Jenkins, Henry

Henry Jenkins (1958–), a media studies scholar and self-proclaimed aca-fan (academic/fanatic), is best known for his concept of convergence culture, which describes the late 20th- and early 21st-century phenomenon of old media living alongside new or digital media. Throughout his academic career, Jenkins has focused largely on studying audiences, fans, and participatory culture. Jenkins is a proponent of media education and encouraging media literacies, and he is an advocate for video games, countering the much-publicized discussion of media effects that puts the blame on violent media (especially video games) for such events as the Columbine massacre. Nearly central to his questions surrounding media are questions of gender and sexuality, which guide many of his research projects.

Jenkins received his M.A. in communication studies from Iowa State University and finished his Ph.D. in communication arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was for many years the codirector of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which he helped create. In 2009, Jenkins became provost professor of communication, journalism, and cinematic arts at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and School of Cinematic Arts.

One of Jenkins's first important interventions in the field of media studies was his breaking down of the barrier between text and reader/audience/fan. In his 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Jenkins noted that fans wanting more story lines and content within their favorite franchise or set of texts would often produce their own stories in various genres that extended the narrative arc of certain episodic texts, seasons, or the entire franchise. Fan cultures produced texts based on the gaps or abandoned story lines found within a franchise. Jenkins, in this book and in other essays, has noted how fans have latched onto these lapses in media storytelling and have produced their own media products that extend the original narrative while following certain rules established by the original narrative. Jenkins uses the term world-making to note the creation of a fictional world that allows all of these texts, along with the canonical source material, to live within a logical, harmonic fan ecosystem. Thus, the worlds that fans create allow for contradictory narratives to coexist, as long as the canonical narrative stays intact and drives the logic of the fan productions. Jenkins examines the ways that fans interact with texts based on their expectations of genre, narrative, and franchise content. He also notes the wide variety of media that are used for fans' productive energies: fan fiction, music videos, music, and more. He explores the ways in which these productive acts have allowed for fans to consider themselves as a strong community.

Much of Jenkins's work has centered on the texts that have attracted large fan communities and the various ways these texts can be read and reappropriated by these communities and individual fans. In his analysis of participatory culture, Jenkins notes the [Page 182]prominence of women participants and the trend of “slash fiction,” the imagining of a text's characters in same-sex romantic or sexual situations that are not found in the canonical text. Jenkins also noted the importance of fan interaction with producers in his pre-Internet study of the queer community's demands for queer story lines in Star Trek, which the producers made concessions to by including implicitly queer story lines.

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