Henry Jenkins's Blog

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

At the climax of the season’s final episode, a character we’ve come to know threatens suicide. He walks to the edge of a train platform, fully prepared to throw himself in front of an oncoming express train. This character has spent the season agonizing over deep personal pain, inflicted on himself and others, his mental health dwindling from an already precarious position. His suicide attempt is the emotional climax of his arc for the season.

To a casual reader, you might assume I’m referring to The Bear; a character being internally tormented to the point of self-harm is as much a neat description of the FX show’s protagonist, Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen-White), as it is of the actual character to whom I’m alluding. Since 2022 and its first season’s exploration of family trauma and workplace drama interwoven with the darkly comedic antics of an eatery in transition, The Bear has gained a reputation for being a deep, dark dramedy; in essence, a series balancing humorous and serious emotional tones and subject matter. It’s also a series whose roots in the funnier side of things have been existentially contested. Last year Pop Junctions hosted a brilliant piece by Megan Robinson illustrating the exasperated humor of the second season’s “Fishes” (2023), an episode exploring the familial eruption of the Berzatto clan over a dinner that ends in a literal car crash. It’s true that The Bear has had a knack for knockout humor that can be both subtle and spectacular: I would personally cite “Forks” (2023), the episode focusing on abrasive anti-hero Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) that includes a purgatory of fork-cleaning, a fist-pumping Taylor Swift car karaoke moment and a pizza preparation that’s shot and soundtracked like a Mission Impossible ticking clock action beat. However, despite its humor The Bear has dwelt in storytelling realms involving mental health, self-harm, personal meltdowns and suicide; to assume the character in the first paragraph comes from The Bear wouldn’t be a stretch.

But the character in the first paragraph isn’t from The Bear: it’s Shrinking’s Louis Winston (Brett Goldstein), the repentant barista who accidentally killed the wife of Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) in a car crash. Louis’s suicide attempt, halted by Jimmy in the final scene of “The Last Thanksgiving” (2024), is a dark turn that’s treated seriously and lacks any kind of comedic or lighthearted undertone until Jimmy’s arrival. In isolation, the scene and the ones leading up to it, where Louis is slowly spurned by his co-workers and disinvited from their Thanksgiving party once they learn of his past, wouldn’t be indicative of what many might consider a “comedy”. But as part of the larger narrative tapestry of Shrinking – which, yes, includes a lot of laughs – it’s representative of the kind of dramedy The Bear used to represent.

The Bear: Nominated for Outstanding comedy series

Shrinking: nominated fr outstanding comedy series

Before I explain further, a few caveats. First, I put aside the Television Academy’s frankly unhelpful rules about genre eligibility; saying a series should have “the majority of its running time of at least six episodes [being] primarily comedic” does not provide firm guidance on genre rules. Where once The Bear might have fit that bill, I argue it has since outgrown it. Second, I don’t wish to turn this piece into a reductive delimiting of the types and trends of comedy that pigeon-hole shows into narrow definitions of genre. Part of the appeal of genre’s mutable edges is to make texts slippery, mixing and reconfiguring to present something new. Jacques Derrida’s influential paper ‘The Law of Genre’ (1980) invites this kind of slippage when he highlights the ability for texts to undergo “a sort of participation without belonging – a taking part in without being part of” multiple genres (p. 59). Both The Bear and Shrinking mix heavy subject matter with comedic frames featuring jokester characters, silly plots and humorous dialogue, showcasing mental health and trauma alongside farce and wry asides. Respective first season episodes “Review” (The Bear, 2022) and “Imposter Syndrome” (Shrinking, 2023) are potently dramatic, yet supremely funny examples demonstrating both shows’ dramedy strengths.

Despite how it might have begun, The Bear has inched further from comedy to focus on drama in its third season. Competing against Shrinking’s second season for Outstanding Comedy Series at this year’s Emmys, The Bear’s third season doubles down on character development that is galvanised by interpersonal drama, contemplative cinematography and a morose atmosphere at the expense of brevity, wit or warmth. The season’s tone is set by its first and best episode, “Tomorrow” (2024), an absorbing half-hour collage of non-linear, largely dialogue-free flashbacks briefly intercut with present-day scenes, entirely scored by an immaculate Nine Inch Nails cue. There is a near-absence of humor in “Tomorrow” and its temporal vignettes; exploring Carmy’s workplace trauma under Chef David (Joel McHale) and its enduring influence on his work ethic, taunting the viewer with scenes of his happy relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon) set prior to their rupture at the end of the second season, further highlights his dysfunctional familial relationships before and after the suicide of his brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal). The episode’s quiet, foreboding and low-energy pacing is shot through almost all subsequent episodes, underscoring the season’s main plotlines including Carmy’s failure to reconcile with Claire, Sydney’s (Ayo Edibiri) indecision regarding co-ownership of The Bear, the tension surrounding a food critic’s forthcoming review, and the shock closing of the hugely successful neighboring restaurant Ever, where both Carmy and Richie staged. When things are funny, they’re either perfunctory or all-too-brief, as in the flashback episode “Napkins” (2024) and its warm ending chat between Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Mikey; their banter and repartee cap a lengthy episode that excruciatingly details Tina’s forced redundancy and failed attempts to find a new job. In some cases the season’s humor has even been a source of frustration for viewers and critics, as in “Children” (2024)’s focus on the Fak family – the series’ primary comedic relief characters – and the stunt cast appearance of their relative played by an able but out of-place John Cena.

john cena in The bear (“children”, season 3)

Don’t get me wrong: The Bear is still a superb series. Throughout its third season – and its more recent fourth, calling ahead to what will surely be another nomination next year – The Bear is a show that excels at introspective and interpersonal character drama. I’d argue that its “serious” elements are what appeal most to creator and showrunner Christopher Storer, who directed seven, and wrote or co-wrote eight, of the season’s ten episodes. Its cast is high-caliber and absolutely deserving of their many accolades. Its cinematography, soundtrack, editing and production are worthy of high praise. Several of its episodes – “Tomorrow”, “Napkins” and the episode-long pre-service meeting of “Next” (2024) – are sublime pieces of television. The Bear is still worthy of acclaim. It’s just, unfortunately, not much of a funny show anymore.

By contrast, Shrinking is a very funny show despite its at-times similarly bleak subject matter. As with The Bear, Shrinking’s second season darkens its tone at the end of its first episode “Jimmying” (2024) by introducing Louis, the source of Jimmy’s grief that sets up the show’s initial premise. Jimmy’s gradual progression towards recognition and acceptance of Louis’s genuine repentance is the emotional spine of the season, interspersed with plenty of the light-hearted yet character-driven storytelling that made its first season successful. An episode like “Last Drink” (2024) exemplifies this balance: on one hand there’s the drama of the car accident’s aftermath and the final bourbon Paul (Harrison Ford) shares with Jimmy before he quits drinking; on the other, there’s the endearing goofiness of Louis justifying his ownership of a Miss Congeniality poster to his girlfriend Sarah (Meredith Hagner), and Derek’s (Ted McGinley) visit to Mac’s (Josh Hopkins) dog-pictured microbrewery and his subsequent inability to be mad at Mac for kissing his wife.

The abundance of chuckles in Shrinking’s dialogue, set pieces and character beats also makes the second season’s other grounded plot elements even more potent. As examples, Brian (Michael Urie) and Charlie (Devin Kawaoka) face set-backs in their quest for adoption, but deal with them in part thanks to a hilarious oceanic group therapy session in “Get In The Sea” (2024); Paul’s Parkinson’s diagnosis further impacts his health, but he loses little of his cantankerous wit when dealing with Jimmy or when forging a new friendship with his quirky former patient Raymond (Neil Flynn); Gaby (Jessica Williams) verbally spars with her recovering addict sister Courtney (Courtney Taylor) over the care of their elderly mother (Vernee Watson), but processes this in part thanks to her awkwardly endearing relationship with Derrick #2 (Damon Wayans Jr.). Both drama and comedy genres are consistently woven well together in service to each other, the end result usually moves the audience towards a smile, if not always a laugh.

shrinking (“get in the sea”, season 2)

To that end, Shrinking is a dramedy that gestures towards a heightened sense of reality. In a manner like creator Bill Lawrence’s previous work on Scrubs (2001-2010) and Ted Lasso (2020-2023), Shrinking’s second season exists in a world where a therapist can get away with significant substance abuse and illegal actions with his patients without losing his licence. A major scene in “Last Drink” is Brian recounting the history of his and Alice’s (Lukita Maxwell) meetings with Louis to a devastated Jimmy; the emotionally heavy confrontation is made lighter by Brian’s exaggerated accents, performative gestures and verbal diarrhea. For a more subtle example from the same episode, Liz’s (Christa Miller) anguished attempt to phone Derek in the wake of her infidelity leads to Derek rejecting her call while making breakfast for his friends in Gaby’s kitchen. Though the weight of the moment isn’t fully lost, the downbeat score of the scene and Derek’s understandably sad expression are briefly and comedically undercut by the sight gag of the Caucasian Derek wearing a borrowed apron emblazoned with “My Black Ass Can Cook”. Despite its move into deeper dramatic territory than its first season explored, Shrinking never forgets its comedic frame exists to serve that drama. Even the season’s darkest moment, Louis’s suicide attempt, is tempered by the subsequent game Jimmy plays with Louis in trying to guess the identities of other commuters on the train platform – something Louis used to do with his girlfriend – without losing any of its dramatic potency. Shrinking is a show whose comedy leans towards hope, even if there’s some darkness on the way to the light at tunnel’s end, and which takes itself seriously but only to a point. It’s a comedy first, and a drama second.

The Bear has become the reverse: a drama series that infrequently employs comedy in a world far more grounded than Shrinking’s. While The Bear’s third season is earnest in how it tackles topics of family, connection and personal growth, it does so without Shrinking’s comedic approach to teasing out drama and in a manner that prioritises realistic impact. Emotionally devastating moments are largely played straight in episodes that rarely contrast with humor for long. Consider “Ice Chips” (2024), the episode focusing on Sugar (Abby Elliott) in labor while unwillingly being assisted by her estranged mother Donna (Jamie-Lee Curtis). As the closest analog to the second season’s “Fishes” it similarly employs the stressful, exasperated family humor that Robinson explored in her Pop Junctions piece, but with its micro focus on Sugar and Donna –the only main characters seen until the episode’s ending – “Ice Chips” unpacks more of their strained personal relationship and attempts to reconcile, both of which largely elide humor. Much of “Ice Chips” is a serious moment of emotional catharsis for both mother and daughter as the latter enters motherhood herself. While uplifting, and ultimately heartfelt, the drama is given priority over the (very sparse) comedy.

The same favoring of drama over comedy is true of The Bear’s third season finale, “Forever” (2024). Aside from Luca’s (Will Poulter) fannish inquisition of a celebrity chef and Richie’s reuniting with the team at Ever who he met when staging, the episode is a largely dour, somber “funeral” for Ever’s closure. Key scenes explore Carmy’s failed attempt to confront Chef David over their traumatic work relationship, Sydney’s continued agonizing over signing The Bear’s co-owner documents while being courted for Adam’s (Adam Shapiro) new restaurant, and several real-world celebrity chefs exhorting the benefits of culinary work and the connections made by food. In an inverse of Shrinking’s finale capping a dark moment with light, “Forever” concludes with a fun impromptu party for the Ever crew in Sydney’s apartment – right before Sydney abruptly has a panic attack and the critic’s review of The Bear is finally released. Sydney’s panic and Carmy’s upset reaction to the (presumably negative) review end the season with an ominous “To Be Continued”.

the bear (“forever, season 3)

In the end, what are we left with for these two Emmy contenders for Outstanding Comedy Series?

 If asked the question “Is The Bear a comedy?”, I would have said “Yes” for its first season, “Somewhat” for its second, and “Not really” for its third (and, for that matter, its fourth). Drama can certainly bring the funnies, but I would argue that—to be a dramedy—the overall tone and approach to narrative needs some kind of a levity, a quirkiness, a wry wit or even black comedy undergirding that supports its storytelling with just a dash of distance from realism; in this regard, The Bear’s third season fails to deliver. Recalling the slippery nature of genre and Derrida’s idea of participation without belonging, the season could have shifted nomination gears and really shaken up the Emmys’ attempts at categorization. If The Bear’s third season had instead competed for Outstanding Drama Series – against such shows as The Pitt (2025), Severance (2022-2025) and The White Lotus (2021-2025) that are similarly dramas effectively using comedy for key moments – I could see an intriguing battle taking place. As it stands, in a manner similar to Hacks (2021-2025) and its deserved victory last year, we’re more likely to see The Bear pipped at the post in favor of The Studio (2025) as the current favourite to win Outstanding Comedy. The Bear no longer feels like a comedy.

Concurrently, if asked the question “Is Shrinking a comedy?”, despite its second season’s heavier themes, further unpacking of grief and deeper focus on mental health, my emphatic and enthusiastic “Yes” is supported by the show’s expert (though not always perfect) genre-mixing. In the grand tradition of prior Outstanding Comedy winners Ted Lassoand Hacks, Shrinking threads the needle by being truly funny and deeply dramatic when needed. Maybe in future The Bear’s Carmy could lie on the couch to benefit from Jimmy’s therapizing and absorb some of Shrinking’s comedic spirit.

Or perhaps, much like the restaurant’s transformation from The Beef to The Bear, the series could end its Comedy service and reopen to a different audience next year as a contender for Best Drama Series. Go on, Television Academy and Emmy voters. Let it rip.

References

Berman, M. 2025, “Is ‘The Bear’ Really A Comedy? And Other 2025 Emmy Nomination Observations”. Forbes, accessed 25 August 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcberman1/2025/07/15/is-the-bear-really-a-comedy-and-other-2025-emmy-nomination-observations/.

Derrida, J. & Ronell, A. 1980, “The Law of Genre”. Critical Inquiry 7(1), pp. 55-81.

Giorgis, H. 2024, “Everyone Knows The Bear Isn’t a Comedy”. The Atlantic, accessed 25 August 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/09/the-bear-emmys-comedy/679895/.

Gordinier, J. 2022, “A Conversation with the Guy Who created The Bear”. Esquire, accessed 27 August 2025, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a40681092/the-bear-creator-christopher-storer-interview/.

Heritage, S. 2024, “The Bear is not a comedy and it’s time to stop pretending it is”. The Guardian, accessed 25 August 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/jul/18/the-bear-emmys-comedy.

Nine Inch Nails. 2020, “Nine Inch Nails – Together (Audio Only)”. YouTube, accessed 27 August 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehNXOIpRr6c.

Robinson, M. 2024, “EMMYS WATCH 2024 – The Bear”. Pop Junctions, accessed 25 August 2025, https://henryjenkins.org/blog/2024/9/12/emmys-watch-2024-the-bear.

Romano, E. 2024, “Did We Really Need John Cena in The Bear?” Men’s Health, accessed 27 August 2025, https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a61485298/the-bear-season-3-john-cena-fak/.

Scherer, J. 2024, “The Bear recap: Is Marcus the kindest, softest, sincerest man in Chicago?” The AV Club, accessed 27 August 2025, https://www.avclub.com/the-bear-review-season-3-episode-5-children-1851570756.

Sepinwall, A. 2024, “‘The Bear’ Season 3 is everything you’ve been waiting for and (maybe too much) more”. Rolling Stone, accessed 27 August 2025, https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/the-bear-season-3-review-1235045666/.

Television Academy. 2025, “77th Emmy Awards: 2024-2025 Rules and Procedures”. Television Academy, accessed 26 August 2025, https://www.televisionacademy.com/files/assets/Downloads/2025-rules-procedures-v2.1.pdf.

VanArendonk, K. 2024, “Is The Bear a Comedy? And Should I Care?” Vulture, accessed 25 August 2025,https://www.vulture.com/article/the-bear-comedy-debate.html.

Biography

Chris Comerford is a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His research explores digital and screen media developments, fan cultures, serious leisure and digital pedagogies. Chris’s current project is an analysis of television's shifting cultural, social and industrial boundaries in the streaming era. He is the author of Cinematic Digital Television: Negotiating the Nexus of Production, Reception and Aesthetics (Routledge, 2022).

