I’ve been working gradually on my book Fan Practices for Language Teaching and Learning on and off throughout this academic year, but I am not as far along as I would like. The other week at the CALICO conference when a few friends asked after the book, I shared some of the things that I am grappling with and which are slowing down my thinking. CALICO Journal co-editor Ana Oskoz suggested that I write about this in my book, so I decided to add this to the acknowledgements section before I recognize the wonderful people and communities who have supported me. Below is the draft of what I am calling the Anti-Acknowledgement of the sociopolitical and technological things that are making writing this book more challenging.
Before I acknowledge the wonderful and supportive friends, colleagues, and fellow fans who helped me with different aspects of this book, I wish to first acknowledge the challenges stemming from ongoing events in both the digital wilds and in the physical world that confronted me and forced me to rethink certain topics and whole chapters and actually made writing this book a lot harder.
On the technological front, Open AI’s release of ChatGPT required me (and everyone else in academia) to grapple with what the wide proliferation of Gen AI meant not only for learning and teaching languages but also data collection and analysis and the trustworthiness of language learner data encountered in the digital wilds. In online fan communities, in particular fanfiction spaces, the explosion of Gen AI led to fragmentation among different fans (e.g. those who used AI in their fanfiction and those who wanted nothing to do with AI-assisted fanfiction in any way) who were also confronted with the fact that their fanfiction, originally written and shared for free, had been fed to large language models which profited off their unpaid labor. More recently, unscrupulous use of AI in online research designed to deceive and manipulate threatens to destabilize trust between the citizens of social media spaces and academic researchers interested in gathering data in the digital wilds. It is unclear what these trends will mean for the future openness of fan spaces for new fans and for researchers interested in taking part in or learning more from this vibrant and creative corner of the digital wilds.
Sociopolitically, I grappled with the influence that legislation and policies restricting access to social media, books, and educational topics would have on those interested in researching and teaching with fan practices for language learning. So much of our understanding of autonomous language learning among fans in the digital wilds is based upon case studies of adolescents and other young people who shared their passion and fanworks over social media. However, laws meant to protect young people also threaten to remove them from online fan communities and spaces. In November 2024, Australia amended its Online Safety Act to ban people under 16 years old from having social media accounts. In the spring of 2025, New Zealand explored a similar ban. In the United States, similar legislation has been proposed or passed on a state-by-state level including Florida’s ban on social media for state residents under 14 years old, which came into effect in January 2025. While several of these statewide bans have been temporarily halted from enforcement due to ongoing court cases, these restrictions represent a growing movement that will influence where and which fans are able to find and form communities online that support their fan practices.
As a teacher educator in Maryland, I am frustratingly conscious of how federal and state policies are having a chilling effect on primary, secondary, and tertiary level classrooms in the United States. Over-adherence to executive orders targeting programs, funding and initiatives in support of diversity, equity and inclusion at the national level are having a trickle-down stifling effect on schools and classrooms where teachers and librarians find themselves limited in what novels and stories they can assign to students to read or are even allowed on their bookshelves. Such ideologies had already been encapsulated by policies in several US states such as the 2021 Texas House Bill 3979, also known as Texas’s Critical Race Theory law, which restricts ways in which students can be taught about race, racism, sex and sexism with respect to US history and culture. A direct outcome of this legislation has been challenges to books that explore race, sexuality and US history and fall under the umbrella of being too controversial for teachers to use. According to the 2025 State of America’s Libraries Report by the American Library Association (ALA)1, of the 821 documented calls to ban or challenge books in school and public libraries across the USA, 72% were launched by political special interest groups and government entities. The highest reported justification for these challenges included reference to LGBTQIA+ characters and themes, and a focus on topics such as race and racism. Unfortunately, this culture of restriction on ideas and identities not only impacts the stories we teachers introduce to our students but also the stories and parts of themselves our students feel safe sharing in their own writing. Fanfiction and other fanworks have served as a rich outlet for self-exploration and reworking and reimagining of powerful stories and tales that don’t always reflect the lived experiences of the fan. Funneling the transformative nature of fanworks such as fanfiction, fanvidding and fanart into the classroom is an underlying motivation for this entire book. But can teachers truly succeed in fostering the level of sustained engagement required for literacy and language development in such a culture of restriction and stigma?
On a more personal level, whole sections of this book reflect my own fannish involvement in the Harry Potter fandom, which also served as the initial inspiration for my interest in research and teaching with fan practices. While I wrote this book, I, like many other Harry Potter fans who made trans and nonbinary friends in our fan communities, was deeply conflicted by the real world impact the Harry Potter author’s2 transphobic views and political influence was having on the dignity, rights, visibility, and safety of nonbinary people and trans people, and cis women. The joy I once felt in writing about Harry Potter fanworks was tinged with the feeling of loss and grief at the fact that many Harry Potter fans and fan creators had moved on to other media where their right to exist was not under attack by the living billionaire author of the source material. For their own mental health, some of these fans avoid all discussion and fanworks related to Harry Potter, including an academic text like this one.
The Harry Potter fandom was at one time a great multilingual and international community that inspired fans to use emerging social media platforms to create, collaborate and speculate during the multi-year wait between the publication of each book or release of each movie. The completed series and accompanying films became pivotal childhood memories for many millennials who grew up alongside Harry, Ron and Hermione. This included many of the teacher candidates I taught during my seven years in Sweden and my current PhD student in the US, who fondly recalls the Harry Potter fandom and its influence on her own autonomous learning of English while growing up in Mexico. For me, the Harry Potter fandom was my first exposure to fans learning language in the digital wilds and the original inspiration for over a decade of my own research. The impact of the Harry Potter series on youth literacy and popular culture owes a great deal to many factors, not least of which is the creativity, curiosity, and passion of its many international fans. This book, therefore, is an extension of that creativity and passion; it is my own fanwork and tribute to the fans who inspired it.
1. Available from https://www.ala.org/news/2025/04/american-library-association-kicks-national-library-week-top-10-most-challenged-books
2. It is a common practice among Harry Potter fans to now refer to JK Rowling simply as “the author” as a way to minimize her presence in popular culture. I follow this same practice in this volume.
