Identical twins John and Edward Grimes (artist name "Jedward") have been active for six years and have a heterogeneous following of fans. This thesis aims to investigate how and in which situations fans think about Jedward as part of their everyday life. Each of the three informants, plus the author, kept diaries recording the above for the course of one week. The diaries were subsequently coded into the groups Traditional Fandom, Social Media, Music, Places, Family & Friends, Interests & Hobbies, Studies, Film & TV and Food & Drink respectively. Auto-ethnographic method was implemented and combined with work within the spheres of fandom and music. At a later date informants were asked if there are any products or causes that they associate with John and Edward; in lieu of comprehensive answers, the author compiled such a list. For the fours fans taking part, John and Edward are experienced as being close to them in many different situations during their day-to-day lives, in much the same way as a close friend or loved one. The conclusion is that through aiming to portray my own interpretation of fandom, it has been possible to see just how creative and imaginative fans are, an enlightening reflection contrary to those which in many cases have been none too positive.

The approach that emphasises the active audience, and the subversive potential of audience encounters with texts, has greatly influenced the study of media fandom which has tended to see media fans, and the cultures they produce, as set in opposition to writers and producers. My thesis challenges this view of the relationships between fans and producers by examining fan-producers in contemporary television. This research challenges the influential theoretical models that see authorship as a major source of social control and thus sees audiences that 'poach' meanings from texts as engaged in rebellion. The approach that perceives fandom as in opposition to the meanings of production falls short in representing the complexity of fan and producer interactions and thus curtails our understanding of these relationships. My thesis moves beyond the untenable opposition between fans and producers and, in doing so, paves the way for an understanding of fan studies more suitable for the contemporary, and still developing, climate of audience interactions. I believe that the practices of fandom demonstrate that consumption and authorship are more closely linked than previous tendencies to divide them would suggest. Previous works have served to both underestimate fandom, as powerless rebels or dupes, or exaggerate its position as a force of political or cultural resistance. My research engages with the contemporary developments within fan culture, and emphasises the importance of deconstructing monolithic ideas of the media industry in order to better understand the influences and pressures placed on the figure of the fan-producer. I argue that the media industries are not as homogeneous as previously implied, and that the fan-producer is forced to negotiate the complex and often conflicting relationships within the worlds of both fandom and official production.

Finding something sacred in secular society is a relatively new field of religious studies. This thesis aims to find the secular sacred amongst Star Wars fans on the blogging platform Tumblr, in relation to Kim Knott and her theory of the secular sacred. I collected and studied 100 blog posts about Star Wars, specifically about one of its main characters, Rey. The research questions used were “How do fans of Star Wars and Rey express themselves on Tumblr?”, and “Could it be seen as sacred according to Kim Knott´s theory of secular sacred?” I analyzed the material with a hermeneutic approach, and using Kim Knott’s theory, I categorized the posts in to three categories: sacred, appreciative and sacrilegious. Even though the appreciative category was by far the largest, the results showed that a fifth of all the blog posts could be perceived as having content that could be seen as sacred to its poster. I came to the conclusion that my study supports the theory of sacredness not being exclusive to religious society, but can be found in the secular as well.

This study examines the academic concept of pop cosmopolitanism—an interest in global popular culture that leads to start of a global perspective and provides an escape route out of the parochialism of local community/culture—as posited by Henry Jenkins in its lived, experienced context. The online English-speaking overseas fandom of the Japanese male pop idol talent agency, Johnny & Associates, framed as a community of pop cosmopolitans, serves a case study to evaluate this concept. These global fans demonstrate through their engagement with and investment in a form of Japanese popular culture that they are able to obtain a competency in Japanese culture that would have not otherwise been available to them. The obtainment of this cultural competency is driven by the personal notion of fandom, with emotional affect and identification between the fan and the fan object at its core, and access to new media technologies such as the Internet. However, it is noted that Jenkins's original definition of pop cosmopolitanism does not account completely for the complexity of the lived experience and a distinction of local pop cosmopolitanism and comprehensive pop cosmopolitanism is necessary. Furthermore, the pop cosmopolitans studied discount the idea of escape embedded into Jenkins's definition and instead emphasize the positive influence of their pop cosmopolitanism on their own (fandom) identity construction.

This study explores how knowledge and reality is constructed within an online fandom’s communication, with a focus on LGBTQ+ discourse within Taylor Swift’s fans on Reddit. This is done through a qualitative digital ethnographic method and uses LGBTQ+ symbols and parasocial relationships as tools to analyse 75 posts and 850 comments total. The theoretical framework mainly consists of Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) theory on the social construction of reality and Couldry and Hepp’s (2017) reinterpretation of their work that considers the effects of digitalization and how our construction of reality has changed with it. The analysis showed that the group uses symbols to build a shared collection of facts and continuously follows an us-versus-them narrative to construct their community. Their foundational belief that Swift herself is secretly queer is not to be too closely questioned within the group and they often use the version of Swift that outsiders have built up to discuss hypothetical what-ifs. To participate in the community and be seen as “logical” it appears to require that you to some extent correctly consume the media in a way that aligns with pre- existing facts that the group shares. Meaning that the group has unspoken rules that dictate the knowledge hierarchies within it.

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