July 5, 7:30 pm
Active, engaged devotees of the fruits of popular culture, aficionados of tv series and comics, anime-buffs, gamers, cosplayers, bloggers, pop music fans — all these groups are studied by researchers today as part of the interdisciplinary field of fan studies. The practices of fan-societies, their means of communication and creativity, along with the intercultural links that they establish, are of just as much interest to academics as they are to the media-professionals who have long taken the views of fan-societies into account when putting together their ad campaigns. What does fans’ text vernacular tell us about the development of contemporary imagination? How do the reading habits of fans of popular fiction relate to changes in the way that reading itself is perceived by a new generation of book-lovers? How are the gift-economy and volunteer work practices of internet societies and sub-cultures constructed? How can fan activity help in regard to the tricky question of learning to embrace diversity, or in education, or the development of gender equality?
During her talk, Natalya Samutina, the author of numerous works on fandoms and the perception of popular culture by contemporary audiences, will focus on the place occupied by fans and fan-culture in the thinking of contemporary cultural scholars. She will invite the audience to put questions to fan-cultures and, very possibly, discover the fan within.
Natalya Samutina is a post-graduate cultural studies scholar and senior researcher at the Higher School of Economics Institute of Historical-Technical Humanities Studies, and is director of the Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies.
This lecture is organized in collaboration with the Higher School of Economics in St Petersburg.
Admission is free of charge. The number of participants is limited. Please register in advance.
The Higher School of Economics has prepared a series of multidisciplinary lectures that seek to offer the general public a fresh perspective on the social phenomena and processes that we encounter every day. Leading Russian and international social scientists will use non-intuitive examples and innovative methods to show the audience just how the world in which we are living is changing before our very eyes. The speakers will present new readings on everyday phenomena, sharing recent research findings from the last 2-3 years, as well as their own personal methodologies. Each lecture offers its own introduction to the social sciences. The course is divided into three thematic blocks: Everyday Life, Culture and Big Data and New Technologies.
