Appendix: Fan Studies Revisited

For our final regular episode, we decided to revisit Fan Studies! We begin with a review of our episodes on Foucault and authorship, Michel de Certeau and the tactics of the disempowered, Jane Tompkins and circulation and Michael Warner's idea of discourse publics. Even though it's our last regular Witch, Please episode, don't be fooled, our Transfiguration segment is a HEADY one and Hannah leads us through mind-bending theory about affective economies and affective economics (two different things!!). If you like feminist theory, you'll love the discussion of Sara Ahmed's 2004 article “Affective Economies," and if you're a media theory nerd (which we suspect you may be...), you'll appreciate when Hannah brings Henry Jenkins into the mix to think about the relationship between media industries and fandoms.

Ultimately, the conversation, inevitably, gets a bit meta and we apply our newly discovered/uncovered/learned theory to the test with a discussion about the changing face of the Harry Potter fandom, the fandom around Witch, Please the podcast and the radical possibilities AND limits of both.

For this episode, we invited our Faculty Club to join in for OWLS so if you hear some unfamiliar voices and brains at work, that's why! Big shoutout to our Faculty Club (a high Patreon tier) for helping us with this last episode and for the financial support. You're why Coach has the hours to add so many sound effects. Hoot, hoot.