"One Above All" — New Co-Authored Publication on Marvel Fandom by Kyle A. Hammonds, PhD

A research team including Drs. Caleb George Hubbard, Kyle A. Hammonds, and Lindsey Meeks completed and published a study on Marvel fandom titled One-above-all: Stratifying Communication Within Marvel Fandom. The piece appears in Transformative Works and Cultures, a key journal in the field of fan studies.

What the study does

The study examines how Marvel fans use communication strategies to generate tiers — strata — inside their fan communities and to compete for social status. The authors apply Max Weber's framework on social capital, which treats status as something earned and traded through resources such as knowledge, taste, and access, to study communication in fan communities. The paper then sets out the specific kinds of capital that Marvel fans draw on when they attempt to climb the social ladder of their own subculture.

Dr. Hammonds worked on the team while finishing his PhD at the University of Oklahoma. He now works out of the University of Texas at Dallas in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Where to read it

The article is open access and free to the public. Read it at Transformative Works and Cultures.