In Fall 2022, HONS 101: Studies in Fanfiction was offered as an interdisciplinary course to first semester freshmen at USC Aiken. Co-taught by an English professor and a librarian, the course focused on critical thinking, analysis, information literacy, research, writing, and examination of primary and secondary texts. The final project of the course was to create and deliver a conference style presentation, and the final projects were excellent and demonstrated good and actively developing research and information literacy skills. In this session, we'll define fanfiction and participatory fandom and demonstrate how they can be valid subjects for interdisciplinary study, with particular focus on helping students develop information literacy skills. Fandom communities develop in a similar way to academic communities, and many fans essentially become subject matter experts with some understanding of the nature and overall quality of information online, resulting in them becoming more sophisticated information consumers, overall.
