FSFF ♥ Nyota Uhura, (Nyota meaning Star & Uhura meaning Freedom) originally played by Nichelle Nichols, is a character in Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series, the first six Star Trek films, and the 2009 film Star Trek.
Film Studies For Free likes to circulate calls for papers for online, Open Access, film and media studies related journals. So, heres a very worthwhile CFP for the very wonderful e-journal Transformative Works and Cultures. All relevant details are given below.
By the way, while putting together this post, FSFF came across another great, related, website: Fandom Research - very much worth exploring.
Race and Ethnicity in Fandom
Transformative Works and Cultures, an online-only, peer-reviewed journal focusing on media and fan studies, broadly conceived, invites contributions for a special issue on race and ethnicity to be published in summer 2011. Academic scholarship on fan cultures and fan productions over the past few decades has focused primarily on gender as the sole category of analysis. There has been little published scholarship on fan cultures and productions that incorporates critical race theory or draws on the rich array of methodologies that have been developed during the past century in both activist and academic communities in order to incorporate analysis of the social constructions of race and ethnicities in fandoms.
In contrast, fan activism and fan scholarship (at cons, workshops, and on the Internet) has produced a growing body of work (personal narratives, essays, carnivals, and in recent months, a press) focusing on not only analyzing but also confronting hierarchies of race and ethnicity and their relationship to gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Submissions by academics, acafans, fan scholars, and fans are encouraged. In all categories, people of color are especially encouraged to submit.
The deadline for completed submissions is October 1, 2010.
The editors would like to encourage pre-proposal abstracts and drafts for early feedback by March 1, 2010.
Topics might include but are not limited to:
Online activism and the circulation of critical race theory and women of color feminisms in fan communities, in particular the relationship between fan online discourse and other online activist communities.
Critical analysis of the instantiation and critique of racial hierarchies in fan communities and the surrounding cultural productions.
Racist and antiracist issues in commercial transformative works (comics, film, mashups, remixes, machinima, etc.), especially recuperative race readings (e.g., Randalls The Wind Done Gone, Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea).
Race concerns in source texts (characters of color and their fannish reception, fandoms for work by authors of color, writing fannish original characters, etc.) and fannish responses (such as the Carl Brandon Society, Verb Noire, and other panfannish and professional projects).
Intersection of race and ethnicity with gender, sexuality, class, and ability in fannish contexts in fan works and fan communities (pre-Internet, Internet, conventions, vids, fan fiction, artwork, etc.).
Complete information available in PDF form here:
US letter paper:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/ twc-race-cfp-2009-04-30-us.p
df
A4 paper:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/ twc-race-cfp-2009-04-30-a4.p
df
The announcement on TWCs site is here:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index. php/twc/announcement/view/9
