The editorial reflects on the directions the journal intends to take. To us, Fanhackers, one sentence inmediately seems relevant.
(…) we continue to resist the tendency within fan studies’ spaces, both casual and academic, to speak about fandom as if it’s a contiguous whole rather than encompassing an enormous variety of people, cultures, practices—and conflicts.
TWC Editor. 2023. “Fan Studies State of the Field 2023. [editorial]. Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 40. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2023.2593.
Fanhackers’ own mission is to connect fandom studies that is casual with the one that’s academic. The journal’s focus falls not necessarily connecting these discussions but to expand what academic fandom studies can cover by
(speaking) with potential authors over the past year, including especially those who may not think of what they do as fitting into the field because of who and what they are studying
TWC Editor. 2023. “Fan Studies State of the Field 2023. [editorial]. Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 40. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2023.2593.
In the editorial, this expansion is related to an important statement.
It is not uncommon to hear or read words such as “fandom has a whiteness problem,” or “fandom has a race problem,” but neither of those statements are true. There are and have always been Black fandoms, and Indigenous fandoms, and Latinx fandoms, and Asian fandoms, and fandoms of and for people whose identities exist outside of Western-dominant racial formations. Fandom does not have a whiteness problem. White fandoms have a whiteness problem.
TWC Editor. 2023. “Fan Studies State of the Field 2023. [editorial]. Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 40. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2023.2593.
I like, therefore, to say that it is white fandom studies that has a whiteness problem, oftentimes, though, discussion doesn’t name fandom studies as such and scholarship that doesn’t center whiteness the same way might not be included in histories of fandom studies. Then, this expansion needs not only to include new scholarship but by rethinking what our scholarship includes.
In this, the efforts of fandom and fandom studies should be connected.