Marginally Fannish

ETHER Blog Post - January 2021: Marginally Fannish by Parinita Shetty

Marginally Fannish is a fan podcast created as a part of my PhD project. My co-participants and I explored various aspects of intersectionality in some of our favourite media texts and their fandoms. My co-participants and I come from a wide range of worldviews and backgrounds – both marginalised and privileged in different contexts. They included people from India, England, Scotland, the US, the UAE, Israel, Singapore, the Philippines, Greece, Japan, Bulgaria, and Canada. Apart from this international diversity, they also inhabited a range of identities across the racial, religious, gender, sexuality, ability, and age spectrum.

In our podcast episodes, we used the framework of our favourite fictional worlds, characters and events to discuss our real-world experiences and perspectives. Under the broader umbrella of diverse representations in media (and, more commonly, the underrepresentation or misrepresentation of diverse groups of people), we explored issues of race and ethnicity, gender and gender diversity, class, sexuality, religion, regional/national origin, physical and mental (dis)ability, and age. We co-created knowledge through our conversations which drew on our different, sometimes conflicting, opinions. This diversity in perspectives allowed us to expand and challenge our understanding as well as explore the complexities and nuances of the intersectional themes we were discussing.

You can find the podcast and text transcripts of each episode on the website https://marginallyfannish.org/ or listen to it on Spotify/Apple/Google/SoundCloud.

Bio: Parinita Shetty has worked with young people and children’s books in India in various ways - as an author, a bookseller in a children’s bookshop, a reading programme developer, and a coordinator of a children’s literature festival. She completed her M.Ed in Children’s Literature and Literacies from the University of Glasgow in 2017. She is currently a third-year doctoral researcher in the School of Education at the University of Leeds. She launched a PhD podcast to research intersectionality, critical literacy, and public pedagogy in fan podcasts. She is passionate about co-creating knowledge as a researcher, including diverse voices in her research, and making her academic research as accessible as possible to non-academic audiences. She should currently be writing but is probably watching Doctor Who.