Mel Stanfill

@melstanfill.bsky.social

2199 Followers 50 Following

Associate Professor, UCF T&T and English. Opinions mine. Bringing Foucault to fandom since 2006.

This place is a message.. .and part of a system of messages ...pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor.. .no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here . . .nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location.. . it increases towards a center.. .the center of danger is here.. .of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
screenshot of USA today news story "Trump promises 'really long speech' on July 4 despite extreme DC heat" followed by text Outdoor in sun perfec t place for president to do speech! Outdoor very warm very soft put old man on green lawn under sun. Put old man in warm sun. no problem ever in warm sun because good view and audience can see long speech. Nice podium outdoor sunny perfect place for old president can trust warm sun to give nice view to President good luck to President. friend sun.
An illustration of a horse split into two halves, one detailed and the other crude
drakensberg-blog Nov 28, 2012 The reading comprehension and overall common sense on this website is piss poor. poupon Nov 28, 2012 how dare you say we piss on the poor
Retro pixel-art game card, flagged "Probably fabricated — judge existence confidence 10/100." Titled "Mel Stanfill, Former NBA Basketball Player," showing "4G Strength." A description attributed to Qwen3 8B reads: "Mel Stanfill is a former professional basketball player known for his career in the NBA." Below is a bar-chart leaderboard of AI models.
Retro pixel-art game card titled "Mel Stanfill, Media Studies Scholar," showing "593 Strength" and "Top 7%." A description reads: "Media studies scholar known for work on fandom, digital culture, and race, gender, and sexuality in media industries." Below is a bar-chart leaderboard ranking various AI models.
galaxy brain meme. Use an LLM to create a podcast instead of reading. LLM podcasts are form without substance. podcasts as a genre are form without substance.
The image shows a flyer designed to match the homepage of Archive of Our Own, including the logo and banner from the website. The left column says “Survey Participants Needed! Fanfiction Writers, Fanfiction Readers, Fans, Fandom enthusiasts.” Below that says “Contact Information: Hannah F. Benton, Graduate Student, Rhetoric & Composition, College of Arts & Humanities, hannah.benton@ucf.edu. Stephanie Wheeler, PhD, Faculty Adviser, department of writing & Rhetoric, stephanie.wheeler@ucf.edu. The right column says “We are looking for Fanfiction readers and writers to participate in a short 10-minute survey. The purpose of this study is to better understand to what extend fanfiction Author’s notes (A/Ns) may function as recognizable, textual genres within online fandom communities. If you choose to participate, you will be asked to respond to several questions about your experience reading or writing fanfiction Author’s Notes as well as your understanding of how they function, their purpose, importance, and features.” Below that says “Information: No identifiable private information will be collected. You must be 18 years of age or older and have had prior experiences with either reading or writing fanfiction to take part in this research study.” The bottom of the flyer has the AO3 logo, a QR code, and “Access the survey here.” https://ucf.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1XmdiMTnzfc9EFM
image of book page: Conclusion Unlike any other book I’ve ever written, when colleagues have asked what I’m working on and I’ve explained this project, everyone had something to say about it. On one hand, people told me they found the premise interesting and wanted to read the book (which will, I’m sure, be a comfort to the marketing team). On the other hand—and, to me, the more interesting response—people had examples. My colleague Tison Pugh immediately thought of his copy of the early 1990s fanzine Judy! about Judith Butler, and then loaned it to me. The zine played with the slippage between Butler and Judy Garland—the queer theorist and the gay icon—as well as with ir/reverence for Butler’s gender theory, mocking and admiring and generally representing much the same push and pull around famous scholars as I’ve discussed throughout this book. Another colleague, Chrissy Kolaya, immediately told me about how her husband Brook Miller is a fan of mathematician Gilbert Strang, whose lectures have received sometimes millions of views on YouTube, indicating a broader fandom amid the students just trying to figure out their homework. Kolaya and Miller both told me about the custom Gilbert Strang T-shirt their children had made for him—academostar fan merchandise. Another colleague, overhearing the conversation about the shirt, suddenly remembered a conference at which there were trading cards of presenters—which is apparently a real thing and not just a @timgill924 satirical tweet. Whether or not people have previously thought of the feels that academics have about each other in terms of fandom, once it is presented to them that way, it often resonates.
image of book page: "Red, White, and Anti-School: The University as Conservative Anti-Fan Object" America remains a safe distance from Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. Neither our secretive university committees nor the social-media mobs are backed by authoritarian regimes threatening violence. —Anne Applebaum (August 2021) “The professors are the enemy.” So said J.D. Vance, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, quoting Richard Nixon at last month’s National Conservatism Conference. . . . But it is important to ask why it is that Vance, and others of his political ilk, appear so viscerally hostile to higher ed. —Henry Reichman (December 2021) In August 2014, Steven Salaita was un-hired at the University of Illinois over inflammatory tweets about Israel. I was doing my PhD at the university, and many of my friends were involved with American Indian Studies, which was to be Salaita’s home program, so it was close to home. I joined the march on the quad and packed in to the university YMCA for Salaita’s talk with the other sardines (the fire marshal would have had a fit) because it seemed wrong that somebody should be out of a job because they had a political opinion that was unpopular with big donors and campus administration. It seemed scary that somebody could get fired for tweets—even caustic ones, as Salaita’s undoubtedly were. It seemed concerning that Salaita’s actual record of scholarly achievement was rendered irrelevant by all of the above. Little did I know then how attacks on faculty because of politics would continue to escalate over the next decade.
