The Routledge Handbook of Fan Video and Digital Authorship

This cutting-edge collection explores the histories, aesthetics, and cultural work of fan video across a wide variety of manifestations and genres.

Editors Louisa Ellen Stein and Samantha Close have assembled an edited collection that showcases the aesthetic diversity and transcultural dynamics at play in fan video as a widespread form. The collection explores the relationships between fan video as a set of DIY subcultural authorship forms and the broader evolving popular cultures of digital media, looking at how fan video structures and aesthetics influence other popular and commercial forms of digital video. In order to do so, it examines a wide range of fan video genres and practices, including vidding, reaction videos, self-insert TikToks, ASMR videos, Let’s Play videos, streams, Bilibili videos, gif loops, fan films, crack videos, animatics, collection videos, deepfakes, fake trailers, and fan video essays, among others. It features chapters by a range of scholars working in the intersecting fields of digital media studies, fan studies, media studies, cultural studies, audience studies, video game studies, transcultural studies, and videographic studies.

A field-defining collection, this Handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of digital media studies, fan studies, media studies, cultural studies, videographic studies, and beyond.

Louisa Ellen Stein is Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA. She is the author of Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age (2015) and co-editor of A Tumblr Book: Platforms and Cultures (2020), Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (2012), and Teen Television: Programming and Fandom (2008). Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on cultural and digital contexts, gender, and generation.

Samantha Close is Associate Professor of Media and Popular Culture at DePaul University, USA. She writes about fan video and creates scholarly video work that mixes fan video with videographic criticism. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes and academic journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, and the International Journal of Communication. Her research interests include digital media, theory-practice, fan studies, gender, race, and Japanese media. She focuses particularly on labor and transforming models of creative industries and capitalism.