, and podcasting, and she is passionate about spreading academic knowledge and expertise beyond the walls of the university. She is the co-creator, producer, and host of a new public-scholarship podcast, Public Books 101. Her writing has appeared in Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paste Magazine, PopMatters, and elsewhere. She can be reached on Twitter at @anniehgalvin and on her website at https://anniegalvin.com/.
Christine Goding-Doty is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Previously, she was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for the Humanities and the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, she was a member of the 2018-2020 cohort of Mellon Fellows convened around the theme "Truth, Fact, and Ways of Knowing." Dr. Goding-Doty received her PhD in African American Studies from Northwestern University in 2018. In the course of her study she also spent three years in cotutelle at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
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The dominant questions of Dr. Goding-Doty's research consider what new problems and avenues of thought the digital age and social media open up for the study of race, whiteness, and coloniality. In her dissertation, "Virtually White: The Crisis of Whiteness, Racial Rule, and Affect in the Digital Age," Goding-Doty identifies a crisis of white hegemony that has taken shape in the digital age, in which a broad insistence on white racial victimization has been incorporated as a strategy in white supremacist and nationalist activity. She can be reached through her website at https://www.christinegodingdoty.com/
EJ Gonzalez-Polledo: is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. They are a social anthropologist specialising in gender theory, biosocial entanglements, and digital anthropology. Gonzalez-Polledo has conducted ethnographic research in the United Kingdom, North America and Europe. Before joining Goldsmiths, they worked at the London School of Economics and the University of Sheffield. Gonzalez-Polledo is the author of Transitioning: Matter, Gender, Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) and co-editor of the volumes Painscapes: Communicating Pain (Palgrave, 2017) and Queering Knowledge: Analytics, Devices and Investments after Marilyn Strathern (Routledge, 2018). Gonzalez-Polledo co-edits the book series Theorizing Ethnography: Concept, Context Critique (Routledge), and is currently co-chair of the European Network of Queer Anthropology.
Benjamin Hanckel is a sociologist and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Benjamin’s research examines youth health and wellbeing, social inequalities in health, and social change. His recent work has explored the design and use of digital technologies for health, with a particular focus on young people’s lived experiences of using digital technologies, particularly those young people with diverse genders and sexualities. Benjamin’s research appears in Media, Culture and Society, Journal of Youth Studies, the International Journal of Communication, and Social Theory and Health. Benjamin is a convenor of The British Sociological Association’s (https://www.britsoc.co.uk/) Youth Study Group, an editorial board member of the Journal of Sociology (https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jos), and a member of The Australian Sociological Association (http://tasa.org.au/). Benjamin holds ongoing affiliate positions at King’s College London, and the University of Tasmania. He can be found on Twitter at @benhanckel
Matthew Hart is a Lecturer in Digital Society and the Director of Research Ethics at the University of Leicester, UK. His research interests include the sociology of youth, social media, and risk. From 2017 to 2019 he was the programme director for the MA Contemporary Sociology and since 2018 he has been the programme director for the MA Digital Media & Society. His background is in digital sociology, having studied, researched, and published in the intersecting areas of youth, intimacy, risk, and digital and social media since 2012. Matt is primarily interested in young people’s intimate social media practices - particularly in terms of the benefits young people are able to leverage through voluntarily negotiating with 'risk' as part of their everyday online practices. He is the author of Nude Selfies, Young People, and Social Media: The Pleasures and Rewards of Risk-Taking Online (Palgrave Pivot, forthcoming). Reach him on Twitter at @Sociologyzombie and on his website at http://soczombie.com/.
Natalie Ann Hendry is a Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT), Melbourne, Australia. She is interested in the relationship between social media, education and health, particularly how it relates to mental health, therapeutic cultures and informal learning. Published works include "Young Women’s Mental Illness and (In-)visible Social Media Practices of Control and Emotional Recognition" in Social Media + Society (2020); “Untangling the conflation of young adults and young people in STI and sexual health policy and sex education” in Sex Education (2018); “Social media bodies: Working through entanglements of sex, mental health and social media” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education (2017) and “A snapshot of social media: Camera phone practices” in Social Media & Society (2015). She can be found on Twitter at @projectnat
Indira Neill Hoch is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia College, Moorhead MN. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago Illinois where she was later a visiting assistant professor of communication. Her research interests include online boundary maintenance and social construction of technology, and her article "Content, Conduct, and Apologies in Tumblr Fandom Tags" has appeared in Transformative Works and Cultures. In the article, she explores how tumblr is used, the types of content found on it, and the language and content barriers that are unique to the platform. She has published articles in Transformative Works and Cultures and Social Media + Society. She’s also been interviewed by WBEZ on how tumblr’s porn ban exposes the hypocrisy of big tech. Neill Hoch can be found on Twitter at @ineill.
