Brianna Dym is a Ph.D student in the University of Colorado Boulder’s information science department under Dr. Casey Fiesler. Brianna’s field of study is fanworks: the original creations, derivations, and reimaginings of existing brands and media, from movies to video games. LGBTQIA+ authors engage in this creative component of fandom to produce original stories and games that better represent marginalized groups.
In this podcast, Brianna and I discuss what makes for good source material, and why there’s more fanfic of Dragon Age and Mass Effect than of Call of Duty or Super Meat Boy; whether fandom is necessarily participatory; why Nintendo should be more supportive of derivative works; how fanworks can develop skills in groups historically excluded from STEM fields; and how communities migrate from platform to platform, and why LiveJournal and Tumblr may serve their needs better than a CMS like WordPress.
Stream the audio edition of this interview below or from Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for a transcript and links to resources mentioned in this episode.
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