Ashley Hinck, Ph.D.
hincka@xavier.edu
Associate Professor
Xavier University
Year of PhD: 2015
City: Cincinnati, Ohio
Country: United States
About Me:
Dr. Ashley Hinck is an associate professor in the Communication Department at Xavier University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who works in rhetoric, internet studies, and fan studies. Her research examines fan-based citizenship performances as new civic practices emerging from networked media. Her publications have examined the civic activities of fandoms like Supernatural, Harry Potter, Star Wars, LEGO, Nerdfighters, Supernatural, AFC Wimbledon, and the University of Nebraska Husker football. Her research also considers the digital communication and fans of politicians, including Ted Cruz, Jon Ossoff, Andrew Yang, Donald Trump, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is the author of the award-winning book, Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World (2019, LSU Press).
Research Interests
Political Participation
American Presidency And Executive Politics
Networks And Politics
Fandom
Internet
Popular Culture
Countries of Interest
United States
My Research:
Hinck is author of Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World (2019, Louisiana State University Press) and co-author of Poaching Politics: Online Communication during the 2016 US Presidential Election (2018, Peter Lang).Hinck is also the author of a number of articles published in journals like Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Argumentation & Advocacy, Transformative Works & Cultures, and the Electronic Journal of Communication.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Hinck, A. & Hardin, C. (2023). Civic culture in the Supernatural fandom: Misha Collins, Destiel, and the 2020 US presidential election. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 29(6), 1486-1501. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13548565231174585 In the 2020 US presidential election, Misha Collins, star of the show Supernatural, endorsed Joe Biden for president and worked to support Biden’s campaign through interviews with campaign surrogates on Instagram Live and by phone banking on Zoom. In this study, we examine how fans made sense of Misha’s political action. While the political science and advertising literature on celebrity endorsements evaluates endorsements by the number of votes earned, we found that fans’ experience of Misha’s political advocacy was far more complicated than that. Our interviews with fans suggest that fans were ambivalent about Misha’s endorsements but enthusiastic about how Misha went about doing politics. Fans described a civic culture they co-constituted with Misha, defined by accepting and caring for other people, being authentic and genuine, and respecting disagreements. Fans described how these values were enacted both inside the fandom (in discussions of LGBTQ representation) and outside the fandom (in the 2020 US presidential election). Ultimately, fandom should be read as an important site of civic culture building—with implications for how fan cultures influence contemporary notions of citizenship, civic values, and political outcomes.
On July 23, 2014, the fiftieth anniversary of Disney’s Mary Poppins, Funny or Die released a video titled, “Mary Poppins Quits with Kristen Bell,” earning more than 4 million views. In the video, Mary Poppins sings to the tune of “A Spoonful of Sugar” while calling for an increase to the federal minimum wage. Understanding fan-based citizenship performances like “Mary Poppins Quits” requires understanding how affect moves between popular culture, fans, and citizens. I argue that Mary Poppins functions as a figure that conducts affect across and between fan-citizens, calling on fans to treat minimum wage workers through the same affective orientation with which they treat Mary Poppins. To make this argument, I draw on work in fan studies and rhetorical studies to define fannish affect and public affect. Turning to my analysis of the “Mary Poppins Quits” video, I argue the video conducts affect through celebrity personae, destabilizes the “worthiness” discourse that often frames minimum wage workers as unworthy of a higher wage, and demands new orientations to one’s fellow citizens. Ultimately, I argue that moving affect from popular culture objects to the public sphere opens up new opportunities for solidarity but carries limitations as well.
While news media has traditionally shaped how voters perceive presidential debates, user-created digital visuals like memes are increasingly framing the presidential debates, public perceptions, and the election. We examine one way in which memes do this: by shaping and circulating affect. Drawing on perspectives from rhetoric, political communication, and political science, we examine two memes that emerged from Hillary Clinton’s performance in the 2016 US presidential debates: the Hillary Shimmy and the Nasty Woman memes. We argue that the Hillary Shimmy and the Nasty Woman memes framed the election by distilling a complex media event into a single moment, amplifying the affect of that particular moment, and transforming the power structures inherent in constructed campaign performances. Last, we conclude by examining how these digital visuals are shaping a new political context.
Co-authored with Kyra Hunting. Critics of celebrity activism often assume that fans blindly follow celebrities who invite them to support celebrity activism and charity. These fans are often imagined as participating in celebrity activism only because their beloved celebrity asked them to — not out of any kind of rational understanding of a political issue, awareness of a public problem, or commitment to a public issue. We contest this view of celebrity activism. Drawing on scholars like Bennett, Ellcessor, and Chouliaraki, we argue that the case of Ian Somerhalder demonstrates that a commitment to a celebrity may actually be connected to a commitment to a public issue. We trace the ways in which Somerhalder plays with the slippage between television celebrity and his character, arguing that such slippage merges the intimacy fans feel for Damon with the intimacy fans feel for Somerhalder and imbues Somerhalder’s environmental appeals with the values his on-screen character comes to represent in The Vampire Diaries. We argue that Somerhalder deploys themes and ideals from The Vampire Diaries in his communication with fans and in his activist appeals. Ultimately, Somerhalder’s celebrity activism demonstrates how intimacy with celebrities might function to connect fans to public issues in powerful ways.