Zina Hutton runs Stitch's Media Mix, a website focusing on representation - primarily race, gender, and sexuality - in media and in fandom spaces. Their website hosts media critique, analysis of fandom tropes and behavioral trends, reviews, and the occasional bit of original fiction. They have a master's degree in English Literature and have published both short stories and nonfiction for a variety of publications, including Fireside Fiction, Anathema Magazine, The Mary Sue, Comics Alliance and Women Write about Comics. Their first book, Judge Anderson: Flytrap, was published in 2019. Notable podcast appearances include the Three Patch Podcast’s Episode 107A: Challenging Fandom Racism–Extended cut and Fansplaining’s Episode 22B: Race and Fandom: Part 2. They can be reached on Twitter at @stichomancery and on their website at www.stitchmediamix.com.
Akane Kanai is a lecturer in communication and media studies at Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on gender, race, and affect, and how identities shift through digital culture and popular culture. She is the author of Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture: Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Maureen Kelly is the proud founder, in 2009, of Planned Parenthood’s Out for Health: LGBT Health & Wellness program in New York. Through weekly youth groups, school and community programming, professional development training, technical assistance, and advocacy, Out for Health works to remove barriers, increase access, and create a community in which health and wellness are an accessible norm for LGBT people. Maureen can be found on her Twitter, @Moserita.
Flourish Klink is a researcher and consultant who focuses on the intersection of fan culture and the entertainment industry. They are a partner and Chief Research Officer at Chaotic Good Studios, where they have worked with companies such as 20th Century Fox, Disney, and Blizzard Entertainment. They also co-host the "Fansplaining" podcast with Elizabeth Minkel. Find them on Tumblr at flourish.tumblr.com, on Twitter @flourish, and on their website, flourishklink.com.
Annette Koh is an urban planning scholar whose research focuses on the urban commons, creative placemaking and civic engagement in cities. She's a member of the Progressive City editorial board and contributed two essays to their 2019 book Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Planning including “Placemaking when Black Lives Matter” (2017). During her doctoral studies at the University of Hawai‘i, she co-organized the Decolonizing Cities symposia. Other articles include "The Right to the City: Urbanism, Planning and Cities in Science Fiction and Fantasy" (The Book Smugglers, 2018) and “Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy,” (Planning Theory and Practice, 2018). She can be found on Twitter at @citykoh or on tumblr at https://anniekoh.tumblr.com
J.S.A. Lowe is a poet and writer who recently received her PhD in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston, and now teaches there as a Lecturer. She has presented her work at national and international conferences including AoIR, HASTAC, PCA, and SCMS, with articles in The Journal of Fandom Studies and Transformative Works and Cultures. She has two chapbooks of poetry, DOE (East Beach Press) and Cherry-emily (Dancing Girl Press), and was recently featured on the podcast Fansplaining in an episode titled, “Race and Fandom, part 2.” She loves matcha lattes, fountain pens, and big-wave surfing, and lives with her service dog Quincy on Galveston Island. She can be reached on tumblr at https://jsalowe.tumblr.com/.
Aisha Mahmud is a writer and student of creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University, with a concentration in fiction.
Jennifer Malkowski is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Smith College. They write and teach about digital media (especially video games, Internet video, digital cinema, and social media); documentary; death and dying; and race, gender, and sexuality in media. They are particularly interested in the links between “old” and new media and the way new technologies reshape—or fail to reshape—social and political power. Malkowski is the author of Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017), the co-editor of Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (Indiana University Press, 2017), and the co-editor of the book series Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press). Their work has also been published in Cinema Journal, Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, and the edited collections Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019) and Queers in American Popular Culture (Praeger, 2010). They can be found on Twitter at @jmalkows
Allison McCracken received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa, with a focus in film and media studies. She has published widely in gender/sexuality studies, media studies, and twentieth century U.S. cultural history. She is the author of the book Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture (Duke University Press, 2015), which has received several awards, including the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Philip Brett Award from the American Musicological Society's LGBT Study Group. McCracken currently teaches courses in American popular culture and media, gender and sexuality studies, and American Studies research and methods. She was a fascinated, dedicated lurker in the Tumblr Glee/Klaine fandom for many years. She can be found on Twitter at @shegiles2010.
