Bio

Suzanne Scott received her Ph.D. in Critical Studies from the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and is currently a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on fandom and participatory culture, transmedia storytelling, comic book culture, audience studies, video game studies, and cultural studies at UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, and Occidental College.

Her dissertation, titled “Revenge of the Fanboy: Convergence Culture and the Politics of Incorporation,” examines the demographic and representational “revenge” of the fanboy within media convergence.  Specifically, the project presents test cases that expose the gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s “collaborationist” embrace of fans and commoditization of fan labor.  The first test case addresses Twilight anti-fandom through an examination of the Twihate protests at San Diego Comic-Con 2009, and its shifting significance as a promotional space.  Moving from localized efforts to contain fangirls at Comic-Con to broader attempts to channel fan participation, the second test case examines the television industry’s adoption of ancillary content models (webisodes, podcasts, etc.) through an analysis of the SyFy series Battlestar Galactica.  This analysis interrogates the textual “work” ancillary content performs (appropriating fans’ tendencies to play in the textual gaps and margins) and how fans’ labor is “regifted” back to them as promotional content.  The final test case examines contemporary forms of socially networked fan production that attempt to negotiate between fandom’s “feminine” gift economy and the “masculine” commercial drives of amateur production within convergence culture, through a discussion of Harry Potter wizard rock bands.  Collectively, this project presents broader concerns about what I call convergence culture’s “incorporation paradigm” with regard to fan culture.

In 2009, Suzanne was named as a HASTAC Scholar; HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) recognizes graduate students doing innovative work on technology, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences.  Between 2009-2012, she served on the symposium editorial team for the open-access, peer-reviewed online journal Transformative Works and Cultures, where she is currently a member of the Board.  Her work has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica and The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and the journals Spectator and Transformative Works and Cultures.  Forthcoming publications include work in the 20th Anniversary Edition of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture,  How to Watch Television, and the Companion to Media Authorship.