Henry Jenkins - Research Fields

Research Fields

Jenkins' research explores the boundary between text and reader, the growth of fan cultures and world-making, "the process of designing a fictional universe that will sustain franchise development, one that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others".

More recently, Jenkins' research has focused on how individuals in contemporary culture themselves tap into and combine numerous different media sources. He suggests that media convergence be understood as a cultural process, rather than a technological end-point. Jenkins discussed media convergence in his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and the founding of the Convergence Culture Consortium research group at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.

Jenkins' research also includes the field of video game critical studies. In his article, "Complete freedom of Movement": Video Games as "Gendered Play Spaces," he discusses the cultural geography of video game spaces. More importantly, he investigates as to what draws boys to video games and whether girls should feel the same attraction. Inspired by such cultural critics as Gilbert Seldes who believed that Cinema was unfairly victimized during his time for being a rising new medium.

He has also written extensively about the effects of interactivity, particularly computer games, and "games for learning", and in this capacity was called to testify before Congress in 1999. This work ultimately led to the founding of the Education Arcade group, also at the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. In 2012 Henry Jenkins went on a lecture tour of Western Europe

Jenkin's forms of participatory culture:
Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).
Expressions — producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).
Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).
Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).