Victoria McCullough currently leads the Social Impact and Public Policy team at Tumblr, focusing on engaging and activating advocacy groups, activists, and other changemakers to tell powerful stories, catalyze engagement with the Tumblr community, and drive measurable impact. Prior to Tumblr, she worked for the Obama Administration in the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Congressional Affairs. In 2018-19, she was a Technology and Democracy Fellow at Harvard University.
Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY, where they also serve as Chair of the Gender Studies and Global Black Studies Programs. Their work stages encounters between black study, queer theory, media, and art. They have written and lectured widely on networked intimacies and messy computational entanglements as they interface with qtpoc lifeworlds. They are the author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (SUNY Press, 2013). They are also the co-editor of two edited collections, Black Genders and Sexualities (with Dana-ain Davis, 2012) and Zombies and Sexuality (with Steve Jones, 2014). Both their forthcoming book Dragging: In the Drag of a Queer Life (Routledge), and their current project, Black Data, have been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Creative Capital | The Andy Warhol Foundation. They can be found on Twitter at @shakaz23 and on their website at https://www.purchase.edu/live/profiles/460-shaka-mcglotten.
Elizabeth Minkel is a writer, editor, and consultant who focuses on digital technologies and fan culture. She's written about fandom for the New Statesman, The Millions, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Verge, Increment, and more. She co-hosts the “Fansplaining” podcast with Flourish Klink, and she collaborates with Gavia Baker-Whitelaw on “The Rec Center,” a weekly newsletter featuring fandom articles, fanart, and fic recs, which was a finalist for a Hugo Award in 2020. She can be found on Twitter at @elizabethminkel, and on her website—which is a Tumblr—at https://elizabethminkel.com/.
Lori Morimoto is a Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She is an independent scholar of fan and media studies, focused specifically on transcultural fan interactions and transnationally circulating media. She has published widely on transcultural fandom, and is co-editor of a special issue on “Tumblr and Fandom” for the journal Transformative Works and Cultures (2018). Her work has been published in the journals East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Participations, Asian Cinema and Mechademia: Second Arc, and she has also contributed to the anthologies Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Culture (2016), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, Second Edition (with Bertha Chin, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (2018), A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (2018), and Transatlantic Television Drama (Oxford University Press, 2019). Morimoto’s videographic work has been published in the online journal [in]Transition, and has also been featured on VCinema, The Playlist, and Enfilm.com. She is currently serving on the editorial board of The Velvet Light Trap. She is host of the podcast, “It’s a Thing!” You can reach her on Twitter at @acafanmon or on her website at https://lorimorimoto.net/.
Katherine Morrissey is an assistant professor in Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University. Katherine’s research focuses on representations of female desire across popular culture, storytelling across media, production networks for popular romance genres, participatory culture, digital production, and digital pedagogy. Katherine’s work has been published in Cinema Journal, Flow, the Journal for Popular Romance Studies, and Transformative Works and Cultures. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled, “Redefining Romance: Love & Desire in Today’s Digital Culture” and recently discussed some of this work on Wisconsin Public Radio. Katherine serves as a Review Editor for the Transformative Works and Cultures journal and Co-Vice President for the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. She can be found on Twitter at @_katedidnt, on Tumblr at https://katiedidn-t.tumblr.com/, and on her website at http://www.katiedidnt.net/.
Devon Murphy has an MA in Art History and an MSIS in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a specialization in Native American Art History and Cultural Heritage Information Management. Their studio practice and interest in art information-sharing spurred their research into Tumblr art communities and art museum websites. They were recently a Getty Research Institute Fellow, and now work at the University of Texas at Austin as the TARO Metadata Analyst. Their paper, titled “The Information Worlds of Art Museum Curators and Registrars,” won the 2018 Student Research Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology Special Interest Group in Arts & Humanities. Publications on critical metadata and museum storage are forthcoming from the VRA Bulletin and FWD: Museums Journal. Devon's best contact is through gmail, devonelayne@gmail.com, and you can also find them on Instagram at @_devushkart.
Abigail Oakley has a PhD in the Writing, Rhetorics, and Literacies Program from Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Her published works concentrate on nonbinary gender and sexual orientation identity construction
on Tumblr.
Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. With an interest in studies of popular culture, pornography, sexuality, affect and media theory, she is the author of many books, including Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press 2011), Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths, 2018), NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media, written together with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light (MIT Press 2019) and Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (with Jenny Sundén, MIT Press, 2020). She is also the PI of the Academy of Finland research project, Sexuality and Play in Media Culture (2017-2021) and the Strategic Research Council funded consortium, Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (2019-2022/25). Paasonen is also an editorial board member of the journals Sexualities, New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Porn Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Capacious: The Journal for Emergent Affect Inquiry. She can be reached on Twitter at @susannapaasonen and through her website, https://susannapaasonen.org.