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

In this second part of the “Television that Changes Us” interview about We Disrupt This Broadcast, podcast creatives Sasha Stewart and Gabe González join one of the associate editors of Pop Junctions, Lauren Alexandra Sowa, to discuss how the podcast blends humor, expertise, and cultural critique. They share more about the process, the role of expert voices in deepening conversations, and the impact they hope to spark with listeners.

Lauren: Thank you so much for joining me, Sasha and Gabe. I was wondering if you can tell me a little bit about your role in the podcast—what each of you do, how you work together and collaborate, and how that all comes together.

Gabe: I will kick us off. My name is Gabe Gonzalez. I am the host of the Peabody's podcast, and I also contribute to some of the writing, although Sasha, who is joining us today, is really doing the heavy lifting on that front. Writing and editing is her bag, and I don't think the episodes would be as tight or as beautiful as they are without it. I'm very lucky to work with this team, especially folks like Sasha, because I get to do what I'd be doing anyway—watching television and talking about it. Only now, I don’t kidnap my boyfriend for an hour to talk about what I just watched on Andor (Disney+). I can do it on a podcast with some of my colleagues. It’s nice to be able to redirect that energy elsewhere.

we disrupt this broadcast podcast logo

Sasha: I couldn’t agree more. I’m Sasha Stewart. I am a writer on We Disrupt This Broadcast, and as part of my writing duties, I edit the interviews and transcripts. I love working with our team. We have a small but mighty group. Basically, what we do is come up with: what are these amazing Peabody Award-winning shows that we’re obsessed with? Which ones can we not stop talking about? That helps us pick our themes, and then we eventually write questions around those.

We also always start with an amazing research packet, so we try to create questions our interview subjects have never gotten before, ones others may have overlooked. One of the cool things about our show is that we’re all about: how does this show disrupt cultural narratives? How is this show changing the game and making the world a better place? A lot of cultural shows will stay away from that. But many writers, showrunners, creators, and actors are excited to talk about what drove them to create the show in the first place. We’re a really nice home for folks to talk about what they super care about when it comes to those shows.

Gabe: It’s also a very natural collaboration between the Peabodys and the Center for Media and Social Impact, because both organizations are focused on highlighting and elevating exceptional work. What’s fun about this podcast is we get to dive into what that means. You kind of know it when you see it—it’s like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography. You know good TV when you see it, but if you’re not in that world, it’s hard to articulate what it is that makes TV exciting, fascinating, thought-provoking, or emotive. Getting to talk to showrunners, experts, actors, and journalists who’ve been covering some of these stories before they’re turned into scripts is such a fascinating process. Sasha and I are both television nerds. We got the writer of an Emmy nominated series with us here today with Sasha. And I am a stand-up comedian who once wrote on a now canceled late-night show, but we both have television experience.

Sasha: We’re both TV writers, end of sentence.

Gabe: That’s true, it’s true. We both love talking about this stuff. Being able to articulate what makes something disruptive is valuable these days—understanding the mechanisms that provoke conversation or thought. PRX (Public Radio Exchange) is the final missing piece of the puzzle, helping us put together such a professional-sounding production. Between all those forces, we’re really proud of the show we get to make and the guests we get to talk to.

Sasha: I think there are a lot of podcasts out there about how a show is made, but we’re the one about why a show is made.

Lauren: That’s excellent, absolutely. When I was listening to the podcast, something I was really impressed with was how seamless the collaboration is. You’re writing questions, Gabe is also a writer, so you’re taking that in, and it all moves together perfectly. I know you both come from politically engaged and media-savvy backgrounds, so do your personal experiences shape the direction of the podcast? Or do things ever surprise you in the moment during interviews—do you change direction after talking to guests?

Gabe: I actually used to work in journalism—that was my day job while I pursued comedy at night. I left journalism for comedy because comedy seemed like a more sustainable industry at the time, during the Facebook/Meta bubble of the 2010s, when everyone in journalism was hiring and then it exploded. I made the shift and doubled down on what I was passionate about.

Lauren: I understand that. Our readers will laugh, but I left acting for academia because it also felt more stable.

Gabe: Haha, right. And now all our creative industries are exploding. I feel like tech is chasing me at every career. It’s the boyfriend that won’t leave me alone, that I should have dumped long ago, but here it is.

Lauren: Well, now with AI, even that’s not stable, so who knows?

Gabe: Exactly. It drives me nuts.

Sasha: And I learned from our Fantasmas (HBO) episode that it’s also private equity and the financialization of culture that’s chasing us everywhere. Just saying, I learn so much from our own podcast.

Gabe: No, for real. We talked to Andrew DeWaard, who wrote a book about how Wall Street devours culture—Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture—and why it has turned its sights on television and creative fields. That episode really got me fired up, I know it got Sasha fired up, and the whole team fired up. We all come from these industries that merge journalism and the creative, we got experience in both. So, it makes me doubly passionate. I want to get to the why, and I want everybody to be just as mad about it. In some ways, comedy or criticism is an easy way to get folks on board with an idea, rather than yelling at them in an article on the very website that is the problem. Nobody’s looking at articles on Facebook or X anymore.

Lauren: So true. Do you think there’s a balance between humor, critique, and deep analysis? Because as a comedian, and with the podcast not just being heavy—it’s celebratory but also critical—how do you strike that balance for listeners?

Sasha: It’s been a fascinating journey. We all come from comedy backgrounds and are obsessed with comedy. Originally, we had grand plans: we were going to infuse so much humor in the podcast and it’s going to be so funny. We are going to have all these very specific segments. But what we found, and one of the beauties of being in a different medium than we had worked in before, is that you figure out what actually works for the medium. And for podcasts, that hyper-scripted segments are not funny. They just don’t work well. What works better is having a fabulous host and interviewer like Gabe, who brings humor organically. We just trust that it’s going to be funny— we know Gabe is going to bring the humor, he is going to bring the joy, and he is going to connect with the subject in a way that subject isn’t going to suspect, and they are going to bond over something delightful and hilarious. We always end up with these funny moments we put at the end of the episode as our “most disruptive moment.” They’re always unexpected and improvised, which makes them unique. Which, again, we both come from scripted comedy and improv backgrounds, so it makes sense that humor shows up more naturally in conversation. Therefore, when we’re writing questions, we can put on our “nerd hat” and ask the most sincere, intense questions of all time, because we can trust that Gabe will bring the humor and the levity.

Lauren: You have to make them laugh so you can make them cry, right?

Sasha: Absolutely, and we also start interviews with a softer question to warm-up our interview subjects. Not start with “what is this most traumatic experience like?”

julio torres—creator and star, fantasmas (we disrupt this broadcast (season 2)

Gabe: And some folks we are interviewing are already primed to talk about these dark topics in comedic ways, since they are dealing in satire. Fantasmas is a great example—critiquing the isolationism caused by late capitalism through weird vignettes. Severance (Apple TV) was another great example of that, where we got to talk to Ben Stiller, the cast, and production. It’s refreshing to see so many shows embrace satire to critique the world around us. Comedy can be a powerful tool to lay the world bare as it is without being totally depressing, but isn’t afraid to speak the truth, right? That conversational tone is where we can find the happy balance as Sasha had said. As a team, as writers and hosts, we’ve melded together into a Monstro Elisasue voice. I don’t feel like the podcast is just my voice—sometimes he’ll read one of Sasha’s questions and say, “Wow, I was trying to ask that, but it took me three sentences and inarticulate words, and Sasha said it in a sentence and a half. So, love that question!” We mold ourselves to fit each other because we bring different strengths to the table. But the podcast has evolved to meet the moment. We ask: what do our listeners need? What’s the world around us saying? How can we be reflective of that, rather than imposing a rigid structure on our interview series?

Sasha: And the other thing that I think is so great and special about our podcast is that we also give ourselves the opportunity to talk to experts. So, we know that if we want to have a lighter interview with our main subject, we can then pivot into the more hardcore, gritty stuff with our interview guests. In that Fantasmas episode, Gabe and Julio had an amazing conversation that was super funny, very emotional, and in-depth. But then when we talked to Andrew DeWaard, it was like, okay, now let’s get into: what does financialization of culture mean, what are the six aspects of financialization, and what exactly is private equity? And I’m finally going to understand that for the first time in my life.

Gabe:  And I will say, just to get brutally honest here for a second, there was a moment during that interview with Andrew DeWaard where he called out the specific CEO of a company as an example of something he’s talking about in his book. In conversations with production, we review notes for everything, and our producer flagged it: is it okay that we say this? I would say that in 8 out of 10 places I’ve worked, whether TV or publications, folks clutch their pearls at a guest calling out a CEO of a powerful company that directly and citing them as the problem and cause of all these symptoms we are outlining. I remember we talked to Jeff about it, and Jeff was like, “Well, that’s the guest’s opinion, so I don’t see why we should censor them.” And that was that.

It feels so liberating to work on a team that isn’t caught up in corporate webs of having to answer to people. It was just like, “hey, we brought on this guest, they’re the best person to talk about this, let’s talk about it honestly.” And if that means pointing a finger to better illustrate their point, then let’s do it. I really appreciate that. It’s less censorship than I’ve faced at major networks that claim to speak truth to power. It’s refreshing, and it feels liberating as a comedian, too, to be able to say, yes, let’s laugh at the guy that canceled the Acme movie that’s coming back anyway because people wanted to see it. I want to do that.

Lauren: That’s awesome to hear that you don’t have to worry about the PR of it all, the studio heads, or the gatekeepers that writers are always trying to get through. You have this space to just be honest and let the guests be honest, and that’s awesome that Jeff was on board with that as well. Do you have any thoughts on how listeners should engage with the podcast beyond just consuming it? Are there other actions or conversations you hope it sparks?

Sasha: What I hope our listeners take away is, first, to think about the culture they consume more critically. To consider what it’s saying, how it makes them think, how it makes them feel. I hope they then talk to their friends and family about it.

We’ve had so many great episodes this year, but I cannot stop talking to my friends about the Fantasmas episode. If I’m that engaged, I’m hopeful our listeners are too. When we talked to Tony Gilroy about Andor Season 2, about fascism and authoritarianism and how leaders are born in crises, I hope listeners took something away about how to act in our current climate. Or in our Bad Sisters (Apple TV) episode, we had an incredible expert talking about divorce, and it made me think about divorce in a way I never had before. I hope listeners, too, thought, “Wow, I’m empowered to see this differently,” or “I never realized I was feeding into cultural bias against divorced women, and the pressure for women to stay in marriages that are bad for them.” So, I hope the podcast is engaging on multiple levels, and that it helps people have difficult, but also fun, conversations with their friends and family.

Gabe: I want to echo something Sasha said earlier about the importance of the experts. One of the greatest takeaways from any episode is their perspectives—their insights into the themes we’re talking about. We had this incredible episodeabout Pachinko (Apple TV). We interviewed the showrunner, but we also spoke with comedian Youngmi Mayer about her Korean heritage and her memoir. I hope people who listen to that episode and watched Pachinko also walk away wanting to read her book or hear her stand-up. She is an incredible comedian. Her themes dovetailed perfectly with the show, offering a modern, irreverent take on a similar story. I like to think we always bring complementary materials or suggested additional reading for people who want to go deeper. If you’re a nerd like us, you can learn more or discover a new historical fact or genre you hadn’t considered before. I hope these experts can expand that universe for you.

Sasha: To that end, we did an episode with Amber Seeley of Out of My Mind, a Disney+ movie about a young woman with cerebral palsy. It’s about accessibility and disability representation, and it’s incredible. The interview was fascinating because she talked about how much better her set was when she made it fully accessible. It wasn’t just for disabled folks on set—it made everyone’s lives better. I hope it sparks people to think, “If I’m an architect, why don’t I design with accessibility in mind? Not just because I have to do it because of ADA, but because it makes everyone’s lives better.” Similarly, our expert in that episode also talked about barriers to accessible and integrated education. It totally blew my mind, and I hope it makes parents listening think differently: is my school accessible? Are my kids getting the education they deserve? Or, if they’re facing those educational barriers, they’ll realize they’re not alone—there are activists everywhere fighting for change.

Lauren: I think one of the things that I love hearing you guys talk about here and on the podcast is this perfect combination of the academic side of things—that a lot of us in media studies are writing about in the journals—and TV creators and writers are creating for television, and you're melding them together, and then bringing it to the public. And the podcast medium allows them to listen to it while they're doing other things; they don’t need to sit and read through the dense research. Yet it can still spark these conversations that we’re all trying to have in different ways. So, I'm so glad that this podcast exists. It’s been fun to listen to!

To wrap up, congratulations again, Sasha, for being a writer on the Emmy nominated Dying for Sex (Hulu). I would love if you could share more of your thoughts on this experience.

dying for sex – Emmy nominee, outstanding limited series nominee

Sasha: Working on Dying for Sex was the career highlight of my life. I had cancer several years ago, I have a number of health issues, and so getting to work on a show that was similar to what we get to talk about on We Disrupt This Broadcast…it was a show that was not afraid to take on these big subjects in a way that is funny, that in our show is very sexy; it was truly the joy of my life.

One of my favorite things that happened with the show, just on a personal level was that I made my therapist cry—because when she watched the series, she said, “I can’t believe how much of our journey that we have been on together that you put on screen.” That’s one of the beautiful things of working on a narrative show: you get to take the difficult, personal experiences and show them authentically through characters who grow and change. And one of the blessings of therapy is you get to grow and change. You get to grow alongside your characters and heal alongside your characters.

An aspect of the show was about how women in particular are often perceived in the healthcare space, are often dismissed in the healthcare space. I think that is something that has happened to me over the course of the last 15 years of my life. It was a huge growth for me being able to express that through a character, and hopefully helps a lot of women who are currently going through the healthcare system advocate for themselves and learn how to talk to their doctors and trust themselves in these really difficult situations. It is really inspiring to me to be able to create characters to model how to do it right. The Sonya character is somebody who I really hope exists a lot more of in the world, because there are so many people who I met in the healthcare system who are trying to make it better—trying to be Sonyas. My oncologist in particular is somebody who was really very wonderful, and a true partner in my experience. So, to show—here's the reality, here’s how it often is—but it doesn't have to be that way. I think that’s one of the beautiful things about narrative TV and trying to disrupt these narratives. You can both authenticate people’s feelings, validate people’s feelings, like, yes, this is the horrible problems we're seeing, and then also model a better future.

Lauren: Incredible. I want to thank you again so much for being here and talking with me today. You both have such insight and wonderful enthusiasm, and I am excited for our readers to engage with your work and the podcast!

Biographies

Gabe González is a Puerto Rican comedian, writer and actor living in Brooklyn, NY. He can be seen in Season 4 of The Last OG, the HBO Latino documentary Habla y Vota, and starred in Audible’s The Comedians. His pilot ‘Los Blancos’ was a winner at the Yes And Laughter Lab in 2019 and his satirical sketch “Bootlickers” was an official selection at the LA Comedy Film Festival and Atlanta Comedy Festival in 2022. He’s hosted and produced digital videos for places like MTV, GLAAD and Remezcla, and performed stand-up across the country. His most recent projects include a monthly queer comedy show in NYC called ‘The Lavender Scare’ and working with Imagine Entertainment to pen the short film Alma, available on Amazon.

Sasha Stewart is a Writers Guild Award-nominated TV writer, producer, and creator who creates work that elicits joy, has a positive impact, and gives her an excuse to eat craft services. She most recently staffed on the critically-acclaimed, 9x Emmy-nominated limited-series dramedy Dying for Sex (FX), starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate, available to watch now on Hulu (U.S.) and Disney+ (Worldwide). Her TV credits include: Amend: The Fight For America (Netflix), The Fix (Netflix), and The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (Comedy Central). She also writes for the Peabody Awards podcast, We Disrupt This Broadcast. Sasha is a winner of the 2024 NRDC Climate Storytelling Fellowship for her and co-creator Casey Rand’s half-hour comedy pilot, Bill on Earth. A PSA starring Jane Fonda she co-wrote aired on CBS Sunday Morning in November 2024. She participated in the 2020 Comedy Think Tank on Paid Family Leave, the 2023 Stand Up For Humans comedy show, and is a winner of the 2020 Yes and… Laughter Lab. She is now part of the Laughter Lab’s Leadership Committee. She contributes to the New Yorker, McSweeney's, and Cosmopolitan. She developed a women’s healthcare docuseries with Samantha Bee and Soledad O’Brien. She’s currently developing an animated half-hour comedy, a lighthearted legal procedural, and has she mentioned you look absolutely radiant today?

