Blog

Hi there! It’s been a while. I’m pretty much still working on my PhD on fandom. Turns out, it’s not that easy to manage research and earning a living in a dated educational system while being ill ^^ Still, being absent for so long is certainly not ideal in ethnography and shouldn’t have happened. I want to let you know that in the following months, I try to be around more often. Some may consider it unprofessional to be open about struggles and mistakes in research and telling our research partners (you, the fans) what we do. I believe being open about it leads to more equality among the scientific as well as the non-scientific community.

I plan on sharing what I did the last months and which direction my research is taking me. I’d love to get in touch and talk to you about different topics.

A short overview what I did so far:

• Work on research ethics and privacy protection in digital spaces. Research in the internet is still new in some aspects and some colleagues consider everything that’s online as public data. It took me some time to defend a more ethical approach.
• Theoretical work on the infrastructure of the internet and its methodological consequences.
• Theoretical work on vulnerability and social power as well as gender & sexuality.
• I plan on trying some kind of beta-reading of some parts of my work with fans. If anyone is interested (preferably German, but I can provide at least an abstract) we could try this in 2023.

What’s next?

• Getting back into the field: I never stopped reading fanfics, but I didn’t stay in touch with the fans I’d talked to.
• Discovering new spaces. I would love to join a fannibal discord server, preferably without minors, if anyone would have me. I don’t know my way around discord, so it’ll be a new media to master as well.
• Talking with you about your fan work, with a focus on explicit fan work. Maybe we can discuss some of the topics you bring up in your work? Also, the reaction to your fan work on different platforms is of interest to me.

I’m open to all ways of communication: Videocall, e-mail, text messages are all great, whichever you’re comfortable with. First thing is always that we discuss consent and privacy protection so I know what info I’m allowed to use and how pseud or credit you in my work.