Rukmini Pande is an Assistant Professor of English Literature and Communication at O.P. Jindal Global University. She completed her PhD on ‘Intersections of Identity in Media Fandom Communities’ at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests coalesce around the field of Digital Humanities and include issues relating to intersectional identity in popular culture, new media and postcolonial cybercultures. In particular, she has published widely on the topic of race/racism in media fandom, and is the author of Squee From The Margins: Race in Fandom (University of Iowa Press, 2018) and editor of Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (Iowa, 2020). She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections on fans and fandom, including The Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (edited Paul Booth, 2018) and Seeing Fans (edited by Paul Booth and Lucy Bennett, 2016). Her work has also appeared in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures as well as the Journal of Feminist Studies.
Rukmini Pande is an Assistant Professor of English Literature and Communication at O.P. Jindal Global University. She completed her PhD on ‘Intersections of Identity in Media Fandom Communities’ at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests coalesce around the field of Digital Humanities and include issues relating to intersectional identity in popular culture, new media and postcolonial cybercultures. In particular, she has published widely on the topic of race/racism in media fandom, and is the author of Squee From The Margins: Race in Fandom (University of Iowa Press, 2018) and editor of Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (Iowa, 2020). She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections on fans and fandom, including The Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (edited Paul Booth, 2018) and Seeing Fans (edited by Paul Booth and Lucy Bennett, 2016). Her work has also appeared in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures as well as the Journal of Feminist Studies.
Milena Popova has a PhD in cultural studies from the Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE Bristol. They are currently a rogue scholar and creative consultant working on representation of gender, sex, sexuality, and sexual consent in popular culture. They are the author of Sexual Consent (MIT, 2019). Parts of this essay also appear in Popova's forthcoming book about consent in fanfiction, tentatively titled Dubcon, also from MIT Press. In 2018, Popova published “Re-writing the romance: emotion work and sexual consent in arranged marriage fanfiction” in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. The same year, they also published “Happy Consensual Gangbangs’: Deconstructing Sports Cultures and Hegemonic Masculinity in Football RPF” in The Darker Side of Slash Fan Fiction. They can be found on Twitter at @elmyra and on their website at https://milenapopova.eu.
Nicholas Proferes is an assistant professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University, where he researches the relationship between users and social media platforms.
Jessica Pruett is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation examines the relationship between lesbian feminist politics and popular culture. She is the author of “Lesbian Fandom Remakes the Boy Band” (2020) for the journal Transformative Works and Cultures. She is currently working on a project examining Michigan Womyn's Music Festival's "womyn-born-womyn" admissions policy and its connection to the festival's racial politics.
Emily Rauber Rodriguez is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her work centers on Latinx participation and depictions in popular culture.
Brady Robards is a Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at Monash University. For the past decade he has studied young people's digital lives, looking at how the experience of growing up today is mediated online and shaped by digital technologies. His recent projects have looked at the role of social media in drinking cultures, body image, engagement with public services, and the impacts on employment and professional identity. Brady's recent books include Growing up on Facebook (with Sian Lincoln, published in 2020, Peter Lang), Digital Intimate Publics & Social Media (with Amy Dobson and Nic Carah, published in 2018, Palgrave), and Youth & Society (with Rob White and Johanna Wyn, published in 2017, Oxford UP). Brady's research also appears in academic journals including New Media & Society, Sociology, Media Culture & Society, Sexualities, and Qualitative Research. Brady is a member of the Association of Internet Researchers (aoir.org) and the Australian Sociological Association (tasa.org.au). You can visit Brady's website at bradyrobards.com and follow Brady on Twitter @bradyjay.
Aja Romano is a Brooklyn-based culture writer for Vox and a longtime member of fandom. They've been covering internet and geek culture full-time for nearly a decade and working as a freelance theatre and movie critic for even longer. With earlgreytea68, they co-created the fanfic-inspired audio drama Kaleidotrope. They can be found on Tumblr at bookshop, Twitter @ajaromano, babbling about Chinese actor RPF @yilingwow, or writing as Aja on AO3. Drop by their website or check out their tarot collection!
Louisa Stein is associate professor of film and media culture at Middlebury College. Louisa is author of Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age (University of Iowa Press, 2015) and co-editor of Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (McFarland, 2012) and Teen Television: Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008). Louisa’s work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of cultural and digital contexts, gender, and generation.
Strugglingtobeheard works as a therapeutic mentor for youth coping with mental illness and trauma. She has three cats and is going back to school to become a licensed therapist.
