Progress and Its Very Important Indicators

Coordeering. CC BY-SA 4.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. I’m in the middle of a mean-spirited mood—or rather, a conflicted one that’s struggling to hold together both sympathy for an individual’s work and their commitment to it and the snort I let out upon reading an almost throwaway sentence in said work. I might not even be dwelling on it, were it not for the way I feel about a good portion of contemporary academia. The sentence that gave rise to my ambivalence came courtesy of Meghan Downes. Discussing Jonathan Gray’s apparently interesting and original contributions to “fan studies scholarship,” Downes notes that Gray went about his business without “discounting the significance of… existing categories and the important progress made by” the field.1 The sentence was really just a way of getting us through a summary of Gray’s thoughts—but I’m flummoxed by what “important progress” would mean to such a field. Is there some sort of timeline or mission guiding fan studies? Progress…

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