Today we’ll be kicking off a new, ongoing series – in between regularly scheduled posts by the Fanhackers team, we will offer guest posts by a number of prominent fan studies scholars.
We are inviting them to tell us about a critical work, theorist, or piece of fan studies that is useful to them – not the best one, or even their favorite one, but the one they build with or build their work or thinking on: their “go-to” piece of criticism.
We asked them for a quote and a bit of an explanation as to its importance. We hope you enjoy hearing the results as much as we did!
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First up: Paul Booth. Paul Booth is a professor of Media and Pop Culture at DePaul University, and a prolific fan studies scholar – his recent books include Entering the Multiverse (Routledge, 2025), Adventures Across Space and Time: A Doctor Who Reader (Bloomsbury, 2023), Board Games as Media (Bloomsbury, 2021); The Fan Studies Primer (University of Iowa Press, 2021); Watching Doctor Who (Bloomsbury, 2019); and the Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (Wiley, 2018). Along with Rukmini Pande, his is the series editor of the Bloomsbury Fandom Primers. His response is below:
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“Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function as a deflection of reality.” (45)
From: Kenneth Burke, “Terministic Screens,” Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method (University of California Press, 1966)
I’ve taken the liberty of picking a quotation I don’t use much in my research (although it influences me more than almost any other!), but rather one I use in my teaching quarter after quarter after quarter. Burke’s discussion here about how technology both guides what we view and always what we don’t view (e.g., what stories ignore, what stakeholders want us to forget) has implications not just for media and technology, but also for fandom. Fans often focus on the the things left out – the “deflection of reality” Burke talks about. Fans create stories in the margins, outside the line of sight for narrative, media technology, and more. At the same time, fandom provides new reflections, new selections, and ultimately new deflections as well: creating and making in different contexts but still, and always leaving things out. Fan studies research (and media studies more generally) is important because it helps us identify those deflections; to recognize and to combat them.
– Paul Booth, Professor of Media and Pop Culture, DePaul University