CHDR Presents: Mel Stanfill

Mel Stanfill will deliver their talk: “The University as Anti-Fan Object: From Collective Dislike to Culture Wars”

This talk applies fan studies frameworks—particularly the concept of anti-fandom—to understand why academics and academia have become targets of intense political hostility. Stanfill argues that academia functions as an anti-fan object: a text onto which anti-fans project false beliefs and against which they perform in-group identity through shared hatred. Drawing on press coverage combined with interviews with politically targeted scholars, the talk identifies recurring patterns in how these attacks unfold—through social media pileups, legislative pressure, targeting of disfavored topics and identities, and demands for firing or defunding—and shows how institutions typically fail to protect faculty. Stanfill demonstrates that these attacks are driven not by coherent policy disagreement but by an emotionally-rooted us/them dynamic in which defeating academics affirms group belonging, with material consequences for the scholars caught in the crossfire.