Acknowledgments

This textbook emerged from the accumulated work of generations of fan studies scholars who argued, often against considerable institutional skepticism, that what fans do matters and deserves serious attention. We owe particular debts to the foundational generation: Henry Jenkins, whose Textual Poachers (1992) established the field's basic argumentative posture; Camille Bacon-Smith, whose Enterprising Women (1992) centered the experience of women fans; and the scholars who built on their work to create the rich, contested, and genuinely international field that fan studies is today.

We owe equal debts to the fans themselves: the zine editors and convention organizers of the pre-internet era who built the infrastructure that digital fandom later inherited; the founders and volunteers of the Organization for Transformative Works, who created the Archive of Our Own and fought for a fan-owned, nonprofit alternative to commercial platforms; the moderators who spend unpaid hours maintaining community spaces; the translators who make international fandom possible; and the fan scholars who have always known that what they were doing was, in some sense, research.

The three running examples in this book—the Kalosverse, the ARMY Files, and the Archive and the Outlier—are composite constructions. The characters who populate them (Priya Anand, Mireille Fontaine, TheresaK, Vesper_of_Tuesday, Sam Nakamura, KingdomKeeper_7, IronHeartForever) are fictional, though their experiences are drawn from the documented practices of real fan communities. Any resemblance to specific individuals is coincidental.

Portions of the analysis in this textbook draw on scholarship from Abigail De Kosnik, Kristina Busse, Karen Hellekson, Mel Stanfill, Rukmini Pande, Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, C. Lee Harrington, Bethan Jones, and many others whose work is cited throughout. Errors of interpretation are my own.

This project was supported by the intellectual infrastructure of open-access fan studies publishing, particularly Transformative Works and Cultures, published by the Organization for Transformative Works, which makes the entire archive of fan studies research freely available.

Finally: to every student who has ever felt embarrassed admitting they cared too much about a book, a show, a band, or a game—this textbook is a formal invitation to stop apologizing for it.