#Ihatethearchersbecause – an Academic Archers conference intervention

Don’t listen to the Archers? I’d love to hear from you.

The Academic Archers conference takes place again in 2020, 28 February to 1st March. I will be attending again, but instead of presenting work looking at listener practices, as I did last year, I am approaching non-listeners. Archers listeners, as much as any other media fandom, will be familiar with the idea of a love/hate relationship with their show – the “anti-fan” (Sandvoss, 2005) or “snark fandom” (Haig, 2013; Harman and Jones, 2013) are concepts which help us understand how we critique a text, sometimes actively deriding or parodying in creative works. However, Sandvoss, sets this apart from “non-fan” identity, and it’s this I’m interested in this year, and some of the social (and anti-social) effects of this in family and friendship relationships.

Without going into too much detail and spoiling the surprise on the day, I will be presenting this as an intervention at the conference which will challenge fan attendees with the online responses I will be receiving from non-listeners about why they hate the Archers.

In order to take part then, please either 1) tweet with the hashtag #ihatethearchersbecause or 2) email jerome.turner@bcu.ac.uk but with a response no longer than 280 characters please. I will pick them up either way.

These tweets or responses will then be made public within the conference, and maybe in mainstream media in coverage of the event, but the origin of the tweet won’t be made known, no screenshots, for example, and it will be anonymised.

(If you are a listener and have bugbears, please feel free to also send these on, but if you can, it would be great to nudge your long-suffering family and friends to respond as well. Thank you.)

Thanks also to colleague Charlotte for input to the anti-fandom / fandom context of this work, much appreciated.