Lauren Alexandra Sowa is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at Pepperdine University. She received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and has a BFA in Acting from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her research focuses on intersectional feminism and representation within production cultures, television, and popular culture and has been published in The International Journal of Communication and Communication, Culture and Critique. These interests stem from her several-decade career in the entertainment industry as member of SAG/AFTRA and AEA. Lauren is a proud "Disney Adult" and enthusiast of many fandoms. Lauren is also a Pop Junctions associate editor.

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

To kick off our “Emmys Watch” series, Pop Junctions spotlights a podcast that goes deeper into impactful television content. The Peabody Awards continue to champion what they call “stories that matter”—narratives that don’t just entertain, but engage us as citizens. In this interview, Jeffrey Jones, Executive Director of the Peabody Awards and co-creator of the podcast We Disrupt This Broadcast, speaks with one of Pop Junctions’ associate editors, Lauren Alexandra Sowa, about how the podcast extends the Peabody Awards’ mission. 

We disrupt this broadcast logo

Lauren: I wanted to start off by saying thank you so much for joining me today and talking about your amazing podcast, We Disrupt This Broadcast. Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of the podcast, what inspired this idea, and how does it complement the mission of the Peabody Awards?

peabody awards logo

Jeffrey:  Yeah, so, a couple things. The Peabody Awards are located at the University of Georgia and, as an educational mission, we feel like we have more to do than just hand someone an award, pat them on the back, and say, “good job, put it on your Vita, see you next year.” Which is to say, everything that Peabody recognizes are what we call “stories that matter,” and we really mean that. Not so much “matter” to us as consumers, but “matters” to us as citizens. That mandate of a story that “matters” to us as citizens means that often the stuff we recognize may not be known by many people, including within the industry itself. We do entertainment, news, documentary, public service, children's, and podcasting. So, there's a lot of materials that aren't always well known. 

We disrupt this broadcast podcast logo

The second thing about this was this understanding that, since I joined Peabody in 2013, we’ve been living through what scholars call the streaming era. And the streaming era has been massively disruptive to the typical flow of events, and I don't need to articulate all that here. The system was created in a non-advertiser-centric programming flow, and did accentuate prestige programming. But, in that process, a lot of diverse and emerging voices were allowed to create programming: Mo (Netflix), Ramy (Hulu), We Are Lady Parts (Peacock), Pose (FX), Transparent (Amazon Prime), Reservation Dogs (FX), and, I could go on and on, but you get the point—the industry has opened up, allowing more really creative showrunners and storytellers and creatives to tell their stories, which used to be much more marginalized voices. 

So, the title is, We Disrupt This Broadcast, and it's so focused on disruption. It's focused on the text and the showrunners—the creatives who are producing these texts that we find disruptive to the industry. The focus is on entertainment television. Almost all have won a Peabody. It is one of the ways in which these kinds of stories are doing something a little different from the broadcast era of television.

Lauren: That's great! It's exciting to hear that you're talking about disruption on the content side of things, because I feel like, as you had mentioned earlier, that a lot of discourse surrounding “television disruption” centers the industrial impact side of things. Many of us are familiar with Amanda Lotz's book, We Now Disrupt This Broadcast, which traces that history. What differentiates your podcast and why I find it a compelling listen is how you're focusing more on what that content is, who the creators are, and what they're bringing to the cultural conversation.

Jeffrey: Exactly. It is disruption and a narrative and cultural flow. Peabody feels very good about the diverse and emerging voices. So, a lot of those people that I named—Mo, Ramy, We Are Lady Parts—there are three shows that have Muslim representation. All were very new showrunners when they won a Peabody Award. The same with Sterlin Harjo and Reservation Dogs. So, those are emerging voices, and they often come out of the gate really strong. They produce Peabody-winning shows, and we want to highlight that. 

The podcast is focused on two things: one is an interview with the showrunner and or major talent on the show—traditionally just getting into what they're doing and how and why. The second part of the podcast is strongly emphasized by our producing partners. So, our producing partner is the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University, headed by Caty Borum. In particular, it's an interview with an expert—an academic, a journalist, who can reflect on the kind of cultural, political, and economic dimensions of what makes this show or the showrunner relevant. So, it's grounding the popular, cultural text in the moment of the political, economic, and social context in which it exists.

Lauren: Oftentimes, I feel like we, as academics, try to find this balance between the celebratory part of media and being critical as well. So, would it be fair to say then that in this podcast, you are taking the content that we want to celebrate, and analyzing how it's being critical of culture or critical of these moments?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I think the second expert interview is the moment of more traditional critical analysis. And of course, we don't have a monopoly on that. There's plenty of authors. Though we interview lots of professors, they just aren't often media studies professors. One of the great things is we're often talking to psychologists, to economics professors, to sociologists and others. So, it broadens the conversation. I think the critical component is to reflect on how the text sits within culture, what it illuminates. I do think there's a celebratory part to the podcast. I mean, we're celebrating when we give them a Peabody Award, right? But the critical part of the analysis is that it's really hard to win a Peabody Award. You know, only about 7 to 10 shows win a Peabody in a given year. So, critically, we've cut out a lot that don't belong. And the ones that are there, we are celebrating. And again, I think for the right reasons, because they are doing something in the streaming era that wasn't on television when I was a kid. It didn't exist. Frankly, when you and I were growing up, it wasn't the same kind of text. For the industrial reasons of advertising and the kind of competition, monopoly of the three, four networks, etc. 

Lauren: I know that this year, Hacks is an example of a show that has both a Peabody Award and an Emmy nomination, but that kind of crossover doesn’t happen all that often. How do you see the Peabody Awards intersecting with the Emmys? Do you think the Peabody’s can help reach a broader audience? The Emmys often reflect the political canvassing of the Hollywood scene to win. While the Peabody’s seem to focus more on meaningful content without the campaigning. So, in a broader context, what does that say? And how do you think we can bridge the gap between the two to bring that kind of content to a wider audience?

Jeffrey: Yeah, well, I'd start with that, you know, most people don't realize our process. So, Peabody meets 3 times face-to-face. And it is an award that is decided across genres and platforms: television, radio, podcasting, and interactive, which is games and VR, etc. And across genre: entertainment, news, documentary, etc. But in particular, it's decided by a unanimous vote of a board of 18 people. And those 18 people represent lots of different facets. There's critics, which include academics and TV critics, media executives, writers, and showrunners. And I want to compare the face-to-face critical deliberation that we engage in as to who will be a winner is different from a campaign for 26,000 voting members, in which you have no control of what they've watched and what they've not watched. So, they're very different processes. You know, Aziz Ansari was famous for coming to our show and saying, “You know, this is pretty cool. It's like you watch all of our shit, and you just decided it was good, and we didn't have to go to a bunch of weird-ass parties and stuff, you know?”

Lauren: Ha! That’s great!

Jeffrey: So, by being different processes, they are different things. Ours is also not just about the craft: it is, is it a story that matters? So, sometimes the craft can be brilliant, but it may not be a story that matters.

But, back to your question about crossover: yeah, there are popular shows like Hacks (HBO Max), The Last of Us (HBO Max), The Bear (FX), Ted Lasso (Apple TV)—they win Peabody's, they win Emmys. But between the voting process, and really somewhat even the criteria of what we're looking for, that crossover can exist, but may not. And often, it probably doesn't. Peabody will often recognize shows truly on their merits, and not the political forces that shape multi-million-dollar campaigns by the industry players to influence votes.

Lauren: Absolutely. So, now, as someone who has studied and shaped media discourse, what has surprised you most in your conversations about the podcast, or something that was unexpected?

we disrupt this broadcast (season 2, feb 6, 2025) with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein

Jeffrey: Not really. It's just a privilege to be able to talk to showrunners about their craft. It's a privilege to look for themes. I mean, I think we probably interview a little differently than journalists, probably because we're academics. We want to dig into the text a bit more than a traditional media trade publication, journalist interview. So, I think about my interview with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein about Shrinking (Apple TV)  and Ted Lasso (Apple TV). You know, I'm a man of a certain age, and so is Bill, and I literally said it in that way, and he laughed, said, yes, we are. And we got to talk about toxic masculinity and therapy, and then with Shrinking, about forgiveness, and the textual themes that are percolating across both of those shows. So, in that regard, I feel not so much surprised as by what a privilege it is to hold that conversation.

Lauren: You had a successful two seasons of the podcast. Are there plans for season three as well? What do you see as the future for We Disrupt this Broadcast?

Jeffrey: There are indeed. We will launch Season 3 either later this year or early 2026. We're very happy. I should give a shout out to our producing partner, PRX (Public Radio Exchange), which produces a lot of quality podcasts. They reached out to us to produce this show, and we couldn't be happier. They're quality folks, and I'm very happy to still support public radio even through the PRX avenue.

Lauren: Well, I think that our audience, or our readers, would definitely enjoy listening to this podcast. I just started, too, and I think it's excellent. Gabe Gonzalez does a wonderful job with his interviews. One of the things that strikes me is that it is academic, but it is incredibly entertaining and very human. I think that's one of the best parts about listening to it, and I think that's what makes it engaging for people who study this and people who don't. I think it's accessible to everyone.

Jeffrey: One of the things that's great about our podcast, I think, and I'm a huge Gabe Gonzalez fan, is that he's a comedian, and extremely smart, and extremely talented.

Lauren: Agreed! Thank you again so much. Is there anything else you want to share or add that I didn't ask about that you would want everyone to know?

Jeffrey: That's a great one, always a great question. One of the things is that Peabody is a very respected award. It's existed for 85 years, it predates the Emmys, because we were recognizing radio broadcasting first. And there's still so much integrity to the award and love for the award in the industry. But the Peabody's, because of its position a little outside the industry, and at a university, there's a little bit of a moral imperative, if you will. It's not just the base to win a Peabody on popularity, but this is the way storytelling does something for us as citizens. So, I think one of the things that's great about the podcast is it's leaning into that. It's not just celebrating entertainment. It's trying to talk about the ways that popular culture and entertainment can deeply shape who we are and want to be as a people, as empathetic citizens in the world. And that's, of course, what Henry Jenkins' whole career has been built on, and why Henry identifies with Peabody and contributed to it for 6 years.

It's that kind of imperative, I think, that we believe, like Henry does, that entertainment can be a positive force, especially in an era when so much news media is seen as rejectable.

As a rejectable truth, as something that you’re buying a brand that's no different than the politics that you adhere to. But when you're telling stories that are deeply empathetic about people and the world that aren't like you, maybe there's an avenue for people to watch it as entertainment and see a part of the world, or even a part of themselves that they weren't in touch with, and that they'll give more credence to, and more love for, and more empathy for. And that's what popular entertainment can do. And to me, that's what the Peabody Awards lean into when we do entertainment programming, but it's especially what this podcast does.

Lauren: That's beautifully stated. I was going to say, that's why art and pop culture (it's all the same thing, right?) makes us human and, like you said, tells the stories about who we are as a people. It's why most of us study this, and why we dedicate our lives to it, right?

Jeffrey: Sure, absolutely, for sure. For sure.

Lauren: That's great. Well, thank you again so much, Jeff. I really appreciate it. This was a really fun, very informative conversation.

Biographies

Jeffrey P. Jones is the Executive Director of the George Foster Peabody Awards at the University of Georgia and Lambdin Kay Chair for the Peabodys in the Department of Entertainment & Media Studies. Jones became only the fifth director of the Peabody Awards in 2013. He holds a Ph.D. in Radio-TV-Film from The University of Texas at Austin. In conjunction with the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University and produced by PRX, Peabody launched a podcast in 2023—WE DISRUPT THIS BROADCAST—celebrating entertainment winners through the lens of cultural and industrial disruption in the streaming era. Professor Jones is the author and editor of six books, including Entertaining Politics: Satiric Television and Civic Engagement, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, and The Essential HBO Reader.  His research and teaching focuses on popular politics, or the ways in which politics are engaged through popular culture.

Lauren Alexandra Sowa is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at Pepperdine University. She received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and has a BFA in Acting from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her research focuses on intersectional feminism and representation within production cultures, television, and popular culture and has been published in The International Journal of Communication and Communication, Culture and Critique. These interests stem from her several-decade career in the entertainment industry as member of SAG/AFTRA and AEA. Lauren is a proud "Disney Adult" and enthusiast of many fandoms. Lauren is also a Pop Junctions associate editor.

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

SEE PART ONE SEE PART TWO BUY FRAMES OF FANDOM

books 1 and 2 in the frames of fandom series

Through both books the examples of fandom used are a mix of primarily North American fan cultures along with mentions of non-Anglophone ones, such as k-pop. While this mix certainly accomplishes the goal of showing the diversity of fandom spaces/objects/practices, how does the series also accommodate adequate consideration of the differences between them and the role of conflict in contemporary fandom communities? (Specifically, Book 2's overview of kinds of fans and their relationship to both each other and media texts/industries mentions the idea of fandom being where fans of marginalized identities can “appropriate” texts and refashion them to their own ends. There is also a side-bar that discusses the different ideas of appropriation and their complications, which is well taken. How does this discussion of audiences and their motivations interface with work on fandom spaces that has highlighted the roles racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc continue to play in fandom communities and their reworkings of media texts?) 

Henry: These are questions we’ve struggled with as we have been writing these books. The past decade has seen thorough and evolving critiques of fandom studies on the basis of race in particular, and we want to do the best we can to acknowledge those critiques and factor them into our considerations. We do so with an awareness that there is going to be a tension between the importance of representing a broad range of perspectives on these topics and also recognizing that as two white Anglo-American authors, this is not necessarily “our story to tell.”

All I can say is that we are trying to find our balance within this shifting terrain, and one way we do so is by highlighting the work of fandom scholars of color across all of these volumes and representing these debates through the insights they provide us. Fandom as Audience includes discussions of racebending Harry Potter, for example, that include the interpretive and expressive work of Black fans doing fan art and fan fiction to illustrate Stuart Hall’s notion of negotiated readings. Our book on Fandom as Subcultureforegrounds the example of a Black Disney bounder, considers the case of hijab cosplay, discusses the ways Black fans work around their marginalization in the mass media texts that inspire much of cosplay practice, and much more.  Fandom as a Public situates the recent discussions about “toxic fandom” or racism in fandom in the larger context of Nancy Frazier’s critique of Habermas’s claims about the “equal access to all” offered by the public sphere that emerge from his idealized understanding of the early modern European coffee houses. We show that contradictions about inclusion and exclusion surround the notion of the public from the start, and that we should not be shocked, though it is critical to understand, that fandom often falls short of its utopian ideals about creating a safe space for all who share passion for the same object.

One of the challenges, then, with trying to represent the broadest range of different perspectives and experiences through the books is that we can only represent the work that is already out there, and thus we are doomed to reproduce some of the blind spots in the existing literature. Our hope is that in mapping the field, we make the strengths and limitations of this work visible to emerging scholars, so they can focus their energies in ways that allow them to make original contributions.

Something similar can be said about the shift of fandom studies to encompass diversity on a transnational or transcultural, if not yet global, scale. My own current interests include supporting and amplifying work on fandoms in East Asia, particularly China.  I have started a research network that is bringing together a mix of researchers based in the United States, China, Korea, Japan, and beyond to do collaborative and comparative work together. This research group has two special issues of journals under development, one for the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and one for the Shanghai-based journal Emerging Media.We include such perspectives in every book in the series, but we also focus on it more explicitly in the Fandom as a Force of Globalization and Fan Locations books.