Jen Tarr is Senior Lecturer in Social Science Research Methods at Newcastle University, UK. She is a health sociologist with a particular interest in visual cultures, including those in digital environments. She was Principal Investigator of the Communicating Chronic Pain project (www.communicatingchronicpain.org) and is currently writing a book about visual images and pain. Her work has been published in journals such as Sociology of Health & Illness, New Media & Society and Qualitative Research. She can be reached on Twitter at @drjentarr.
Katrin Tiidenberg is an Associate Professor of Participatory Culture at the Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication Institute of Tallinn University, Estonia. She publishes widely on the topics of sex, social media, visual culture, and digital ethics. Her recent books include Tumblr (forthcoming with Natalie Ann Hendry and Crystal Abidin), Sex and Social Media (with Emily van der Nagel, Emerald, 2020); Selfies, Why We Love (and Hate) Them (Emerald, 2018), and Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity (co-edited with Annette Markham, Peter Lang, 2020). She is on the Exec of the Association of Internet Researchers and the Estonian Young Academy of Sciences. Find her at tumblr at https://kkatot.tumblr.com/ and Twitter at @kkatot.
Noah Tsika is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. His work explores the politics of representation in both commercial and noncommercial media, emphasizing race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. He has conducted field research in West Africa and the United States, focusing on the production, distribution, and reception of Nollywood films. His research on the internet combines queer theory, digital media theory, and online ethnography, examining some of the emergent conditions of circulation for global queer cinema. He is the author of five books: Gods and Monsters: A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal, 2009), Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora (Indiana UP, 2015), Pink 2.0: Encoding Queer Cinema on the Internet (Indiana UP, 2016), Traumatic Imprints: Cinema, Military Psychiatry, and the Aftermath of War (California UP, 1918) and Screening the Police: Film and law Enforcement in the United States (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). His writings appear in journals including African Studies Quarterly, The Journal of African Cultural Studies, Black Camera, The Velvet Light-Trap, WSQ, Porn Studies, and Paradoxa. He is the editor of a special issue of Black Camera on the marginalization of African media studies. He is a contributing editor of Africa is a Country and a contributor to The Huffington Post. He can be found on his Queens College profile: https://www.qc.cuny.edu/Academics/Degrees/DAH/MediaStudies/Pages/Noah-Tsika.aspx
Joseph Varisco is an independent curator and producer of public arts and educational programming. He is the founder and program director of QUEER, ILL + OKAY, which explores the contemporary experience of living with HIV/AIDS. He is the recipient of AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Chicago Community Trust, and Visual AIDS grants.
Son Vivienne has over 30 years’ experience in media production and research in digital self-representation, storytelling, online activism for and by queer identities. Their current research explores the many creative ways that we ‘code-switch identities’ as diversely abled, classed, raced and gendered bodies, online and off. They are a Board Director at LGBTQI+ youth advocacy NGO, Minus18, and Secretary of Transgender Victoria (Australia) with particular interest in Diversity, Access & Inclusion and Peer Support. Their work on digital storytelling is published as Digital Identity and Everyday Activism: Sharing Private Stories with Networked Publics (Palgrave, 2016). Son’s less-verbose, more-embodied projects include cultivating abundance in their garden, and generosity in their children. More info at Son’s website: www.incitestories.com.au or Twitter @sonasterisk
Lesley Willard is a lecturer in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, where she received her doctorate. Her research and teaching interests include fan studies, platform studies, industry studies, and work studies; in all of these arenas, she focuses on labor and professionalization. Her scholarly work has appeared in the journals Transformative Works and Cultures, Critical Studies in Television, The Velvet Light Trap, Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media, and In Media Res. She also has a chapter in the upcoming book Fan Studies: Methods, Research, Ethics (University of Iowa Press) and is co-authoring another for Routledge based on the Media Industry Conversations series, entitled Work in Progress: Negotiating Work in the Contemporary Media Industries. She is also developing her dissertation, “From Hobby to Side Hustle: Fan Artist Professionalization in the Post-Network Era,” into a scholarly monograph. She is a research fellow with and the Assistant Director of the Moody College of Communication's Center for Entertainment and Media Industries (CEMI). She has coordinated several conferences, including the annual Fan Studies Network-North America (FSN-NA) conference (which she co-founded), the Flow Conference, and UT Austin's Women & Gender Studies Emerging Scholarship Conference. Lesley has also served in an editorial capacity with Big Data & Society, The Velvet Light Trap, and Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture. She can be found on Twitter at @lesleyawillard