Wikia Fandom Craze: Connecting, Participating, Creating, and Re-negotiating Boundaries

This article draws attention to latest online fandom practices that take place in online participatory environments as a result of intersecting technological and economic variables. After tracing the origins of fan practices in literary theories that regard readers as active agents in reading and meaning-making processes, the present study investigates fandom as a cultural event that is determined by changing technological, economic, and generic conditions. Through the study of Wikia—a vibrant online fan community—the article explores the de-territorialization of fan-fuelled media production and its re-territorialization as one of fans’ ways to enter what Pierre Bourdieu calls the industry’s “circle of belief.” Its wiki structure and technology as well as the latest smart Web tools that it employs allow fans to access, edit, and share media content, as they push the fuzzy boundaries between corporate and grassroots production further. The article maps out the efforts of media platform producers, of the industry, and of the fans to re-negotiate their roles and relationships, and looks into the different types of fan subjectivity that evolve as fans voluntarily succumb to the policies of the popular culture industry

Space, Narrative and Digital Media in Teju Cole’s Open City

This article explores the metaphor of the novel as the actual “space” for creative expression to take place. It is “space” affected by social and technological developments, employed to “house” global concerns and perspectives. In this article, I intend to investigate the ways in which Teju Cole, an American writer of Nigerian descent, communicates his concerns to his audience and explores questions about crises and debates, responding to social, cultural, and technological challenges of the twenty-first century both in print and electronic spaces. In particular, I investigate the ways in which Cole employs both narrative fiction and Social Media as political space in order to comment on twenty-first century events like 9/11, global terrorism, and a renewed wave of racism. Key-words: narrative, social media, political, activist, 9/1

Pop culture texts as STEM educational support

@1:12 -- Despoina N. Feleki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Stranger Things Multimedia Franchise to Support STEM Teaching @24:50-- Margarita Segovia-Roldán, University of West of England, ‘And the Ph.D. goes to …’: Influence of Science on Screen for Scientific Career Choices @42:55 -- Ash Eliza Smith, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Narratives in the Network: STEM + Popular Culture with Emerging Media Arts @1:03:25 -- Panel discussio