There and elsewhere, we pay attention to the tensions between pop cosmopolitanism/transcultural fandom (forms that connect across national borders) and fan nationalism (conflicts that seek to align fandom to national interests and to police borders between cultures). This is one of the key conflicts within fandom today, and to understand it, we may need to try to keep multiple and seemingly contradictory insights in mind at the same time. We signal the potential mobilization of fandom and fan-like structures by global strongmen in Defining Fandom, and we explore other forms of “toxic” or conflictual forms of fandom throughout all of the books. Our forthcoming book on Fandom as Public discusses some of the research on QAnon that has emerged within fandom studies, but we also look at ASMR fandom as a space where a more healing or therapeutic function emerged during the pandemic lockdown. We talk about the ways that the Chinese state encourages an entanglement between fandom and the national interests that restricts what can be said but also requires the performance of nationalism. But we also discuss how the free speech and participatory ethos of the Archive of Our Own struggles to deal with the structural and systemic racism that make it a sometimes uncomfortable space for fans of color.

We certainly have our own biases as researchers and mine includes a framing of the opportunities for cultural and political participation that fandom affords that is more optimistic than that of scholars drawn from critical theory and political economy. We also want to provide an overview of the field as a whole and that includes citing critiques of fandom and fandom studies. 

I appreciate your acknowledgement of the ways we discuss appropriation. From the start, fandom studies has centered on the ways diverse audiences appropriate and rework resources from mass culture as the basis of participatory culture. This has included the ways that groups marginalized in the source text speak back to media producers and re-story the media. Yet, we also have to acknowledge that there are ongoing critiques of cultural appropriation which have rendered that term problematic. How do we reconcile the two? Writers like Mikhal Bakhtin tell us that all cultural expression involves appropriation – the language we use does not come pristine from a dictionary but from other people’s mouths. Rather than a simple dismissal of appropriation, which would be inconsistent with other aspects of the field, we should ask harder questions and offer more nuanced accounts of the ethics of appropriation. When is it appropriate to appropriate?

I am not sure we have the answers to this question yet and perhaps not even the best framework for asking it, but at least we are acknowledging the problem here and considering some ways people are trying to address it. In Defining Fandom, there is a similar section where we consider the metaphor of consumer tribes and tribalism as it has been developed in consumer culture research and critique it from perspectives drawn from indigenous studies.

Biographies

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.

BOOK 2: FANDOM AS AUDIENCE

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

BUY FRAMES OF FANDOM

Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

SEE PART ONE

what is a ‘fan’?

I'm curious about the conceptualization of what a “fan” is. Does that definition change between books? 

Rob: We took special care to define what we mean by “fan,” “fanship,” and “fandom” early in the series, and we did this not because we thought the terms were unfamiliar, but because we found that they were being used inconsistently, even by experts. Sometimes “fandom” referred to an individual’s enthusiasm, for instance, but at other times it described a collective entity. We needed to have that conceptual clarity to move forward with the other work we wanted to do in the series. So, although the definition does not change from book to book, it does develop, and we add nuance to its various elements. We build on them, return to the definition, even challenge it from different angles—but, fortunately, the foundation holds.

Our distinction is rather simple, yet essential. Fanship is a personal, passionate relationship between an individual and a fan object. It’s an orientation, an emotional and cognitive investment in a piece of culture: a team, a singer, a show, a brand, a game. Fandom, by contrast, is what happens when that fanship becomes social. When fans affiliate with others, when they participate in shared rituals, critique, creativity, or community, they enter into fandom. Fandom is thus always a collective formation of some kind. It includes norms, histories, values, and practices that are produced, shared, and sometimes contested by its members.

We think this distinction is powerful because it travels. It works across domains—music, sports, fashion, theme parks, politics, celebrity, brands. It respects solitary fans who have never set foot in a forum or a fan con, while also giving us language to talk about the intense collective energies that swirl around franchises like BTS, Formula One, Taylor Swift, and the UFC. It helps us map different kinds of involvement without being forced into ranking them. It also allows us to develop and accommodate the many digital advances that have altered the terrain, trajectory, and capacities of fans and fandoms, most notably those involving social media.

We also emphasize that fandom is not a static identity. It moves, changing through our lives and across our different activities. Fans shift in and out of fandoms over time. Their levels of involvement change. Our framework accommodates that fluidity, offering something more than a typology, and less than a rigid model. It’s a way to think about how people organize meaning through the passionate cultural engagements they form both alone and together.

So no, the definition doesn’t change. But it does get tested, elaborated, and put to work. That was the point. We didn’t want to assume we already knew what fandom was. We wanted to build a foundation strong enough to support fifteen books and flexible enough to grow with them. 

Henry: Each frame allows us to see things we would not see otherwise. Star Trek surfaces in almost all of the books because it was the starting point for both of us and because it has been so foundational for both media fandom and fandom studies. Other fandoms, such as those around Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, K-pop and Harry Potter, appear often across the books. Each time they surface, though, we add some new depth as we look at them from another vantage point. We may discuss how Black fans of Harry Potter explore the possibilities of a mixed-race Hermoine in Fandom as Audience and fan responses to J. K. Rowlings’ transphobic comments in Fandom as Activism.  Other examples are more local – we consider how Netflix has built Wednesday to address multiple audiences in Fandom as Audience or how a public sphere about gender and sexuality issues surfaces around the comic books Sex Criminal and Bitch Planet in Fandom as Public or how Good Omens inspired an online exploration of spirituality issues in Fandom as Devotion.

In terms of the purpose of these books, at one point you mention that you hope the series will help practitioners – marketers, brand managers – to interact with fan communities on the principle of “do no harm.” How does this work within contemporary fandom spaces which are increasingly polarized and where “harm” can be conceptualized very differently by different fan groups? Is there a consideration of ethical issues facing fandom researchers and practitioners? Is there a space for discussion of toxicity in fandom? 

Henry: We do not have a separate book on fan ethics – perhaps we should. But I’d like to think that ethical issues – for researchers, for practitioners, and for fans – surface across every book in the series. The goal of creating a conversation between fandom studies and consumer culture research is not to teach industry how to better “exploit” fans but to help them to understand the richness and complexity of fandom as a site of cultural experience within the context of a consumer economy. To serve those ends, we often include passages that show points of friction between fans and industry – for example, book 2 includes a discussion of the concept of fans as surplus audiences, how Alfred Martin has taken up the concept of “surplus Blackness” as a means of critiquing the racial assumptions guiding contemporary franchises, and the ways that “queer baiting” has been critiqued within fandom studies. In Fandom as Co-Creation, we dig deep into the literature on fan labor and explain why many existing industry practices that claim to “honor” fans actually exploit them. We link this work to the debates around the Paramount guidelines on Star Trek fan cinema and a larger consideration of intellectual property law, transformative works, and fair use.  

We definitely will be taking up sites of conflict between different groups of fans, including reactionary backlash by white male fans against women and fans of color, and we definitely deal with the growing literature on so-called “toxic” fan cultures, especially in Fandom as Public. I am sure we will face criticism on the balance of different perspectives here. Even with the large canvas this book series provides us, we will not be able to discuss everyone and everything, and our own blindness and privilege will be on display. But in creating this framework, we will create something that other scholars can push against and call attention to what is still missing in a field of research that for too long was shaped by presumptions of whiteness and Anglo-Americanness.

Rob: Yes, “do no harm” is a principle we offer to practitioners, but we don’t mean it naively. We’re fully aware that harm, like toxicity, is a contested category. What one fan sees as righteous defense of their values, another sees as overreaction or harassment. What a marginalized fan calls a reasonable and direct critique, a showrunner might experience as outlandish abuse. And from the point of view of an authoritarian government, even playful remix culture or satire can read as dangerous thought crime. So when we talk about harm in fandom spaces, we’re talking about something that always has to be contextualized socially, culturally, and politically. 

Fandom gives people a channel for strong feelings. Love, anger, grief, obsession, loyalty, and betrayal: fan communities are pulsing with these emotions. In an age when formal institutions often fail to reflect people’s values or listen to their concerns, fandom has become one of the few arenas where people feel like they can speak together about and maybe even back to power, or act to reshape culture in their own image or into forms that suit them better. That’s why governments monitor fan spaces. That’s why platforms struggle to manage fan conflicts. That’s why brands court fans and fear them at the same time.

We’re not trying to sanitize that energy, though. We respect it, and we are doing our utmost to try to understand it. Across the series, we return to the idea that fandom is a passionate form of cultural participation, not a passive state of appreciation. It’s not neat, and it’s not always polite. Sometimes it’s defiant. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s cruel. But it is always meaningful to those within it. And when that passion becomes collective—when it organizes, critiques, remixes, or revolts—it forces industry and institutions to listen. That’s not toxicity. That’s power and culture being built and rebuilt.

Of course, there are behaviors that cross lines. There are moments when fandom mirrors or reproduces structural harms—racism, misogyny, queerphobia, nationalism. We don’t make excuses for those things, of course, but we also don’t believe you can understand or engage with fandom by labeling entire communities as “toxic” from the outside. Those elements, like racism and misogyny, are not particular to fandoms or fans–they are all around us, and some fans express them, as one would expect. There is a bigger picture, however, in the study of how norms are negotiated within fan cultures, how boundaries are drawn, how accountability functions—or fails to. Those are interesting and important discussions to have, beyond simply labeling this or that phenomenon or behavior as “toxic” or “inclusive.” We think this sort of intellectual elaboration happens alongside viewing fandoms not only as expressive publics, but as moral economies, with their own forms of justice, solidarity, and exclusion.

Ethics, in that sense, is not a separate topic in the series. It runs through every volume, because we are always asking what these relationships—between fans and brands, fans and each other, fans and society—require and demand. We don’t claim to have the final word. But we hope the series opens space for that ongoing conversation and models the kind of respect and critical generosity that we believe fandom itself, at its best, embodies.

 More to come in Part Three.

Biographies

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

BUY FRAMES OF FANDOM

Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

henry jenkins and a furry fan

The books (esp. book 1) straddle autobiography and autoethnography. In your minds, is there a separation between the two (and does there need to be?) and how does your own personal background affect the books?

Henry: It would be hard to exclude the autoethnographic/autobiographical voice from a book on the field of fandom studies. As we discuss in Fandom as Subculture (not yet published), the aca-fan stance has been a founding and defining trait of fandom studies. We pay tribute there to the work of Angela McRobbie, whose influence I have come to see as absolutely foundational to my own work in Textual Poachers. In her “Settling Accounts” essay, she calls out the male researchers at Birmingham who were writing about various British subcultures without acknowledging their own involvement with them. She advocated a feminist standpoint epistemology as the intellectually honest way to approach such terrain. I would say the passages in the books where we write about our experiences as fans are a fulfillment of those principles.

I have often been reluctant to go full autoethnography in the past when writing about, say, female fan fiction writers in Textual Poachers, for fear that as a male scholar I would be taking up too much space or redirecting attention away from the feminist/feminine project of fan fiction. But, here, I can tap my own participation in, say, the monster culture of the 1960s as we examine the ways it deployed a range of domestic technologies and practices – from monster models to my mother’s eyeshadow, which I appropriated for monster make-up, to a super-8 camera or a Disney record of haunted house sounds or the photocopier from my dad’s company – to encourage and enable new forms of participatory culture.

Our use of the first-person is also a challenge to the anonymous voice with which most textbooks are written and the reason why such “nonhuman” prose becomes deadly to read. We often use first person to call attention to the forms of association between people that shape our scholarship, seeing scholarship as emerging through conversations, debates, and even confrontations between human beings. This is something I never got from a textbook: understanding here who our mentors were, who our students were, who our collaborators are, to help readers grasp the collaborative nature of scholarship. We don’t like the mind/body split implied when we focus exclusively on ideas without acknowledging the people behind them. 

Rob: There is a distinction between autobiography and autoethnography, and it’s a meaningful one, although perhaps it is not always a hard and fast boundary. We certainly do straddle it in Defining Fandom and across the series, and we do that very intentionally. Autobiography, traditionally, is about self-expression and narrative coherence, where the telling of a life, or a slice of it, foregrounds the personal and the idiosyncratic because it is interesting and entertaining in itself. Autoethnography, on the other hand, takes that personal slice and uses it for a purpose–it refracts it through conceptual lenses and asks, “What does this story help us understand about culture, media, society, technology or something else? What frameworks does it offer to us, which does it challenge, which does it expand upon?” 

Our series, and especially the first book, mobilizes autobiography in the service of autoethnography. So we are not just telling stories about our youthful engagements with Batman, Gilligan’s Island, or Pogo comics because we think they might be charming tales or nostalgic trips down memory lane (which, sometimes, they might be). We're using them to get at some of the finer conceptual points of fandom, to calibrate, through the lens of our own experiences, its meaning across personal, cultural, commercial, sacred, and other territories. 

This requires a kind of careful attunement. We are aware that who we are—our backgrounds, identities, affiliations, fascinations, values, emotional repertoires, and much more—shapes how we understand fandom, and even what aspects of fandom we consider meaningful. But rather than bracketing that influence, we try to make it central. Positionality in qualitative research doesn’t eliminate subjectivity (that is inevitable in all research) but it does seek to make it visible so that we can make it count in our interpretations. It acknowledges that who we are shapes what we see, how we interpret, what we choose to write down and leave out. Like I tell my students when I teach qualitative research methods, positionality isn’t a bug: it’s a feature of cultural inquiry. By placing our subjectivities in full view, we treat them not as something which distorts or “biases” our perspectives but as instruments that can be adjusted for, cross-checked, and interpreted in light of their specific strengths and limitations–something we are doing constantly behind the scenes as we write this book series and try to adjust for our mutual blind spots. 

That said, although we have some key similarities, we don't speak from a single unified voice. Instead, we use our two voices to emphasize the divergences between us—our different relationships to religion, for example, or to particular genres (like sports, videogames, and music), or even to what counts as “serious” academic work. These differences aren’t obstacles to understanding; they actually are our understanding. We are modeling through our voices and their perspectives what it looks like to build theory in dialogue, across perspectives, with attention to friction and resonance.

That’s also why our approach embraces a diversity of fan practices, motivations, and intensities, just as we show our own attachments as uneven, sometimes ambivalent, and always transforming. The personal becomes meaningful when it is not only deeply felt but also when it is analytically situated as a formation we can use to ask better questions about how people form attachments, how meaning circulates, and how cultural structures shape affective life.

In this way, the autobiographical and the autoethnographic come together for us as complementary modalities. One provides raw material we enjoy writing and feel passionate about, while the other encourages us to be judicious and consider its processing into a more conceptual form of understanding. One brings the reader closeness and the specificity of particular examples; the other offers some degree of distance and a space for abstract reflection and considerations. Our books use both, not to collapse the personal into the scholarly, but mainly to explore how one can clarify and deepen the other. 

Can you discuss what impact you want the books to have? Why these topics for the fifteen books – how did you come up with those, why not others? They are semi-academic, semi-personal; they are short, but still longer than (say) the Fandom Primer series; they are built around the two of you, but tell stories of fandom across a spectrum of ideas. How should readers “place” the books in their categorization of books about fandom?

Rob: The impact we hope for is both intellectual and practical. We want these books to help reframe how fandom is understood and approached across multiple fields. That means deepening the conversations already happening in cultural and fan studies while also extending them into marketing, consumer research, and communication studies. We want the work we’ve each done separately to meet here, in dialogue. Not fused into some hybrid middle but sharpened through contrast and coordination. These books aim to do that work out in public, so to speak.

The initial goal was modest. We needed a textbook for our Fan(dom) Relations course at Annenberg. But very quickly, the project expanded. It became an intellectual voyage, one that it seems we could only take together. The idea of “frames” gave the whole notion structure as well as depth. Each book would examine a different paradigm for understanding fandom: Fandom as Audience. Fandom as Subculture. Fandom as Activism. The frames overlap, they build on one another, and sometimes they even conflict with one another. That’s okay; we actually wanted that level of complexity and depth. This wasn’t a master theory of fandom we were putting together. It was always meant to be a way for us to think about and across fandom’s many multiplicities.

