Welcome to our Events Calendar roundup for the month of May! The Events Calendar can be found on the OTW website and is open to submissions by anyone with news of an event. These can be viewed by event-type, such as Academic Events, Fan Gatherings, Legal Events, OTW Events, or Technology Events taking place around the world.

• MISTI-Con, Harry Potter convention hosted by The Group Who Shall Not Be Named (the New York City Harry Potter Meetup) in cooperation with Ray "The Dark Lord Bartender" Smith and the Margate Hotel, will be held in Laconia, New Hampsire, USA from 9-13 May 2013. The convention will feature panels, programs, academic presentations, exhibits, wizard rock performances, and much more.
  Read and Share about MISTI-Con on Fanlore
• Vidukon, a United Kingdom-based fan-run convention focused on vidding, will be held in Cardiff, Wales on 18-19 May 2013. The con welcomes vids and vidders from all fandoms and features video shows along with workshops, panels, and even a 'Vid Bazaar' where vidders can swap DVDs of their work.
  Read and Share about Vidukon on Fanlore
• Celebrating its 31st incarnation, BayCon, the San Francisco Bay area's regional science fiction convention will be held 24-27 May 2013. In honor of this celebration, the program organizers have chosen the theme 'Triskaidekaphobicon' and are planning to explore the darker sides of science fiction and fantasy: phobias, superstitions, thrills, horror, and more. The con features panels, workshops, special guests, meet and greet opportunities, and gaming spaces for fans across the genre.
  Read and Share about BayCon on Fanlore
• The First Annual Fandom and Neomedia Studies (FANS) Conference will be held in Dallas, TX, on 1 and 2 June 2013. The FANS Conference is hosted and sponsored by A-Kon, the longest continually running anime and manga convention in North America. It will be held at the Dallas Hilton Anatole Hotel. Topics at the conference will include all aspects of being a fan, ranging from being a passive audience member to producing one’s own parafictive or interfictive creations. Neomedia includes both new media, as it is customarily defined, as well as new ways of using and conceptualizing traditional media.

A Call for Papers this month comes from Intensities - The Journal of Cult Media. Intensities has recently relaunched and has issued a call for papers for issue six focusing on television shows "that have achieved cult status at a historical distance". Papers are sought for both established shows and for shows that have received limited critical attention. According to the call: "[T]he papers will locate those shows historically, either by drawing on archive materials or suggesting new cultural, historical or institutional contexts in which they might be understood."

Submissions should be 6000-8000 words with a 200 word abstract (sent as separate documents) and made via e-mail to intensities[at]brunel.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2013. See the official call website for more information.

This month we have received a request for research participation from Lucy Neville, a lecturer in criminology and sociology at the University of Middlesex. Dr. Neville's study is entitled "Women's Production and Consumption of (Male) Homosexual Erotica". The study has been approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Middlesex.

Her contact information is available within the survey's cover page and she can be reached via e-mail at l.neville[at]mdx.ac.uk. The research results will be shared on the researcher's LiveJournal following the completion of the study.

If you are interested in participating, the survey questionnaire has additional information regarding the study and your rights as a participant.

If you have requests for research participation, please view our policy for inclusion at our website.

The OTW encourages anyone to submit an event that's not already listed, and to check out the calendar throughout the year!

Welcome to our Events Calendar roundup for the month of March! The Events Calendar can be found on the OTW website and is open to submissions by anyone with news of an event. These can be viewed by event-type, such as Academic Events, Fan Gatherings, Legal Events, OTW Events, or Technology Events taking place around the world.

• The Barnard Center for Research on Women at Barnard College in New York, New York, will host the 38th Scholar & Feminist Conference on 1-2 March 2013. The event's theme is "Utopia" drawing on the idea that there is a consistent power that comes from confronting our desire–our "appetites and hunger"–for "spaces of possibility," making "women’s long revolution… breaking all the old hierarchies." The event will also feature a workshop entitled Talking Back to Culture Through Feminist Remix, co-presented by Elisa Kreisinger of PopCulturePirate.com and OTW founding Board member Francesca Coppa.
• The Society for Cinema & Media Studies will host its annual conference 6-10 March in Chicago, Illinois. The annual conference is an interdisciplinary endeavor for teachers and scholars in the areas of film and media studies to network, present new research, and promote the field to practitioners, scholars, and the public at large.
• RevelCon 24, billed as "THE only fan-run relax-a-con/zinefest in the Southwest US" will be held in Houston, Texas on 15-17 March 2013. The weekend focuses on a number of fannish practices including vids, fic, art, zines, and much more. The event includes a songvid contest, a fic reading party, an art auction, and much, much more.
  Read and share about RevelCon on Fanlore
• MegaCon (MegaConvention) is a multimedia fan convention held at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. MegaCon 2013 will take place 15-17 March. The con features programming related to science fiction, fantasy, comic books, anime & manga, and gaming and hosts a number of media and comic book guests for panels and autograph sessions. This year's event will also feature a special evening event with the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
  Read and share about MegaCon on Fanlore
• New York City's first Open Source conference, Open Tech NYC, will be held on 30 March 2013. The one-day conference will feature talks on open source in business, using open technology to make a local impact, and state and local policy in relation to open source. Discounted registration is available for students

A Call for Papers this month comes from Open Source Bridge, a technology conference focused on the full spectrum of open technology and culture.

