Cara Marta Messina

Critical Fandom positions fan authors as rhetoricians and fan fiction as an action. Every fan author navigates--implicitly or explicitly--the politics of their fandom, the media they love, their lived experiences, digital technologies, reader expectations, and a larger culture. To better understand critical fans, Cara Marta Messina analyzes Archive of Our Own tagging practices, fan fictions, and interviews from four different fandoms. Fans of The Legend of Korra celebrate queer relationships while understanding representation is just the first step in the face of systemic homophobia. Game of Thrones fan authors challenge racism and heteronormativity in both the community and the show. In online forums for Black Panther, fans make space for sapphic romances and explore the humanity of Erik Killmonger, ultimately contending with harmful stereotypes of radical Black men. And the Our Flag Means Death fandom demonstrates how a show can flourish when it centers queerness, especially for trans fans. Even in these moments of joy, there's conflict. Critical Fandom seeks to answer what comes next.

Rethinking Multilingual Writers in Higher Education: An Institutional Case Study explores the complexities of multilingual students as language users and learners, emphasizing the distinctive assets that they bring to their education and the ways in which institutions of higher education can better meet their needs.Teachers, university administrators, advisors, and other support staff will gain an understanding of the resources, challenges, and successes of this growing student population and become better equipped to provide them with the best possible educational opportunities. Through mixed-methods case studies focusing on the Northeastern University Writing Program and Writing Center, the authors unpack the complexity of multilingual students’ identities and languaging to challenge deficit and homogenizing narratives that overlook their linguistic assets and diverse educational experiences. Working within and against university categories for collecting information about students and assessing their writing, authors point out the limits of terms such as “international” and the problems with dichotomous L1/L2 and native/nonnative speaker labels. Finally, the book offers lessons learned about the importance of conducting program self-study to inform research and pedagogy for higher education institutions around the world.This book will appeal to writing studies and linguistics scholars with interests in multilingualism, assessment, and mobility, as well as institutional stakeholders and researchers of higher education and multicultural education.