Fandom today is multifarious—it is strong, great, and numerous. We think that, for better and worse, has moved from the margins to the center of culture, economics, identity, and politics. We wanted to write books that reflected that shift. These books had to find a balance between being focused, teachable, grounded in prior thinking, up-to-date, future forward, and conceptually rich. The books are short but not light. They are accessible but not simplistic. And yes, they’re personal. We appear in them because we believe that theory is better when it’s situated, when it has a voice, a history, and a perspective. 

The fifteen topics we chose reflect a kind of mapping exercise. They trace out the dominant ways scholars and practitioners have tried to understand fandom. Some frames, like Fandom as Participatory Culture or Fandom as Co-Creation, reflect well-established paradigms. Others, like Fandom as Desire, Fandom as Devotion, Fandom as Technoculture, or Fandom Relations, push into less charted territory that we think is important or will be. But every book tries to say something new. We are trying to use these books to develop a novel perspective, not just report on or overview existing ones. 

We’re aware that this series doesn’t fit easily into existing categories. It’s not quite academic publishing, but it’s also not a fan primer or how-to. These are conceptual books written by researchers, who are also fans, and by fans, who are also researchers. We’re building on decades of work that has argued—we think correctly—that fandom is not a deviation from everyday life, but a powerful and productive mode of engaging with culture. That argument has been made and what we do here is trace in a variety of new ways its implications for scholars, students, managers, and certainly for fans themselves. 

Where should these books be placed? Maybe in the space that doesn’t yet exist: a shelf for works that take fandom seriously as a global social form. That speak across disciplines. That engage theory without detaching from lived experience. That are willing to argue, to speculate, to build, and to risk being wrong. This, as I see it, is the Frames of Fandom series. 

Henry: Our initial discussions on the project centered on the high costs of textbooks and especially student frustration when only small portions of books are used. Most students have not yet learned to think of books as long-term investments not restricted to the benefits to be gained within the context of a particular class. But what if we could deconstruct the textbook, allowing people to, in effect, buy chapters a la carte, paying for only the portions they need? This question is what started us down the path towards self-publishing.

As we got into it, our idea of selling a book chapter by chapter evolved into the concept of short-ish books focused around a single frame but looking at that frame from a number of different angles, thus incorporating a broad array of different literatures.

Revision of Hall’s ENCODING/DECODING MODEL

So, the book on fandom as an audience largely foregrounds how the approach grew out of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, but it also considers some other parallel developments from consumer culture research, reader-response theory, or formalist film theory, each of which taught us things we needed to know to understand fandom. We hit the big names, but we also are reintroducing writers who have often dropped out of the conversation about fandom within fandom studies, considering for example Dorothy Hobson’s advocacy on behalf of the audiences for soaps or Martin Barker’s potential contributions as a critic of fandom studies methodology.  

When John Fiske asked me to write a book about fans in the early 1990s, he wanted a grand theory of fandom, which was not something I could write given the state of research on fans then. Textual Poachers became a study of a relatively discrete set of fans – the women who wrote and read fan fiction – though there are mixed signals throughout as it tends to universalize these fans or incorporate material from research on other kinds of media audiences. Many of the criticisms writers like Matt Hills directed against the book locate contradictions, uncertainties, inconsistencies, and hesitations that emerged from those competing ideas about the book’s project.  

Now, we are at a place where there is a massive body of scholarship on fans, and so we can begin to map this as a field while, at the same time, constantly pushing for a more inclusive understanding of what fandom studies might learn from other adjacent bodies of literature. Simply bringing consumer culture research and fandom studies together, which is at the heart of our initial vision, is a large contribution. Trying to keep up with the writings about fandom beyond the Anglo-American world, say, requires active searching and careful contextualization of the similarities and differences that emerge. Debates within fandom require us to go back to intellectual roots, to consider roads not taken, works not read or discussed, that might allow us to expand our research in productive new directions.  

Often as we are writing these books, we have in mind a reader being introduced to the field for the first time, someone in graduate school who is searching for where they might make their ‘original contribution.’ We are leaving many, many breadcrumbs here. But also, as a scholar in my, erm, late 60s, I am trying to trace my own journey through this space, consolidate ideas developed in scattered publications, weigh ideas to see how I might modify them if I were writing these works today, acknowledge old debates and heal old wounds. I have made many different contributions to fandom studies at different phases of my career, as has Robert, and these books function as introductions to our body of scholarship as well as maps of the field more broadly.

One challenge, though, is that these books are coming out on a rolling basis. The core of each book is drafted, so we can point to what topics will surface in what book, but we are also adding and reflecting as we prepare them for publication. About a third of the content or more comes at that stage. We are writing as if the whole project had been completed, including pointers to what’s in the books not yet published. We hope people will be patient since all of this apparatus will be helpful once the project is completed. I also worry that people will get upset because we did not include a person or topic in book 2 that was always planned to be discussed in book 10. So, bear with us…

More to come in Part Two.

Biographies

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.

Guns and gun violence has become one of the great polarizing issues in American politics. I grew up in a household where gun possession was the norm. My father housed his rifle cabinet – locked – in my childhood bedroom. I have chosen not to own guns, but I was trained how to use them safely because I was around them for most of my youth. I passed a gun safety course organized by the National Rifle Association (NRA) – in its more rational era – through my local scout troop. My brother, I am pretty sure, still owns guns. One of my nephews has worked for Dick’s Sporting Goods as one of their experts on guns. I know that I do not have much to fear from people who know how to use guns safely and recreationally. Even my mother was a crack shot though mostly firing at tin cans rather than any living being. As such, my own positions about guns are more complicated than many of my more progressive friends who lack this intimate exposure.  

During the years I was focused on the issue of whether representations of violence in video games could contribute to real world violence, following on from various school shootings, I tried to resist the temptation of pitting the first amendment against the fourth. I do believe the deregulation of certain classes of weapons – particularly semi-automatic guns which were once restricted under the Brady Bill – have contributed to the increase of large-scale public shootings because they allow the gunmen to get off so many shots before they need to stop and reload. But advocating for the reinstatement of those restrictions, for example, is not the same thing as wanting to “take people’s guns away” – not that any progressive I know advocates that on the wholescale basis that gun advocates fear. What worries me about the current NRA is not that they support the right to bear arms but that they are urging people to carry weapons, often concealed weapons, into situations (churches or schools for example) where they make no sense. Marching around waving guns just to show that you can is a degree of militancy that my father or the NRA members that came to my scout troop would not have supported, because their focus was on gun safety, not guns everywhere all the time. 

All these experiences came to mind as I recently read a graphic novel, Should We Buy a Gun? (2025), sent to me recently by its author, Dave Cowen, who uses the comic medium to explore a variety of perspectives on the issues raised by the book’s title. It centers on a progressive couple who starts to have doubts about any opposition to gun ownership when they become victims of a random street crime, which shakes their fundamental sense of security. Through engagement with a broad range of perspectives from friends, family, and coworkers, the characters learn that the question is far more complex than any simple position – right or left, pro or anti – can account for.

 The book doesn’t give us any answers; it is simply skiing questions, but my bet is that you will leave it less certain of your own stance than you were before reading it. This is why I find myself rehearsing and litigating my own trajectory through the debates. 

page from Should we buy a gun?

Cowen counts himself as a progressive; he has chosen to work with an artist Gabriel Wexler, who considers himself more conservative. And this partnership also reflects their desire to produce a tool designed to cut through political polarization and model how we might find common ground around this topic. Cowen has been going out, literally, into the town square to promote his book and engage with passersby to get a sense of where they stand on these issues. Given my own commitments to working past political divides, I salute these efforts and want to use this blog to call attention to the important work he is doing.  

What follows is an interview, conducted via email, with Cowen (and Wexler inserting himself at one point to make a comment).

Henry Jenkins: During the campaign, Kamala Harris sparked controversy when she, as a progressive Black woman, owned agun. Why has gun ownership become such a dividing line between right and left in America?

Dave Cowen: I think the Kamala Harris moment in 2024 was revealing because it showed that the dividing line is more negotiable than we tend to believe. After she said that on Oprah, a journalist from The Wall Street Journal, Cameron McWhirter, reached out to me after reading a draft of this book, for a story he was doing about liberals buying guns. I referred him to Tom Nguyen and The LA Progressive Shooters where I did some training. There’s a growing conversation on the left about guns, not just for personal safety, but also as a response to the perceived rise of authoritarianism on the right. Historically people on the left believe the consequences of right-wing gun ownership policies is the potential for traumatic harm. For instance, Deirdre Suguichi, who also read the book (and we’re slated to be doing something like this together), she wrote in an essay for Literary Hub: “That the number of mass killings – in airports, military facilities, houses of worship, workplaces, music venues, and schools – has skyrocketed since 2005, when the Republican-led Congress, under George W. Bush, lifted the national ban on assault weapons.” So I thinkliberals view it as a dividing line because they can’t see how conservatives would rather live in a society that is much more dangerous to innocents. Whereas I think conservatives can’t see how liberals would rather live in a society that is not much more protected against enemies. Harris was celebrated by Kris Brown of The Brady Campaign for her nuanced stance to both re-ban assault rifles but also promote responsible gun ownership. Meanwhile, gun rights advocate C.D. Michel called her a hypocrite, saying, “She sees the social utility of firearms for her. But she doesn’t want anyone else to have access to the most effective tools to defend themselves or their families.” To me, the dividing line is more of an inherent paradox for Americans to negotiate, which is something like: how do we balance unlimited danger to innocents vs unlimited protection against enemies?

page from Should we buy a gun?

HJ: What factors have pushed both conservatives and progressives to more extreme and entrenched positions on these issues?

DC: I’m not a sociologist like Dr. Jennifer Carlson or an anthropologist like Ieva Jusionyte (who blurbed the book), but from my layman’s perspective I think geographic and algorithmic sorting pushes both conservatives and progressives to extremes. A staunch conservative can easily move to a red county of Florida and spend their time on X. A purist liberal can easily remove themself to BlueSky and never leave Portland. So your ideology and sense for what is normal or right is affected by these silos. As someone who was once pushed extremely and into demonizingthe other side, I ironically found you can also very easily expose yourself via curious movement both in the real and digital world to other perspectives. These very same mechanisms that pushed us apart can also be what can help bring us back together. That’s been my personal experience at least.

HJ: What does each side misunderstand about the other and their perspective?

DC: I think the main thing each side misunderstands about the other is how much they misunderstand the other. I thinkespecially with the digital world’s flattening of identity, where – and I’m guilty of this – making assumptions about someone based on their social media bio or posts. People can very often prejudge someone’s perspective. And this goes the same for bias against someone’s surface physical appearances or identity markers. But truly meeting a person who is different from you – which is everyone in some way – I find that it’s quite easy to find commonalities and understandmost everyone’s perspective. If you look at the etymology of that word understand it comes from “to stand” and yes “under” but that meant “between or among.” So, I think right there you see that you might not understand someonefrom your mind’s projections, it takes real presence, with someone, physically or not, to not misunderstand.

page from Should we buy a gun?

HJ: Can you talk a bit about the character design in the book? What steps did you take to avoid reducing these characters to stereotypes and those characterizing their positions?

DC: That’s a great question. And I’m not sure I succeeded! I think some character design things I tried to do was make exceptions to the stereotypes part of the rule of the character design. For instance, an elder Indian-American mentor editor at NPR is probably unlikely to own a gun as a stereotype, but, here she is. Or a queer interracial couple isn’tusually thought of as having strong Christian values, but, here they are. Which, if you live in Los Angeles like we do, you often find that there is tremendous diversity within diversity, so any of those examples aren’t that rare. I think the toughest character design was the teenage student, David. He was originally named John White and was a White person, because potential school shooters are statistically more likely to be young White men. However, later in the drafting process, I decided to change his race to a mix of Latino and White. His father was already absent in the narrative, but his mother stayed White. I also changed his name from John to David. Which is my given name. His last name changed to something Latino, in this case, Gomez. Why the change? Well, not to ruin the story, but thischaracter has a redemption arc. So I didn’t want people to think that only a young White male could be redeemed in this way. I really wanted – and I think this change came after the shooting in Uvalde (which was by someone with Latino background) – people to identify this redemption arc with any young man. And the given name change to David promoted semi-autobiographical identification, which essentially says: reader, you or me or someone we love could become wayward.

Another difficult choice was, do I rewrite his dialogue, his characterization, his plot based on this change to hisheritage? I talked to a friend who is of Latino background, and he advised that he thought it would be even better to not change any of it, besides the literal color of the character, because changing him to fit some stereotype of what I thought might be different would be paradoxically stereotypical itself. So I think this is a long way of saying that every character design choice was extremely thought through, but I’m aware that probably anyone could take issue with any of them, but that’s ok!

HJ: I often felt as if the writer and readers were growing along with the characters as they worked throughsome of the contradictions in their position. What was your thinking about the journey these characters are taking?

DC: Thanks for noticing that! I would say that was definitely true of the writer, and I hope with the readers. The way the book was made over 11 years – 7 as a screenplay and 4 as a graphic novel – was extremely evolutionary. It can’t be overstated how much it evolved as a written script and then again as a graphic novel. The story went from a silly action comedy to a very pacifist progressive polemic, and that was before it was even re-imagined as an open graphic novel.Within the making of the graphic novel, there was a whole illustrated draft that no one will see – and Gabriel can attest (sometimes to his frustration, LOL) – that the graphic novel kept changing based on how I continued to work through the contradictions in my own position, up until it was finally published January 20, 2025. At a certain point it became clear the goal wasn’t for me to find a position, but to provide a way for readers to work through the contradictions in their position – or even to be open again to not having a position, which is kind of a hard sell to make. But I think there is tremendous utility in a book that guides you to not know how you think about something again, before perhaps you can know anew.

HJ: How did you come to write a comic book addressing this divide? What do you hope will happen as readers of diverse ideological backgrounds engage with this book?

DC: This book is personal in that the couple was inspired by a relationship in my life that ended due to irreconcilable differences. Those differences were bigger than this issue, but my hope is anyone who’s in a relationship with differences can find something helpful here. I’ve been out selling the book on the street and meeting others to engagewith it. Several people have confided to me they are in relationships that could benefit from this book. As we reach a potential breaking point in society, I’m happy (and privileged) to be in a niche role of promoting not Right reformation or Left resistance but personal reconnection and societal reconciliation.

HJ: Tell us about the partnership which produced this book. The writer is liberal, the artist conservative. How did this impact the finished work?

DC: We met via my godson being pre-school friends with his son and I liked him and his work. I didn’t know his politics. Our partnership is also interesting because Gabriel is work-for-hire. It’s somewhat hierarchical in the sense that I’m the publisher and writer (and financier). He’s the illustrator who is executing, paid per page. It’s not a partnership where he might say I wouldn’t draw that because that’s not what I think it should be. But then again, I don’t think Gabriel is like that as a person at this point in his life. And I was also at a point in my life where I wasn’t likethat in my maturity. So, the impact is somewhat intangible and it was in the many phone conversations around the work at hand. It was the casual texts of a link to a podcast from him. Or the gift of a book from me to him. Honestly, it’s hard to even use right/left labels sometimes. I know he’s illustrated for a very conservative publication. But he might also say the left itself has moved since he once considered himself. I think the beauty of the partnership and the book is that it dissolves labels. Yes, it might start with that as a sales pitch, and the characterizations, but the goal is to transcend the polarizations. I think we were able to do that for ourselves and hopefully others.

Gabriel Wexler: This is the only question I feel qualified to weigh in on. The simple answer to this is that I was working for Dave, and I don’t think it’s the artist’s job to shape the narrative or let his opinions affect the work. If I had deep ideological differences with the book, I wouldn’t have said yes to illustrating it. Dave entered this with morequestions than answers, which is a humble and honest way to make art. Really, it’s the only way. Of course, you can write a lecture but it won’t make for very fun reading.

HJ: Do you have a sense of how people have used your book to help spark discussions around these issues?

DC: I think we are in the very early stages of that, which is why I feel very fortunate to connect with an authority like yourself. No pressure (LOL) but I would love to be invited to my alma mater USC where you teach to use the book to spark discussions. Maybe we can figure out a next step, Henry ;) But more than anything specific like that, I hope, generally (and to use your kind of terminology), that this book becomes part of our civic imagination, not just about guns, but about how the collective can more civilly relate to each other, so we have a better world.