From the official call: "We are looking for people from all experience areas to submit talk proposals. Your background can be web development, project management, open hardware engineering, security, quality assurance, data visualization, user experience, etc. If you work or play in open source, we want to hear from you. Let us know how you are improving your communities, small or large. All speaking experience levels welcome." Proposals can be submitted using the online form and are due 9 March. The conference will be held in Portland, Oregon from 18-21 June 2013.

This month we have received a request for research participation from Kristen Street, a master's candidate in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kristen's study is entitled "The Effect of Fandom on the Literary Lives of Young Adults" and the survey consists of "14 yes/no and short answer questions about your reading habits and fandom activities, and 3 open ended questions about how fandom has affected your life." The study is approved by UNC-Chapel Hill's Institutional Review Board. Additional information is available on the consent form prior to the survey.

Kristen can be contacted at kstreet[at]live.unc.edu and her faculty advisor, Brian Sturm, can be reached via sturm[at]ils.unc.edu. Kristen intends to pursue publication of the study results and plans to share them with us so we may include them in a future OTW Fannews post.

If you have requests for research participation, please view our policy for inclusion at our website.

The OTW encourages anyone to submit an event that's not already listed, and to check out the calendar throughout the year!

• Slate wrote about a recent hacking attack on Tumblr, reporting on how the target was a fandom. "The original target appears to have been the 'brony' tag on tumblr...The first Tumblrs that were infected...used the brony tag, and from there, it seems, thousands of other Tumblrs fell victim, including those belonging to USA Today, the Verge, and Reuters. In a press release announcing today’s attack...GNAA insults brony culture with racist, inflammatory language typical of trolls, before mentioning an upcoming 'brony-removal drive.' The group claims to have infected 8,600 individual Tumblrs with the worm."
• Anime News Network wrote about the cancellation of various fandom events due to death threats. "Since last month, more than 20 locations linked to Kuroko's Basketball creator Tadatoshi Fujimaki, including the Comic Market dōjinshi event, have received threat letters with powdered and liquid substances. A source in the investigation of Kuroko's Basketball threat letters said there is a high possibility that the liquid sent to Sophia University on October 12 could emit a lethal dose of hydrogen sulfide if vaporized. "
• On the other hand, a TV show's fandom is being blamed for the cancellation of a popular show. "Producers and actors in North American, Asian, and European media have had a few decades to get used to the impact of organized fandom on their series. But in other parts of the world, online fandoms are only just beginning to interact with and influence television and film production decisions. Sometimes the road to harmony between the two can be quite rocky, as fans of Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon?, affectionately known as IPKKND, learned when its lead actor, Barun Sobti, decided to leave the show."

If you have stories about fan events, canon cancellations, or online wars why not share them on Fanlore? Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• While blogger Maryann Johanson at Flick Philosopher asks about the relevance of using the term 'fanboy' as female fandom keeps getting more and more visible, over at The Learned Fangirl, Vivian Obarski and Keidra Chaney ask what can be done about fandom misogyny, and a Tumblr account for female academics tired of mansplaining quickly led to a spinoff dedicated to female sports fans tired of the same thing.
• Yet even as female fans hope to get some support from content creators, whether by bringing more women to the professional table or simply wielding the banhammer for a good cause, media reports continue to emphasize gender stereotypes as if to explain the presence of women in what they always considered to be male events. A recent piece on Wizard World in Austin, Texas took care to separate fanboys and fangirls into different camps. "A fangirl can sometimes fanboy — get into the statistics, the completionism, the minutiae of continuity, while fanboys sometimes get their fan-girl on: obsessing about family dynamics in character development and wax poetic about the emotional and psychological implications of any and every plot development — but the discussions overheard from a fanboy booth versus a fangirl booth were pretty easy to tell apart."
• By comparison, people who attend those events have long noticed their diversity. In an interview with former Doctor Who actor, Peter Davison, he noted “I’ve always loved the fandom...You do seem to be an extraordinarily tolerant bunch of people, and I mean this in the nicest way, because it’s every kind of facet of the human condition that you see at every kind of convention.”
• Meanwhile, other recent articles have instead focused on the importance of creativity and inspiration in fandom, whether at a convention or just in everyday life. "Fandom can just as often produce a creative response, or provide life-directing inspiration. Think about the first Puerto-Rican astronaut, who was originally inspired by her love of Star Trek...UCLA historian Eugen Weber relates an amusing anecdote about a 19th century French labor leader who was asked whether he was more inspired by Karl Marx or Georges Sorel, to which the labor leader replied, “Lord no, I don’t read this sort of chap — I read Alexandre Dumas, I read The Three Musketeers!” In short, being a “fan” means nothing more than that one has heroes."

Have you attended fan cons? Do you have opinions about the terms fanboys and fangirls? Why not discuss it in Fanlore? Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.