New Chapter: Fandom: Historicized Fandom and the Conversation between East and West Perspectives

Erika Ningxin Wang The chapter I have co-authored with Dr Eleonora Benecchi, Università della Svizzera Italiana, discusses the transformation of the concept of "Fandom" before and after the digital age, and the conversation between East and West. It is included in the book Digital Roots: Historicizing Media and Communication Concepts of the Digital Age, part…

Remembering life using social media during pandemic times

Taylor Annabell Like many in the CMCI academic community, my research has adapted and responded to the unfolding social environment brought about by Covid-19. In fact, entering lockdown in the UK on the 23rd March 2020 was the midway point for me in my fieldwork interviews. My PhD looks at how memory is entangled in…

Emotionally Demanding Research in Lockdown

Lauren Cantillon One definition of ‘emotionally demanding research’ is ‘research that demands a tremendous amount of mental, emotional, or physical energy and potentially affects or depletes the researcher’s health or well-being’ (Kumar and Cavallaro, 2017, p.648). There is an ever-growing literature on how to protect the mental wellbeing of a researcher or research team when…

Lockdown Fashion: An exploration of dressing at home in 2020

Yana Reynolds As a fashion sociologist, I have always been fascinated by everyday sartorial behaviours as a mechanism that allows to ‘articulate the relationship between a particular body and its lived milieu, the space occupied by bodies and constituted by bodily actions’, as fashion theorist Jennifer Craik put it. But what happens to dress in…