Biographies

Dave Cowen has written for The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Points In Case, among many, and his work has been featured in The New York Times and on NPR. His graphic novel debut SHOULD WE BUY A GUN? unites a provocative, heartfelt story with simple, enchanting art. Written by a politically left author and illustrated by a politically right artist, it aims to help heal our polarized divide. Cowen has also published six comedy Haggadahs, parodies on Trump, Seinfeld, Biden-Harris, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Kanye West, and Mel Brooks. His other books include an experimental stream-of-consciousness memoir THIS BOOK IS THE LONGEST SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN AND THEN PUBLISHED. The satire FAKE HISTORY! And a remix of memes SPIRITUAL INSTAGRAM. He also has a Substack, Shuffle Synchronicities, which teaches how something greater communicates with us through the music we love. A second Substack, SerioComics, are enthusiasms for graphic literature that is serious and comic as he debuts his.

Gabriel Wexler has made storyboards for film and TV, drawn for newspapers and magazines, taught art at schools, and illustrated a book for young adults.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

The following passage is a continued excerpted from Henry Jenkins’ new book, Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America (New York: New York University Press). If you like what you read and want to read the rest of the book,

Use code NYUAU30 for 30% off when you order the book on nyupress.org . 

Here's the link: https://nyupress.org/9781479831890/where-the-wild-things-were/

“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”: The Whiteness of Permissive Culture

These transitions in ideas about childcare can be traced back to the origins of the Child Study movement in the early twentieth century. Here, I consider one particular outgrowth of the Progressive Era—the ways that the permissive imagination was founded on certain assumptions surrounding whiteness that imperfectly fit the realities of Black America. The initial focus of Child Study was on reforming the conditions that impacted the lives of low-income, immigrant, and minority children, especially those living in urban environments. Increasingly, the focus shifted toward the raising of “normal” children, in other words, white, middle-class children. Normality was also defined through the norms of child development shaped by observational work. Since the early 1930s, Yale University’s Arnold Gesell had been a leading voice promoting scientifically grounded child management; he was to childhood what Masters and Johnson were to human sexuality. Returning to a tradition of surveys begun by his teacher, G. Stanley Hall, Gesell interviewed thousands of American parents, recording each stage of their children’s development and publishing encyclopedic works mapping children’s biological and cognitive development. Working with Francis Ilg, Gesell made this data more readily available to postwar parents, hoping to lower stress by helping them to understand their child’s individualized development in comparison with others in their cohort. Martha Weinman Lear, a critic of permissive parenting, wryly notes that many parents used such norms as competitive benchmarks. Black children were underrepresented in this research, which tended to fore- ground white, middle-class practices and perspectives. We might see this conflation of “normal” with whiteness as perhaps the original sin of the Child Study movement.

Advice writers had little to say directly about Black childhoods, sometimes expressing discomfort about knowing how to speak to the realities of Black lives. But they did sometimes address concerns about whether white children were being taught to hate people of different races and ethnicities. A book responding to parents’ questions about family life in wartime confronted this query:

Until recent events forced us into a horrible dilemma, my husband and I believed and taught our children that hate and war were the most destructive forces on earth. We taught them also to respect and believe in the reasonableness of human beings of all races and nationalities. Now there is an orgy of hate let loose. I believe my older children can keep their balance, but I dread the effect on the little ones. Must even the babies hate?

While some animosity toward the enemy was a consequence of the war, the Child Study Association of America advised: “The best thing we can do is to help our children to be fair to others of enemy alien descent with whom they come in contact and who are certainly not responsible for this war. If they really love justice they will not tolerate ostracizing the classmate whose parents come from Germany, or ridiculing Japanese children in their community, or stealing fruit from the corner grocer whose name and accent are Italian.”  As the war ended, the focus expanded to include not simply people of other nations but also people of diverse races living in the United States. The novelist Pearl S. Buck (1952) explained: “It is the duty of every parent and teacher to see that in our own community the children are made aware of the problem of race and to pass on, not prejudices, but freedom of choice for the new generation to deal with what in their time may be a choice that will result either in world harmony or the greatest and most horrible war the human race has yet seen.”

These wartime writers saw helping their own children to deal fairly with people of other races as part of their patriotic duty. As Buck reminds her readers, “Do not forget that Nazism had as twin doctrines the false ideas that one race is superior to another and that the male is superior to the female. Both of these notions are at the root of tyranny in society.” And both, Buck felt, need to be resolved to prevent future race wars.

In Glass House of Prejudice (1946), Dorothy W. Baruch challenged readers to confront their own prejudices to better prepare their children to live in a more diverse society. Baruch was the founder and director of the Gramercy Cooperative Nursery School. In the late 1920s, she directed the parent-education department at the National Council of Jewish Women. For much of her career, Baruch ran a private practice treating children with psychological issues. Between 1939 and 1953, she published eight books on child psychology, education, and family life. Baruch translated the wartime struggle against fascism into a model of democratic parenting.

In Glass House of Prejudice, Baruch notes that fascists encouraged American isolationism through tapping racial prejudices, dividing the population against itself and diminishing concerns for the plight of European Jews: “Why, as the hate messages flew across America, were they lifted in such eager hands? Unless they were in some fashion welcome, would they have been so closely embraced?” She asks: “Did we expect to rescue the people of other countries from intolerance and persecution and to disregard what is happening to millions in our own country? Why have we allowed the break between Americans of different races to widen so that whole masses of people have come to feel that they are unwanted and they do not essentially belong?”

Such attitudes, she concluded, had been taught, and so a concerted effort might ensure that the new generation were taught to embrace the richness of American culture. Racism took root as children worked through their anger and frustrations over ways they had been unfairly treated, directing rage outward against those different from themselves, rather than inward, toward family members who often sparked those feelings. As the 1949 musical South Pacific recounted:

“It’s not born in you.
It happens after you are born.
You’ve got to be carefully taught to hate and fear. . . . You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people
whose eyes are oddly made
and people whose skin is a different shade.”

Consider how the song sees racism as a set of “learned” cultural prejudices mapped onto biological differences. Following this same logic, Baruch concludes, “If children could grow up learning to handle their hostile emotions and having guidance in doing so all along the way, the vicious circle of hatred could be diminished even in one generation.”

Baruch shares the story of a classroom of ten-year-olds that “suddenly went wild” when the teacher left the room, chanting that one little boy, Jerry, was a “dirty jew.” Confronting the class, the teacher suggests that the children seemed to be feeling “very, very mean” and needed to find a way to share those feelings:

They decided they wanted to draw about it. Before they started, the teacher assured them that they could make their pictures show mean feelings coming out in any way they liked. Some drew pictures of cannons shooting men to pieces. Others drew pictures of people setting fire to houses. One boy drew a man and a woman and a baby with nooses around their necks. . . . When they were through with the drawings, the children crowded into small groups, looking at the different pictures. The teacher smiled to herself when she noticed two of the boys who had been among Jerry’s worst persecutors. Their arms were now around his shoulders. They were intimately pursuing the friendship that they had denied before.

Baruch’s account expresses the support, at least among progressive educators, for the project of promoting “racial harmony,” a phrase blurring racial and ethnic distinctions in its application.

Children’s book writers in the immediate postwar era similarly sought a more accepting society. Consider, for example, In Henry’s Backyard. Columbia University anthropologists Ruth Benedict (Mead’s mentor) and Gene Weltfish had written a pamphlet, The Races of Mankind (1943), to help debunk myths that had been spread by fascists overseas and racists at home. In 1945, United Productions of America (UPA) produced an animated short based on the pamphlet, and in 1948 a children’s book based on the original text and illustrated with pictures from the film was released. Henry, the story’s protagonist, dreams that “the whole world became so small that it fit nicely into his own backyard and all sorts of odd people had become his neighbors.” Henry needs to overcome his fears as he confronts such cultural and racial differences: “Then suddenly he felt...an ugly sort of tug...that stopped him. It was his Green Devil, who lived inside him. It had slithered . . . out . . . of him. And it whispered, ‘don’t speak to these people, Henry! You won’t like them. They’re DIFFERENT!’” The book helps Henry—and the reader— overcome their prejudices: “We’re not born haters. . . . We’ve only got one world and we’re all in it.”

Such direct representations of racism, or for that matter, racial difference would become less and less common the deeper we move into the 1950s. Postwar storytellers generally avoided the negative racial stereotypes found all too commonly in the 1930s and 1940s. But they frequently responded by constructing an all-white world or by moving into the realm of allegory. In a nuanced, multilayered analysis, Philip Nel argues that children’s book authors had minds like sponges, which absorbed, sometimes unconsciously, influences from all directions. He argues that The Cat in the Hat, for example, might be described as “mixed race” because its origins lay in both white and Black culture (including Black-faced minstrelsy), that as a consequence it may be hard to see some of the stereotypical representations upon which it was built, and it may generate contradictory or ambivalent feelings about race as we contemplate the presence of this trickster character in a white household.

It was easier to avoid representing minoritized children than to construct alternative framings. Consider, for example, the case of P. D. Eastman, one of the animators who worked on The Races of Man. Eastman had served in the US Signal Corps during the war, working on the Private Snafu training films under Theodor Geisel, better known today as Dr. Seuss. Eastman also collaborated with Geisel as a scriptwriter and storyboard artist on Gerald McBoing-Boing. And in the early 1960s, Geisel invited Eastman to contribute to his Beginner Books series. East- man is today best known for his picture books, Go Dog Go (1961) and Are You My Mother? (1960).

At the risk of overreading a simple fable, Are You My Mother? depicts a baby bird’s first encounter with difference, not the racial difference In Henry’s Backyard depicted, but rather the differences between species. As the baby bird is about to hatch, its mother departs in search of food, leaving the infant to confront the world on his own. The newborn asks each new creature he encounters whether they are its mother. Across the book, the baby bird again and again discovers places where he does not belong: “The kitten was not his mother. The hen was not his mother. The dog was not his mother. . . .” In the end, a giant steam shovel—the SNORT!—returns him to the loving care of his own mother. The book is a reassuring story suggesting that everyone has a loving mother and that children do not necessarily notice the differences that matter to adults. But it is also a story where birds of a feather flock together. I do not mean to suggest that Are You My Mother? is a racist work. If anything, it tries to be “color-blind” by removing the story from the human realm altogether, but in the context of a society struggling with segregation, it stresses hominess, comfort, and familiarity. In shifting from cultural categories such as race to biological categories such as those distinguishing animal species, Eastman made such distinctions seem more natural and logical.

For most of the period, children’s fictions were segregated just as decisively as children’s lives were, the majority of the child-rearing advice books assumed a white middle-class reader, and the majority of children’s films and programs had an all-white cast. Fewer Black parents were raising their children according to Dr. Spock. They could not afford the risks—misbehaving Black boys might have lethal encounters with cops. Permissiveness constituted a form of white privilege, no matter how much these authors might have wished otherwise. Their normalization of whiteness, their silence about racism, made children’s fictions complicit in America’s inequalities.

Biography

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

The following is excerpted from Henry Jenkins’ new book, Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America (New York: New York University Press).

If you like what you read and want to read the rest of the book, Use code NYUAU30 for 30% off when you order the book on nyupress.org. 

Here's the link: https://nyupress.org/9781479831890/where-the-wild-things-were/

 

Extract – Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America

“No parent wakes up in the morning planning to make his child’s life miserable.” Thus begins Haim G. Ginott’s 1965 guide Between Parent and Child. Born in Tel Aviv in 1927, Ginott’s varied career included elementary school teacher, resident psychologist for NBC’s Today Show, and professor of child psychology at New York University. His book spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list, reflecting an expanding market for advice literature addressing parents, given the success of Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (first published in 1946 and growing in popularity across the 1950s and early 1960s). Ginott’s book adopts an explicitly “permissive” approach, understanding what an earlier generation might have seen as misbehavior as reflecting a failure to communicate: “No one deliberately tries to make his child fearful, shy, inconsiderate, or obnoxious. . . . We want children to be polite and they are rude; we want them to be neat and they are messy; we want them to be confident and they are insecure; we want them to be happy and they are not.”

To overcome these challenges, parents should express their expectations and address children’s needs: “He wants us to understand him. He wants us to understand what’s going on inside himself at that particular moment. Furthermore, he wants to be understood without having to disclose fully what he is experiencing. It is a game in which he reveals only a little of what he feels, needing to have us guess the rest.” Ginott instructs parents how to play this guessing game, moving between broad principles and practical applications. “How do we know what he feels? We look at him and listen to him, and we also draw on our emotional experience.” Let’s label these practices as empathetic introspection. Such understanding must shape parents’ everyday approach: “Our inner motto is: let me understand. Let me show that I understand. Let me show in words that do not automatically criticize or condemn.”

The Fabulous Fifties, a 1960 CBS television special, featured shifts in child-rearing practices among the trends that defined the previous decade. A comedy segment parodied the efforts of the modern parent—in this case, the father—to apply permissive practices in disciplining a boy who has separately asked both parents for money to purchase the same school supplies. The father (Shelley Berman) is thrown off guard by the unpredictable and sometimes irrational choices his son (“Flip” Mark) is making: the boy uses his father’s democratic impulses—such as telling the boy to sit where he wants—to defer the disciplining— as he shifts from chair to chair throughout the conversation. The boy’s dialogue includes non sequiturs the father does not know how to interpret, and the boy does not know how to explain. And the boy rationalizes his choices by deploying familiar permissive concepts, such as talking about the expressive potential of the modeling clay he purchased with the excess money. In the end, the father seeks to punish him by demanding that he stay in his room but is defeated even here, storming off after the boy negotiates exceptions to this rule. Here, the comedy stems from the widely recognized gap between permissive ideals and their application.

Broad ideas about child psychology, empathy, and democracy are essential to permissiveness: a discursive formation, a cluster of interlocking ideas and practices, a structure of feeling that took shape across the twentieth century and reached its greatest influence in the 1950s and 1960s. Here is how Ginott describes his approach: “Permissiveness is an attitude of accepting the childishness of children. It means accepting that ‘boys will be boys,’ that a clean shirt on a normal child will not stay clean for long, that running rather than walking is the child’s normal means of locomotion, that a tree is for climbing and a mirror is for making faces.” Reading this passage, one might be tempted to say that permissiveness is a theory of childhood that explains children’s emotional and social development, seeing certain “wild and untamed” attributes as part of children’s nature. For Ginott, “childishness” would have referred to acting like a child, which for writers of this period would have included images of rambunctiousness and messiness but also curiosity, fairness, and imagination.

The “new” permissive approach was signaled in the first few decades of the twentieth century by the shift from feeding on schedule (a practice disciplining the child’s body, reining in their emotions, and restraining their actions within an adult-centered world) toward feeding on demand (where the parents were expected to interpret the child’s various cries, feeding them when hungry, comforting them when hurt, and providing them company when lonely). From there, parents turned toward child psychology, investigating youngsters’ emotional and fantasy lives. Permissiveness is defined in terms of what it permits. Ginott explains, “Strong feelings do not vanish by being banished; they do diminish in intensity and lose their sharp edges when the listener accepts them with sympathy and understanding.”

If permissiveness freed children from constraints, it imposed new expectations on parents regarding how they should behave in response to children’s outbursts. Advocates of more permissive approaches offered parents insights on how they should interpret and enable children’s emotional expression, even as they prepared their children for a world that was unlikely to tolerate behaviors it saw as brattish: “A parent who listens with attentiveness conveys to the child that his ideas are valued and that he is respected. Such respect gives the child a sense of self-worth. The feeling of personal worth enables the child to deal more effectively with the world.” Ginott justifies this approach as a recognition of children’s rights: “The essence of permissiveness is the acceptance of children as persons who have a constitutional right to have all kinds of feelings and wishes. The freedom to wish is absolute and unrestricted; all feelings and fantasies, all thoughts and wishes, all dreams and desires, regardless of content, are accepted, respected, and permitted expression through appropriate symbolic means.” Ginott’s phrase “the freedom to wish” captures the ways children were connected to a larger vision of a more democratic culture.

