Call for Abstracts Workshop & Themed Issue “Affective Forensic Fandom: Emotion, Evidence, and Investigative Participation in Contemporary Media Cultures”
Over the past three decades, fan studies have developed sophisticated accounts of participatory culture, collective intelligence, affective engagement, and transformative practices (Jenkins 2006; Booth 2015; Hills 2017). At the same time, scholarship has increasingly addressed the investigative dimensions of audience participation. Mittell’s concept of “forensic fandom” (2009), for example, highlights practices of close reading, clue collection, speculation, and collaborative interpretation in response to complex narrative worlds. Fans thus become active investigators who uncover hidden meanings, solve mysteries, and assemble fragmented information across media texts. More recently, such investigative practices have expanded beyond fictional worlds.