Fan‐based citizenship performances question the assumed relationship between citizenship performances, civic groups, and ethics. Communication scholars have traditionally understood civic actions as deeply connected to social institutions, such as family and church, and civic groups, like the Democratic Party, Green Peace, or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I argue that economic, social, and political shifts since the late 1970s have made the membership in those social institutions and civic groups more fluid than ever before. In a fluid world, citizens may easily choose Harry Potter over the Republican Party to guide their civic action on same‐sex marriage. A fluid world that enables citizens to choose popular culture media texts to authorize civic actions demands new theoretical terms. I offer ethical framework and ethical modality as terms to enable researchers to investigate this shift and the civic actions it enables. Through processes of pairing and unpairing, fan‐based citizenship performances combine noncivic ethical frameworks from popular culture with civic ethical modalities, civic actions such as voting, petitioning, and so on. These terms allow researchers to examine fully a wide range of fan performances of citizenship, including performances that are emancipatory and problematic, effective and ineffective, and grassroots and industry organized. In this article, I use the example of the HPA's “Not in Harry's Name” campaign to illustrate how these terms can be used to investigate fan‐based citizenship performances.
The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) has invited thousands of Harry Potter fans to view politics and activism through the lens of Harry Potter. HPA members have signed petitions, sent letters, made videos, and raised money in efforts to affect laws and public policies. These activities circulate and operate within the public sphere through an engagement with others. If we are to consider the political actions of fans, we must consider how fans insert arguments into the public sphere, constitute publics, and ultimately assert their own public subjectivities. By drawing on social movement and public sphere theory, I first develop the theoretical concept of the "public engagement keystone." I conceptualize the public engagement keystone as a touch point, worldview, or philosophy that makes other people, actions, and institutions intelligible. Next, I use the case of the HPA to demonstrate how the Harry Potter story operates as a public engagement keystone, opening the door to public subjectivities on par with the healthy public formation of John Dewey, Doug McAdam, or Peter Dahlgren. I offer an interdisciplinary approach to how fandom encourages and invites civic engagement. By doing so, public sphere theory can better account for a wider variety of types of civic engagement, including fandom activism.
Books Written:
Politics for the Love of Fandom examines what Hinck calls “fan-based citizenship”: civic action that is blended with and arises from participation in fandom. Examining cases like Harry Potter fans fighting for fair trade, YouTube fans donating money to charity, and football fans volunteering to mentor local youth, Hinck argues that fan-based citizenship functions by inviting citizens to act out of a commitment to a fan-object, rather than via traditional political institutions such as the Democratic Party or the Catholic Church. Within the context of an increasing digital and networked world, individuals can easily move among many institutions and groups. They thus have more choices than ever for institutions and groups that guide their civic actions—even non-civic groups like the Harry Potter fandom can become the foundations for civic action. This significant shift opens up opportunities for public engagement that occurs outside of political parties, organizations for social activism, and religious houses of worship. Fan-based citizenship performances help us understand the future possibilities of public engagement. Examples like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s large fan following stemming from the Notorious RBG Tumblr blog makes clear that public culture and fandom are already increasingly connected. Hinck examines the communication at the center of these civic actions, exploring how fans, nonprofits, and media companies manage to connect fandom with public issues.
Co-authored with Paul Booth, Aaron Hess, and Amber Davisson. The 2016 US election was ugly, divisive, maddening, and influential. In this provocative new book, Paul Booth, Amber Davisson, Aaron Hess, and Ashley Hinck explore the effect that everyday people had on the political process. From viewing candidates as celebrities, to finding fan communities within the political spectrum, to joining others online in spreading (mis)information, the true influence in 2016 was the online participant. Poaching Politics brings together research and scholars from media studies, political communication, and rhetoric to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the role of participatory cultures in shaping the 2016 US presidential election. Poaching Politics heralds a new way of creating and understanding shifts in the nature of political communication in the digital age.
Media Appearances:
Radio Appearances:
“K-Pop, The President, and Protests"
Newspaper Quotes:
“Could Taylor Swift really swing the 2024 presidential election?”
“Zelensky fans flood social media with fancams and thirsty posts, creating a controversial online obsession"
“Fan citizenship: how groups of pop culture lovers can influence an election"
"When race, fandom and pop-music dollars collide"
"Why Is Everyone So Obsessed With AOC? Let’s Analyze The Memes"
Other:
“JK Rowling’s Tweet Shows the Divide Between the Writer and the Phenomenon She Created"
“McDreamy, McSteamy, and McConnell"