For critics, the term “permissiveness” conjured images of a world without limits, a world where parents are at the mercy of tyrannical tykes. But Ginott and the other childcare experts saw setting “limits” without intensifying conflicts as essential: “Destructive behavior is not permitted; when it occurs, the parents must intervene and redirect it into verbal outlets and other symbolic channels. . . . In short, permissiveness is the acceptance of imaginary and symbolic behavior. Over-permissiveness is the allowing of undesirable acts. Permissiveness brings confidence and an increasing capacity to express feelings and thoughts. Over-permissiveness brings anxiety and increasing demands for privileges that cannot be granted.”

Having abandoned the more discipline-centered approaches of their own upbringing, parents struggled with doubts about how far they should let their children go:

Civilization has cast parents in the role of “killjoys” who must say no to many of the small children’s greatest pleasures, no sucking of the thumb, no touching of the penis, no picking of the nose, no playing with feces and no making of noise. . . . Some restrictions are inevitable if the child is to become a social being. However, parents should not overplay their role of policemen for civilization, lest they invite avoidance, resentment, and hostility.

Here, adult impulses—such as a repulsion at certain bodily functions— need to be suppressed for children to grow without inhibition, repression, or trauma. Permissiveness situates children’s natural response to the world within a nexus of adult power, where what one adult might tolerate another seeks to shut down. And ironically, no matter how it might seek to dislodge parental authority over children’s bodies, the concept assumes that adults are the ones who might grant permission.

Becoming Permissive

Where the Wild Things Were focuses on the discursive effort required to adjust to this new model of parent–child relations. Such efforts were conducted through advice literature for parents and through children’s fictions, stories across all media that represented and were addressed to the world of the American child.

We—the postwar generation—were the “wild things” in the permissive imagination; our subjective experiences of the world were the focus of adult speculation. Critics accused us of acting like “wild animals” because no effort had been made to “tame” our impulses, while advocates spoke of our “unbridled” energy. By the late 1960s, when many of the initial baby-boom children were college-age, they were said to be “wild in the streets.” In Wild Things, Jack Halberstam writes about Max, the protagonist of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, as embodying “the wild not simply as a space beyond the home but also as a challenge to an assumed order of things.” I want to second Halberstam’s conception of wildness as “a chaotic force of nature, the outside of categorization, unrestrained forms of embodiment, the refusal to submit to social regulation, loss of control, the unpredictable,” for the child in the permissive imagination is all these things. The child embodied a natural freedom (in the Rousseauian sense) to operate on the outer limits of the civilized order, a potential to escape adult limitations, and a new world order that the writers who used such metaphors wanted to achieve. In both advice literature and children’s fictions, the child is often depicted as a “wild animal” or a “wild Indian,” suggesting a space outside the civilized domain. As Robin Bernstein argues, the presumption of childhood innocence that justified such wildness in white children was rarely if ever accorded Black children or for that matter, Native children, making permissiveness a form of white privilege.

Keep in mind that adults were willing accomplices to our wildness, making efforts to accommodate our messes and noise. Consider, for example, a 1964 commercial announcing the launch of Transogram’s Trik- Trak, a racing-car toy that allowed children to set up the track as the battery-powered car was in motion. As the announcer explains, the toy allows your car to “go anywhere, room to room, all over the house.” And if the point was not clear enough, there is a diagram showing the car traveling across all the rooms including the parents’ den and bedroom. A boy shouts “Trik-Trak,” and his father puts aside his paper and lifts his legs so the car can run under his feet, smiling and saying “Terrific.” It’s hard to imagine any working father being so cheerful about the car disrupting his evening paper in this way, but the fantasy was potent, not just for the child but also for the adult.

Figure I.1: Henry’s suburban boyhood was informed by an infrastructure of permissive ideas, embodied by the Parents magazine on the coffee table.

As I enter my sixties, I reflect on this period with nostalgia: the works discussed here shaped the kind of man I would become. In some cases, I returned to the same copies, kept in storage all these years. Some passages of this book are explicitly autobiographical, most are implicitly so. But this book is more than a trip down memory lane. By reengaging with my parents’ generation, I have discovered things I had missed about these texts before. Consider this image (figure I.1) taken from one of my parents’ slides: I always focused on myself, sitting across the room, wearing a striped shirt. I was surprised, then, to notice the pile of Parents magazines on the coffee table in the foreground. The choices my parents made were guided by the best practices in child development and in the service of a larger civic responsibility. Though invisible to the children whose lives it helped to shape, this advice literature was omnipresent.

Many advice-book writers saw themselves as promoting a more scientifically grounded approach to parenting. Some of what they saw as science has been thoroughly debunked—for example, the theory that the child recapitulates the history of the “human race’” or their involvement in eugenics. Other aspects—such as Freudian psychology or Mead’s early fieldwork—have been disputed by more recent accounts. But the importance of these writers’ moral philosophy concerning the relations between children and adults does not rest on claims of scientific validity alone, and these debates do not undercut permissiveness’s historical importance in shaping the American family (and through it, the American society) during a period running roughly from 1946 (the publication of Spock’s book) to 1968 (the beginnings of a strong conservative backlash).

When advice-literature writers referred to the American child as “he,” they were adopting normative practice of the period: “he” stands in for both masculine and feminine cases. Benjamin Spock was early to note the gendered politics around pronouns, writing in his 1957 edition: “I want to apologize to the mothers and fathers who have a girl and who are frustrated by having the child called ‘him’ all through this book. It’s clumsy to say him or her every time, and I need her to refer to the mother.” In the Victorian era, the ideal child was often a girl; Alice, Dorothy, Wendy, Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms, and many more come to mind, who frequently broke free from constraining norms, spoke their mind, ventured beyond the domestic sphere, and engaged in “unladylike” behavior. Another wave of stories in the 1930s and 1940s, but increasingly fringe by the 1950s, depicted young girls—whether outspoken orphans (such as Annie or the characters played by Shirley Temple) or spunky pranksters (such as Little Lulu, Little Audrey, or the Harvey girls).

The ideal child of the permissive era was a boy—almost always white, suburban, straight, middle-class, Christian (mostly Protestant), and above all, American. These were all-American boys, often depicted in red-and-white-striped shirts, blue jeans, and Keds, with disheveled hair, smudged cheeks, and dreamy eyes. Even Charlie Brown had a stripe on his shirt, albeit a jagged, anxious one. These boys turned their parents’ bedrooms upside down or talked back to kings in the pages of Dr. Seuss’s best-selling books. They were rescued by Lassie or led astray by Flipper. These boys are curious, adventuresome, messy, noisy, rough- and-tumble, muddy even. They explore the world, questioning everyone and everything. They sometimes disobeyed and often escaped adult supervision; they were natural leaders and embraced a democratic style of living. This focus on boys assumed that while girls would and often did read books about boys, boys tended to actively avoid books about girls, and it was boys, the perception went, who most needed help in learning to read.

Beyond that, the traits associated with boyhood aligned with the ways America viewed itself as a nation coming out of the Second World War—bold, fearless, outgoing, wild, open for action, eager to explore the world, and curious about the future. Yet, they were also the traits that led the country into colonialist and military excursions; the “Boys will be boys” ethos has been used ever since to justify the worst excesses of toxic patriarchy.

There are certainly adventurous girls in the children’s literature of the period—from Harriet the Spy to Pippi Longstocking or even Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird—but they were far fewer, less central to the conversation, and in the case of Pippi, foreign in origin. For this reason, among others, my book focuses on boy-centered narratives and thus reads the advice literature for what it tells us about masculinity. These are also the children’s fictions most important for me as a boy raised by gender- normative parents. Throughout, I will be asking what it means that the child in the permissive imagination is so often male just as I ask why it matters that these boys are overwhelmingly white. Throughout, I use “child” when referring to the advice literature’s constructions and “boy” when referring to children’s fictions, but do not forget that much of what is written about “the child” assumes that the child is male.

This is necessarily a partial account of the permissive imagination— far from exhaustive even regarding the subject matter it does consider. Many, perhaps most, readers of a certain age will find one or another favorite missing. More than once, I have been asked about the relative absence of Leave It to Beaver. I can offer several possible explanations for why I lean toward Dennis Mitchell and away from Beaver Cleaver, who follows many of the same genre formulas. Part of what interests me about Dennis is that he appears across media—comic strips, comic books, and television—while Beaver appears almost exclusively on television (and a short-lived comic book). Hank Ketcham has a definite authorial voice and strong views, especially about gender and race, which allow us to examine a more conservative yet still permissive stance. Jay North as an actor also appears in Maya, which I also wanted to discuss. But ultimately, it is a matter of personal preference. Dennis lives in my personal mythology. I watched Beaver—everyone my age did—but never fully embraced him.

How did this cluster of ideas and practices I am labeling the “permissive imagination” take shape? Rather than a rigid periodization, I am drawing on a more dynamic model of cultural change developed by Raymond Williams. Williams stresses “the dynamic interrelations, at every point in the process of historically varied and variable elements.” New ideas do not erase old ones but build upon them. Aspects of cultural traditions are always being pushed aside to make room for the new or carried forward to temper its impact. Williams proposed that dominant (the most widely adopted meanings and practices), emergent (“new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships”), residual (“formed in the past but . . . still active in the cultural process”), and even archaic (“wholly recognized as an element of the past”) may coexist, mutually informing the “structure of feeling” common to a particular period. Thinking of permissiveness as a structure of feeling suggests its aesthetic, social, and emotional dimensions as it is embodied in everyday practices (such as the way adults might kneel on the floor to speak eye-to-eye to children), elements of style (Fred Rogers’s direct address and slow pace, the whimsy of Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak, the ways photographers such as Ruth Orkin and Helen Leavitt center children’s expressive practices), and so much more.

“Permissiveness,” always a relative term, was often defined against John Watson the behaviorist, a dominant voice of the prewar period. But the behaviorist model did not go unchallenged in its own time. The roots of permissiveness as an emergent perspective go back to the Progressive Era (1890–1920), when Dorothy Canfield Fisher helped to popularize a version of the Montessori method through her fiction (The Home-Maker) and her advice writing. Fisher was well ahead of her time, but she was not alone. Fisher collaborated with Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg in rallying a group of complementary thinkers who articulated a method of Child Study and translated these insights into advice for parents. Josette Frank and Anna W. M. Wolf are representatives of the expansion of the Child Study discourse in the 1930s and 1940s.

Dorothy Baruch, an educator and child advocate, was the primary voice for a more democratic approach to family life. Baruch, like Fisher, presented her insights in child-rearing guides but also helped to shape fictional representations—in her case, the Sally, Dick, and Jane books that introduced my generation to reading. Having embraced feeding on demand, writers extended this approach to factor in children’s other bodily—even erotic—desires as things that needed to be accepted and accommodated. With this came a larger reassessment of “discipline,” seeking to understand and address the root causes of children’s behavior. Under this paradigm, children had core rights that needed to be respected. The hope was that the next generation would be more comfortable with their bodies and their identities, more democratic in their impulses, more exploratory in their learning, and more connected with the world around them than the previous generation saw itself to be. Dorothy Baruch describes the ideal outcome:

We hope they will become adults who are able to get along without fights and wars, who will want to settle disputes by more civilized means, but who will stand up for themselves and for what they believe to be right. . . . The ideal is the personality which will maintain itself against opposition as it feels the necessity and which will not perpetually be yielding, giving in submissively to any and every influence that comes near.

With the publication of Spock’s Baby and Child Care, permissiveness became the dominant paradigm for parenting and remained so until the late 1960s, when it faced increased challenge from feminists because of its normalization of gender roles and from conservative critics because of the suspicion that tolerance of disruptive behaviors had paved the way for the counterculture. This approach was also informed by a multitude of women—themselves mothers, often women’s rights advocates—whose contributions have been largely neglected. Ginott’s Between Parent and Child concludes with a short list of “books you may find enjoyable and useful,” which includes works by Baruch, Wolf, and Selma Fraiberg.

In The Permissive Society, Alan Petigny argues that America during the Truman and Eisenhower years was less conservative, complacent, and contained than popular memory might suggest: “During the latter half of the 1940s, and continuing throughout the 1950s, the popular ingestion of modern psychology, coupled with changes in child-rearing and religious practices, constituted an unprecedented challenge to traditional moral constraints.” Many of the experts and creatives discussed here held progressive (and sometimes radical) beliefs and saw themselves as helping to reshape American society for a postwar era by reimagining the American family (which they saw as more fluid and more open to experimentation) and reshaping the American child (whom they saw as coming into the world free of the fears and prejudices that had led to the failure of their own generation to overcome racism or embrace global citizenship).

By the late 1960s, conservative backlash toward Spock and his contemporaries would lead to the formation of a “Dare to discipline” approach that saw itself as putting adults back in control over children’s lives. This model remains a potent reactionary force today, while permissiveness has retained a residual status.

Biography

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

If you need to develop projects involving education, literacy, engagement strategies and interaction with technology and digital platforms, you will invariably find our interviewee in search engines. If you are in the academic world, you will certainly find countless citations of his work in scholarship from around the world, the result of 40 years of a consistent and innovative career in studies of communication, transmedia, media ecology, interaction design and digital platforms.

Carlos A. Scolari has a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics and Communication Languages (Catholic University of Milan, Italy) and a Degree in Social Communication (University of Rosario, Argentina). He is Full Professor at the Department of Communication of the University Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona, where he coordinated the PhD Program of Communication between 2018-23. He's lectured about digital interfaces, media ecology /evolution and interactive communication in more than 30 European, Asian and American countries. He's been the Principal Investigator of H2020 TRANSLITERACY (2015-18) and the Spanish projects TRANSALFABETISMOS (2015-18), PLATCOM (2020-23) and LITERAC_IA (2024-27).

His most important publications are: Hacer Clic (2004), Hipermediaciones (2008), El fin de los medios masivos (with M. Carlón, 2009/2019), Crossmedia Innovations (with I. Ibrus, 2012), Narrativas Transmedia (2013), Transmedia Archaeology (with P. Bertetti and M. Freeman), Ecología de los medios (2015), Las leyes de la interfaz (2018), Media Evolution (with F. Rapa, 2019), Cultura Snack (2020), La guerra de las plataformas (2022) and On the Evolution of Media (2023).

In this interview with Dr. Carlos A. Scolari, we reviewed his thinking on current challenges in communication and technology, referring to some of the world's leading experts on engagement studies, fandom, and communication systems, such as Dr. Henry Jenkins. This is a unique opportunity to discuss the present and future of transmedia, new paradigms in storytelling strategies, new contexts for interactions and communication literacy with artificial intelligence, as well as some case studies of projects he has developed.

In Imagining Transmedia (2024), a book recently published by MIT Press that was the subject of some publications on Pop Junctions, Henry Jenkins asks: “How could we have a stable or even coherent definition of ´transmedia´, given the fact that we are discussing emerging and evolving practices within a media landscape that is itself always being reconfigured?”. He states: “All media produced today follows a transmedia logic, loosely speaking, but I used ´transmedia´ to narrowly refer to an intentional, coordinated strategy for spreading story elements across multiple media platforms”.

I agree with the observation that nearly all contemporary communication strategies — be they commercial, political, or cultural — are executed across multiple media and platforms and actively invite audience participation. In essence, these are transmedia strategies. However, I suspect that the term ‘transmedia’ is losing its prominence, particularly within professional circles, due to the ubiquity of transmedia practices. When transmedia becomes the norm, the term ceases to serve as a distinguishing characteristic for businesses or professionals. In this sense, the descriptor ‘transmedia’ no longer carries differentiating power.

As I stated in an article titled “Transmedia Is Dead. Long Live Transmedia! (Or Life, Passion and the Decline of a Concept)”, a parallel can be drawn with the trajectory of the term ‘multimedia’ in the 1990s. Reflecting on my own experience, I was then living in Italy and working at Ars Media, a company specializing in ‘multimedia’ communication. Early in the decade, the term ‘multimedia’ was reserved for a niche group of companies producing digital works, such as CD-ROMs or laser discs, and thus functioned as a marker of differentiation. By the decade’s end, however, the proliferation of multimedia content across the web and digital supports rendered the term obsolete as a competitive advantage. ‘Transmedia,’ I believe, is undergoing a similar lifecycle.

