Beyond Subcultural Community: A Sociological Analysis of Japanese Animation Fans and Fandoms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study of media fandom has emphasized the subcultural nature of fans’ practices and relationships. The work of Henry Jenkins (2013) was especially influential in this regard. Proposing that media fans constituted both a subculture and an interpretive community, Jenkins reified fandoms as bounded, subcultural groups composed of nomadic readers. The current dissertation constitutes a powerful critique of this traditional approach to the study of media fandom. Through ethnographic research on Japanese animation fans in Mexico and Canada and a theoretical framework informed by the oeuvre of Pierre Bourdieu, I propose that Japanese animation fandom is not a bounded group, but rather a field of consumption, that is, a space of consumer positions articulated around particular tastes relating to Japanese animation and its associated texts and characters. While some of these positions correspond to local and trans-local communities, individual media consumers occupy others. From this perspective, in a similar manner to Bourdieu’s “field of cultural production”, Japanese animation fandom is much more complex and fluid than implied by the fandom-as-community paradigm. To approach this complexity, this dissertation explores knowledges, practices, localities and objects that are appropriated and deployed by Japanese animation fans in order to be closer to their favorite narratives and characters. In doing so, fans’ tastes and consumption practices become the core of a new approach to the study of media fandom.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".