FAN ENGAGEMENT, IDENTITIES, AND REPRESENTATION IN POP CULTURE

Popular culture has always been a challenging topic in academia.Ever since the 1950s, we have turned to look at popular texts (Williams, 2018).Whether those texts are films, songs, or even games, they fulfil a specific function for us -the audiences who consume them.Williams (2018) argues that the notion of popular culture finds its roots in something in which people are involved as a distinct entity, mainly to take distance from what we would call high culture -the niche taste(s) like opera or classical music.Yet, Williams ( 2018) is critical of that perspective, too: popular culture is something that is produced, and it comes with a sense of novelty.Building on these characteristics of popular culture, Williams (2018: 907) argues we should not consider it a residual category "for things which have not made the grade as serious culture".This Special Issue, exploring the intersections of pop(ular) culture, Fan Studies and the Creative Industries, shows how