Independent Researcher

Thesis Title: PhD thesis (Bristol University 2008): Performing Fandom, Peforming Community: A case study of The Sopranos and its online fandom

About

This thesis examines how the terms fandom, community, and 'quality' are negotiated within the online social networks that are devoted to the HBO series The Sopranos (1999-2007). By extending perspectives that challenge theoretical models of audience resistance, much of the analysis considers fan discussion forum activity as a playful, performative strategy which enables fans reflexively to assert their individual or group identity. Fan performances often reflect a desire to strive for utopian versions of community while also making subcultural assertions of difference and distinction within Sopranos-related groups. I argue that the performance of distinction and the reproduction of taste hierarchies within groups interacts with The Sopranos own cultural performance as 'quality' TV. As such, the analysis focuses on how fan activity is implicated with, rather than resisting, economic, industrial capitalist interests. In considering claims that the Internet has mainstreamed fandom, I suggest that the cultural work that The Sopranos' fans perform, indicates a complex practice which challenges the separation of the terms 'mainstream' and 'subcultural'.

The research utilises a range of virtual ethnographic and qualitative research strategies. The project locates fan-audiences and their constructed secondary texts throughout multiple Sopranos-related fan discussion forums. Modes of practice such as participant-observation, email correspondence, real-time chats and researcher self-reflexivity are employed in order to shape the final gathering and textual analysis of empirical data. I argue that the deployment of an autoethnographic narrative accounts for the ways in which the scholar-fan's discursive locations inform subsequent analysis. I assert that this critical approach complicates assumptions about the researcher's rational, detached subjectivity, thus challenging ethnographic authority and textual transparency.


Research Seminar Papers

University of Bristol, UK, School of Arts, Department of Drama: Theatre, Film and Television
March 20, 2008
Paper Title: ‘Approaching virtual ethnography: An investigation of possibilities for conducting online fan-audience research’

Cardiff University, UK, School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC)
March 21, 2007
Paper Title: ‘Writing the self into ethnography: Memory, personal narrative and the negotiation of a speaking position’

Postgraduate Training Day: ‘AHRB South West Universities Postgraduate Film and TV Studies Group: Research Methods Colloquium’, University of Bristol, UK,
Department of Drama: Theatre, Film and Television, June 6, 2005
Paper Title: ‘Studying The Sopranos online fan community:
From proposal to third year of study’

University of Bristol, UK, Department of Drama: Theatre, Film and Television, Nov. 21, 2002
Presentation Title: ‘Methodological Challenges for the
‘Virtual Ethnographer’’


Conference Papers
(peer reviewed)

'Radical British Screens Symposium', University of the West of England, Sept. 3, 2010
Paper Title: 'Radical for Whom: Finding space for the political in the teen drama/comedy series Skins'


‘British Television Drama and US Imports: Aesthetics, Institutions, Histories’,
University of Reading, March 24, 2006
Paper Title: ‘Travelling Across Communities: An autoethnographic account of a cross-cultural viewing experience of The Sopranos’

‘Console-ing Passions Conference’, Tulane University, New Orleans,
Louisiana USA, May 30- June 2, 2004
Paper Title: ‘ ‘Since The Sopranos is not a soap-opera…’: Debates over meaning and fan performance in Sopranoland.com’