image of book page: "Make the Ivory Tower Exclusive Again: Frustrated Fandom of Academia at the University of Austin A new university dedicated to the pursuit of truth.—University of Austin Twitter account (2021) “Wokeism” is a handy acronym for a set of ideas and, more importantly, practices that have become very influential in American academia. The ideas range from “Critical Race Theory” to extreme gender relativism to a preference for “diversity, equality, and inclusion” over academic freedom and academic standards.—Niall Ferguson (2021) Writing this chapter was profoundly irritating. It entailed wading through more than 114,000 words about what higher education is and was and should be—words that I felt to be, almost without exception, wildly off base. It was a slog to read about how conservatives are supposedly discriminated against on campus in the same way that race and gender function
image of a book page. "Haters Gonna Tweet: Academia as an Object of (Anti-)Fandom on Social Media" This is more of a comment than a question, but the speaker’s semiotic analysis is insufferable. #scms22—@DrMediaProf In 2022, I did a bit of a performance art piece at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference. I created a Twitter bot, @DrMediaProf, which would generate snarky commentary, and I set it to tweet into the conference hashtag once an hour while papers were being presented. The point wasn’t to target any particular presenter—in fact the bot’s vocabulary was deliberately vague, referring to the “critic,” “presenter,” or “professor,” their “critique,” “reading,” or “framing,” and a range of theory terms: “poststructuralist,” “Foucaultian,” and “Birmingham School,” among others. It tweeted things like “Listening to the panelist’s Toronto School framing is annoying. #scms22” or “The scholar is doing postcolonial discourse, drink! #scms22.” The bot grew out of a sample Twitter bot that I had developed to use for teaching both critical theory and JavaScript programming a couple of years earlier, but I turned it loose in the SCMS hashtag because I wanted to comment on the formulaic nature of academic snarkiness—it’s so predictable, a bot can do it.
image of book page: From Lecture Notes to Likes: Academics as Social Media Microcelebrities We have to kiss our own asses. The institution is not gonna. —Kishonna Gray Institutions will not protect you.—Mary Rambaran-Olm I created a Twitter account for myself in 2009, and in summer 2011 I started a second account for my blog that automatically published tweets about new posts. But it wasn’t until my first Association of Internet Researchers conference in fall 2011 that I really came to understand Academic Twitter. I remember sitting in the lobby of the conference hotel with my tiny netbook switching over the blog account to be my professional presence and moving the other one off the @melstanfill handle, because I had realized that significant amounts of the conversation and networking I’d come to the conference for were actually happening on Twitter. Once I was ready, I joined what I would come to know as the conference backchannel. My first conference tweets explained something that has been misunderstood in my talk: “just to clarify, i mean ‘livestock was a useful metaphor to understand this process’ @drst ‘Fans are livestock’—Mel Stanfill #ir12 #fandom” (Stanfill 2011).1 I soon became a regular live-tweeter at conferences, doing mostly color commentary at first (the quippy, quotable bits, like my misunderstood livestock metaphor) until I gradually got better at the play-by-play (summarizing the argument). I often showed up on the list of most frequent tweeters in conference hashtags.
image of book page: Fans of Aca-Fans: Fan Studies Scholars as Celebrities The backlash I faced is not really from right-wing people. It’s from people who genuinely do believe that they are committed to a progressive politics, but are threatened by the idea that fandom is structurally racist.—Rukmini Pande I went and did 10 lectures at various universities. And it was like being a rock star. I mean, one house had a thousand people physically there, and another thousand or two thousand online. —Henry Jenkins At the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in 2024, the Fan and Audience Studies Scholarly Interest Group held a social meetup that was organized as a game night. I had found a seat next to Rukmini Pande, who is Associate Professor of Literary and Communication Studies at O. P. Jindal Global University and whom I had at that point already interviewed for this chapter. More people were gradually trickling in as we were deciding which game to play, and a graduate student I didn’t know came and sat on the other side of me. The student soon noticed Pande and got her attention so that she could express how much she valued her work and how excited she was to meet her. I tried to lean out of the way to let the conversation happen, but all the while I was thinking about what Pande had told me about knowing that her work has been valued but not always feeling welcomed in academic fan studies spaces, and it was nice to see her be the recipient of some fannishness.
