The Participatory Cultures Handbook

Media creation, distribution, and exhibition was once monopolized by a handful of institutions (e.g. newspapers, television stations, movie studios), but today many of these tools are readily available to the general public, and people are using this technology--in just one example--to create or remix fan-generated entertainment on video sharing sites like YouTube.

The Participatory Cultures Handbook will help students and scholars navigate this rapidly changing media and cultural terrain. Composed of newly commissioned essays from contributors across disciplines, this handbook will introduce students to the concept of participatory culture, explain how researchers approach participatory culture studies, and provide original examples of participatory culture in action. The wide range of topics explored in participatory culture include crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, fanfiction, wikis, video games, video sharing, transmedia storytelling, and much more.
Contributors include: Howard Rheingold, Christopher Kelty, Jason Mittell, Suzanne Scott, Henry Jenkins, Clive Goodinson, Mia Consalvo, Thomas Swiss, Helen Burgess, Pierre Levy, Alexander Halavais, Daren Brabham, Sophia B. Liu, Jen Ziemke, Sarah Pearce, Will Venters, Barry Joseph, Kelly Czarnecki, Dieter Fuchs, Rolf Luehr, John Heaven, David M. Faris, Patrick Meier, Cynthia Hawkins, Benjamin Stokes, Paul Taylor, the Janissary Collective, Owen Gallagher, Clay Calvert, W. James Potter.

Aaron Delwiche is an associate pofessor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He teaches courses on hacking subcultures, transmedia storytelling and video-game design and criticism. His experiments with games in the classroom have been covered by publications ranging from Wired to The Guardian (UK). In 2009, with support from the Lennox Foundation, he organized the lecture series "Reality Hackers: The Next Wave of Media Revolutionaries"and published an anthology of essays related to the series. 
Jennifer Jacobs Henderson is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Henderson is the author of the 2010 book Defending the Good News: The Jehovah's Witnesses and Their Plan to Expand the First Amendment. She specializes in issues of media law, the ethics of media, and the use of participatory cultures for political and social action. For more than a decade, she has been researching how voices outside of American mainstream discourse have pressured the government to expand free speech protections.