Regarding its definition, ‘transmedia’ appears to have achieved a relatively stable understanding within academic circles. However, as with any concept, it remains subject to tensions and reinterpretations, particularly in light of the rapid evolution of the media ecosystem.

If the concept of ‘transmedia’ follows the same path as ‘multimedia’ years ago, media companies (from the big corporations to the individual production units) will look for new concepts to differentiate what they offer and gain visibility in the market. New concepts like ‘immersive narrative’ or ‘narrative experience’ – in the line of ‘user experience’ or ‘UX’ – could be possible substitutes in the highly competitive media production market.

Exactly. In recent years, there’s been a lot of buzz around ‘immersive narratives,’ a concept I find fascinating because it shifts how we think about storytelling. Instead of the traditional linear approach—like the structures proposed by Aristotle, Propp, or Campbell—it encourages us to think in terms of ‘worlds.’ These are spaces filled with characters, relationships, and plots—a dynamic place where things happen. Researchers like Marie-Laure Ryan, Susana Pajares Tosca, and Lisbeth Klastrup have explored this territorial aspect of narrative in depth.

When I talk about ‘immersive narratives,’ I’m not just referring to the metaverse or VR headsets. It’s about a cohesive set of media where users step in, interact, and essentially live alongside the characters. This shift from the linearity of traditional storytelling to the three-dimensionality of world-building is a game-changer. For one, it provides richer perspectives for analyzing these experiences. And for another, it opens up new possibilities for creativity and production. Writing a script for a linear story is entirely different from creating a narrative world—it’s a whole new level of complexity and opportunity.

The concept of ‘narrative experience’ draws a direct connection to the design of ‘user experience,’ creating a fascinating and valuable crossover, particularly for professionals. Thinking of the creation of ‘transmedia’ or ‘immersive’ narrative worlds as a form of design opens up exciting possibilities. Just as architects design museums and urban planners create parks, why shouldn't we have designers dedicated to crafting narrative worlds?

In some universities, especially within communication programs, transmedia workshops are already part of the final-year curriculum. These workshops integrate and apply the various languages and media that students have learned throughout their studies. Adding a layer of design culture—or even incorporating design thinking—into these workshops could enrich the learning process and prepare students to approach narrative world-building with a more structured and innovative mindset.

You wrote that in academic and scientific circuits the situation is different: the life cycle of concepts is longer than in professional markets. Although in social sciences there are fashionable concepts, such as ‘sign’ or ‘structure’ in the 1960s, ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ in the 1980s, etc.), the concept of ‘transmedia,’ like ‘hypertext,’ or ‘multimedia’ should last longer than in professional circuits.

The academic world, like any other cultural sphere, follows trends and shifting research agendas. Just take a look at Google Ngram, and you’ll see how research topics and key concepts change over time. That said, I think terms like ‘transmedia’ or even ‘multimedia’ still hold their analytical value in academic discussions, regardless of trends. Despite the waning of professional hype, these terms provide a framework for understanding specific logics of communication. It would not be surprising to see doctoral dissertations on ‘transmedia storytelling’ being written decades from now, much as concepts like ‘hypertext’—not entirely new—continue to serve as viable analytical categories. Just last week, an excellent doctoral thesis on ‘transmedia tourism’ was defended in our department, showcasing the enduring relevance and adaptability of these frameworks.

Henry Jenkins and you have recently dedicated time to developing projects related to transmedia or civic media/civic imagination due to the strength of using storytelling for social causes, activism, and educational actions. For you, are there still theoretical and project horizons for transmedia? If so, what are the paths or trends? I personally believe so, including in a corporate and institutional environment, beyond the civic, or activist, or related to social causes. Technology does not determine cultures and societies, at least for now, I hope that AI does not change that.

A decade ago, we began exploring the concept of ‘transmedia literacy,’ aiming to adapt the logic of transmedia narratives—stories told across multiple media with audience collaboration, now involving prosumers—to the educational context. Our focus was on understanding how young people learn outside traditional school environments, in informal settings like social networks or video games. At the same time, we sought ways to bring this learning into the classroom, integrating it into the school curriculum. The H2020 TRANSLITERACY project (2014–2018) gave us the opportunity to work in eight countries, advancing our understanding of these dynamics.

Can you talk about this project and main outputs? Could you describe what types of transmedia storytelling strategies are most effective for educators?

The H2020 TRANSLITERACY project was a cutting-edge initiative designed to bridge gaps in digital and transmedia education, particularly for younger generations immersed in complex media ecosystems. Aimed at shifting from traditional media literacy to the broader concept of transmedia literacy, the project emphasized understanding and engaging with the multiple platforms teens navigate daily. In this project, we did not approach young people as victims of the media, as traditional media literacy often did. Instead, we see them as active agents who are learning—however and wherever they can—to navigate a complex and hyper-technological environment. I completely agree with the way dana boyd summed up this landscape: “It’s complicated.” And any oversimplification of complexity is dangerous. For example, believing that banning a smartphone or a single app will magically solve the challenges of adolescence.

Another cornerstone of TRANSLITERACY was its bottom-up methodology. By analyzing the everyday practices of teens—from writing fan fiction to modding video games—the project uncovered informal learning processes often overlooked by traditional education systems. Beyond its scientific contributions—such as creating one of the most comprehensive maps of the skills teens develop outside of school—the project also produced a practical framework and a series of activities to help educators integrate these transmedia skills into formal education. This approach not only bridges the gap between informal and formal learning but also empowers educators to connect with students on their own digital and creative terms.

TRANSLITERACY PROJECT 

The concept of ‘transmedia literacy’ is also present in some of your other projects.

Building on the same methodological and epistemological foundations of TRANSLITERACY, we later examined informal learning processes in the context of platform workers through the PLATCOM project, which concluded earlier this year. In this case, we did not work with adolescents but with platform workers over the age of 18. However, we also explored the competencies they develop and the informal learning processes involved. More recently, with María del Mar Guerrero-Pico we launched a new project called LITERAC_IA, which revisits the concept of ‘transmedia literacy.’ This time, our research focuses on how teenagers are engaging with Generative Artificial Intelligences and the ways they are learning to use these tools.

PLATCOM PROJECT

As shown, the concept of 'transmedia'—in this case, 'transmedia literacy'—continues to provide a valuable framework for various research projects that share common elements. Our focus is on informal, ‘wild’ learning that occurs outside traditional educational institutions, often within highly technological and interactive environments like digital platforms. We are particularly interested in how these practices can be identified, adapted, and incorporated into formal education settings.

As I already said, when working with adolescents, we make it a point to reject the notion of them as passive victims of the media—a perspective that has dominated traditional media literacy for years. This marks a key distinction between our approach and more conventional views. While we strongly advocate for the critical and ethical use of digital technologies, we firmly oppose the narrative that positions every teen or adult person as inherently vulnerable and defenseless to media influence.

Back to the use of ‘transmedia’ in other fields, just as our team continues to work under the umbrella of ‘transmedia literacy,’ other researchers can pursue their studies within similar frameworks. Long live transmedia!

There are digital platforms whose information literacy is not dominated by the public, others that will soon exist following consumption and behavior trends, this has always existed. But what I really believe is that there is still a lack of strategic, innovative, and intelligent vision in storytelling projects that incorporate much of what prosumers produce. What do you think about it?

The media industry is always eager to encourage audience or user participation, yet it often struggles to meaningfully integrate that content into its ecosystem. It's no surprise that most fanfiction or user-generated content ends up on platforms like Wattpad, social media, or wiki pages. The media industry's DNA still reflects its broadcasting roots, when audiences were treated as mere numbers rather than collaborators.

The most compelling examples of participation, however, often emerge in non-fiction transmedia projects. Documentaries or civic engagement initiatives, for instance, genuinely incorporate audience contributions, allowing their productions to deeply shape and inform the narrative. A transmedia project like QUIPU from Perú or MUJERES EN VENTA from Argentina would be unimaginable without the participation of Peruvian or Argentinian women sharing their stories. In contrast, the Marvel universe could easily continue thriving without integrating the fanfiction that has grown around it. It probably wouldn't be the same, but it would still exist. This highlights a key difference in how participation can be valued and utilized depending on the context.

Very soon quantum computing will reach domestic use, a new communication paradigm for transmitting, emitting, and receiving information in millions of data points at the speed of light. Human data capture and processing capacity is not enough. And from it, with AI, platforms will certainly emerge that will influence relationships between people. Based on this, what are the challenges for storytelling in this scenario that is increasingly approaching? What, in your opinion, would be a storytelling strategy for the new generations that represents them and makes sense?

If we consider narrative models, I doubt we’ll see any major changes—just as there haven’t been over the past millennia. Certain narrative structures have endured for thousands of years, and it’s hard to imagine radical transformative shifts. What is changing, however, are the ways these narratives are expressed and the social practices that activate, disseminate, and amplify them. The integration of generative AI offers intriguing opportunities for exploring the creation of new narrative worlds. Early experiments, beyond deepfake videos, are venturing into dreamlike and surreal territories, shaped by AI's inherent hallucinations and errors. On the video game front, procedural generation is another key trend. While not entirely new—it was applied in games from Tetris (1985) to No Man’s Sky (2016) —it transformed gaming by cutting costs and unlocking new creative possibilities for virtual environments. Yet, much remains to be explored, and it’s too early to propose detailed scenarios for the future. Reality, as always, will surprise us—for better or worse.

Other topics, such as the capture and processing of human data or the use of platforms for surveillance, clearly lie outside the realm of narrative. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from studying the evolution of the media ecosystem—and socio-technological networks in general—it’s that long-term predictions are nearly impossible. At best, we can aim to envision scenarios, which are often highly diverse, within the short term. But, as I mentioned earlier, reality always manages to surprise us in the end.

Still on the challenges of digital platforms mentioned in the questions above, there are others that are already imposed in our increasingly algorithmic society in which data storage and exchange does not occur in a transparent and secure way. In Algorithms of Resistance, Bonini & Treré (2024) state that “platform power is thus inseparable from the ability of individuals to exert some sort of agency and resistance over it”. During 2020 and 2024, your research group developed the PLATCOM project. Could you talk about the main contributions of this project? Do you believe that those involved are aware of how much the algorithm influences their work and lives?

For four years, we conducted research on platform labor in Spain. Our focus was not on content creation but rather on the most vulnerable workers in this ecosystem—those engaged in ‘last mile’ tasks such as elder or pet care, delivery services, or driving. This is an incredibly complex landscape, one that cannot be reduced solely to the dynamics of oppression and resistance (although these dynamics undeniably exist). In the Spanish context, a significant portion of these workers avoid union organizations or collective resistance actions. Perhaps the high number of undocumented immigrants working in the sector or the perception of it as a transient and temporary activity reinforces this attitude.

Our fieldwork uncovered some fascinating insights. For instance, we encountered workers who, during the same interview, praised the ‘freedom’ that the platform system afforded them—for example, the ability to work without a boss and to manage their schedules autonomously—while simultaneously criticizing the platforms for employing ‘slave-like’ exploitative practices. In this context, we developed a concept: slaverty (esclavertad), encapsulating this paradox. This term reflects just one of the many contradictory and conflict-laden aspects that emerged from our study.

One thing became clear to us: platforms cannot be analyzed solely through the lens of algorithms or the ruthless use of personal data. If we limit our analysis to that dimension, we miss much of the picture. To illustrate, let me draw a historical comparison. Television was a hegemonic medium for several generations, and its business model was built on a quantitative system—ratings—that determined the cost per second of advertising spots. That model shaped the content being produced and intensified the competition among different media. The question is: Can we reduce television to that quantitative dimension alone, to the temporal exploitation of attention for monetization through advertising? Clearly not. Beyond its business model, television transformed how millions of people perceived themselves and their understanding of the world; it exported the American Way of Life but also helped rural-to-urban migrants in Latin America understand urban living. Just as we cannot impoverish the analysis of television by reducing it to ratings, we must not impoverish the analysis of platforms by reducing them to algorithms. A significant portion of our social lives is constructed and unfolds on platforms. Things happen on platforms—many things—beyond the inevitable and problematic algorithmic dimension.

According to your recent book (On the Evolution of Media, 2023), “Media Evolution is a proto-discipline that studies media change from a long-term, holistic, intermedia, reticular, and complex point of view. The goal of this proto-discipline is not to predict the future of the media ecosystem but rather to understand its past and contemporary transformations.” Could you elaborate on how you perceive the main contributions of this perspective?

Media Evolution examines how mediated communication evolves over time, focusing on the dynamic interplay between media and their reciprocal processes across different historical and cultural contexts. Drawing on biological concepts like ‘emergence,’ ‘adaptation,’ ‘survival,’ or ‘extinction,’ it provides a framework for understanding how media grow, compete, and integrate within a dynamic ecosystem. Central to this perspective are ideas such as ‘coevolution’ and‘intermediality,’ which highlight the mutual influences between emerging and traditional media. This approach moves beyond linear historical narratives, presenting media landscapes as interconnected, evolving networks.

But why the need for a new theory or research field? Is Media History or Archaeology insufficient? Unlike Media History, which focuses on chronological developments, Media Evolution emphasizes intermediality by uncovering systemic patterns and identifying adaptive strategies within media ecosystems. Let me explain. History of communication books often tell us that clay tablets came first, followed by papyrus scrolls, then manuscript books on parchment, and finally, in the 15th century, the printed book. However, what they rarely discuss is what happened to papyrus after parchment became widespread, or how manuscript books managed to survive after the invention of Gutenberg’s press. The same gaps appear when discussing the 20th century: How did cinema change with the emergence of television or video games? How did radio adapt after the rise of television? This is what Media Evolution seeks to address. Media Archaeology, for its part, delves into specific devices and practices, often avoiding broad theoretical frameworks. Together, these approaches are complementary: Media History outlines general timelines, Media Archaeology uncovers forgotten devices and practices, and Media Evolution provides a broad framework for understanding the long-term dynamics of media change.

Links

PLATCOM Project: https://platcom.upf.edu/

Transmedia Literacy: https://transmedialiteracy.org/

Teacher’s Kit: https://transmedialiteracy.upf.edu/es/transmedia-skills-map

References

Bonini, T., & Treré, E. (2024). Algorithms of resistance: the everyday fight against platform power. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Jenkins, H. (2024). “Foreword: What We Mean by “Transmedia”. In: Finn, E. Imagining transmedia. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Scolari, C.A. (2018). Transmedia literacy in the new media ecology. White Paper of the H2020 TRANSLITERACY project. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Scolari, C.A. (2019). Transmedia Is Dead. Long Live Transmedia! (Or Life, Passion and the Decline of a Concept). Letra. Imagen. Sonido: Ciudad Mediatizada, ISSN 1851-8931, Nº. 20, 2019, Pags. 69-92. 

Scolari, C.A. (2023). On the Evolution of Media. London: Routledge (Spanish edition: Sobre la evolución de los medios,Ampersand, 2024).

Scolari, C.A., Piña, M. and Guerrero-Pico, M. (2024). Communication platforms, workforce and informal learning. White Paper of the PLATCOM project. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Biography

Renata Frade is a tech feminism PhD candidate at the Universidade de Aveiro (DigiMedia/DeCa). Cátedra Oscar Sala/ Instituto de Estudos Avançados/Universidade de São Paulo Artificial Intelligence researcher. Journalist (B.A. in Social Communication from PUC-Rio University) and M.A. in Literature from UERJ. Henry Jenkins´ transmedia alumni and attendee at M.I.T., Rede Globo TV and Nave school events/courses. Speaker, activist, community manager, professor and content producer on women in tech, diversity, inclusion and transmedia since 2010 (such as Gartner international symposium, Girls in Tech Brazil, Mídia Ninja, Digitalks, MobileTime etc). Published in 13 academic and fiction books (poetry and short stories). Renata Frade is interested in Literature, Activism, Feminism, Civic Imagination, Technology, Digital Humanities, Ciberculture, HCI.