image of book page reading: Introduction Academics are fans, by any workable definition.—Alan McKee (2007) We must undergo a change of heart. We must change our attitudes and stop being fans. Just say no to academostars.—Sharon O’Dair (2001) “Ugh, I hate that guy,” my fellow grad student said. The person walking by was one of the most famous people ever to graduate from my PhD program, who had returned to campus for one of a series of annual “reunions.” This was partially a networking opportunity for current students and partially about proving something about the program to university administrators in a way I only vaguely understood at the time. Just an hour or two earlier, I’d heard another fellow grad student hijack a series of elevator pitch talks about our research to gush over the same famous scholar, telling him how much she admired him instead of about her research (to his credit, he gently redirected her). This bifurcation, with some people clearly fans of this guy and some clearly anti-fans, was what first made me want to write this book. When and how and why do academics become objects of fandom and anti-fandom? At the time, I was most interested in how academics become such objects to one another, but the intervening years have seen relentless and escalating attacks on academics and academia from politicians and pundits, demonstrating that antipathy toward higher education can be a fun pastime for the whole family.
image of book table of contents List of Tables vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Fans of Aca-Fans: F an Studies Schol ars as C elebrities 21 Chapter 2 From Lecture Notes to Likes: Academics as Social Media ocelebrities Micr 49 Chapter 3 Haters Gonn a Tweet: Academia as an Object of (Anti- ) Fandom on al dia Soci Me 83 Chapter 4 Make the Ivory Tower Exclusive Again: Frustrated Fandom of Academia t niversity Austin a the of 107 U Chapter 5 Red, White, and Anti-School: The University as Conservative Anti-Fan Object 131 Conclusion 159
cover of Professor Superstar: Fandom and Anti-Fandom of Academia by Mel Stanfill
A mailed notification for the Antheopic copyright settlement.
summary of panel, which won't all fit in alt text: Over the past decade, there has been increased scholarly attention to how audiences, and particularly fans, have been incorporated into media industry practices. This has predominantly centered on the fans and practices that are most often industrially and socially sanctioned--heterosexual, cisgender white men and their habits of merchandise collection and canon-formation. This panel challenges this hegemonic focus by interrogating the dynamics between media industries and fans of femslash (typically woman/woman) relationships, whose affective and creative engagements disrupt conventional paradigms of fandom. First, this is a question about how queer fan content becomes formal industry content. Second, the panel examines how industry actively engages queer fans, or even seeks them out. Third, the panel considers how, departing from the history of antagonistic relationships with industry, some queer fans seek out industry validation of their interpretations of source texts. Fourth, the papers take up the question of whether and how fan-industry relationships shed light on how queerness itself is normalized in culture. Through four interdisciplinary case studies, we examine how queer fans navigate, subvert, and reconfigure industrial forces and opportunities to claim visibility and agency, seeking to broaden how we make sense of the relationships fans have with industry through the particular case of fans of lesbian content.
book cover for Teaching AI in Film and Media Studies by Bridget Kies and Mel Stanfill with a robot and various film and economic symbols
Plaque for the NCA diamond anniversary book award for Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture
screenshot of email that says "We will begin review in the new yar"
image from Monty Python and the Holy Grail that reads: We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
award announcement text: Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture by Dr. Mel Stanfill is recognized with the Diamond Anniversary Book Award for its incisive and timely analysis of the hidden costs of participatory culture. Drawing on vivid case studies from video games, television, film, and politics, Stanfill demonstrates how fan networks that foster creativity and connection can also perpetuate harassment, sexism, racism, and exclusion. By exposing these dynamics with clarity and rigor, this book reshapes how scholars and the public understand the cultural and political stakes of fandom, making a profound contribution to the study of communication, community, and power.
Hollywood Walk of Fame style star, but colored blue like a photo negative from a scandal, with book title Professor Superstar: Fandom and Anti-fandom of Academia and author Mel Stanfill
a survey question "Which of these options best describes your sexuality?" which has autopopulated with the answer choices Male, Female, Non-binary/third gender, and Prefer not to say
Google search result for Baptismal font
title page: Professor Superstar Fandom and anti-Fandom oF academia Mel Stanfill University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor
a screenshot of a table of contents showing chapter titles: Chapter 1 Fans of Aca-Fans: Fan Studies Scholars as Celebrities; Chapter 2 From Lecture Notes to Likes: Academics as Social Media Microcelebrities; Chapter 3 Haters Gonna Tweet: Academia as an Object of (Anti-)Fandom on Social Media; Chapter 4 Make the Ivory Tower Exclusive Again: Frustrated Fandom of Academia at the University of Austin; Chapter 5 Red, White, and Anti-School: The University as Conservative Anti-fan Object
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a stack of books. Benjamin's Race after Technology. Brock's Distributed Blackness. Constanza-Chock's Design Justice. D'Ignazio and Klein's Data Femnism. De Kosnik's Rogue Archives. Jackson, Bailey, and Welles's Hashtag Activism. Nakamura's Digitizing Race. Noble's Algorithms of Oppression. Steele's Digital Black Femnism.