Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles about transformative works and the fan community. It is an online-only Diamond Open Access publication (meaning that it is free for readers to access and free for authors to publish in). All past journal issues are available online in the Journal Archives. TWC is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This means that anyone is free to adapt and share TWC articles, as long as they provide attribution and do not add additional restrictions preventing others from sharing and accessing the original work.

TWC publishes at least two issues per year: a special issue with guest editors on March 15 and a general issue on September 15. Some years, a second special issue is released on June 15. Popular past issues include: Sports Fandom, Centering Blackness in Fan Studies, and Fandom and Platforms.

Read more about TWC on their website.

Our Mission

TWC’s mission is to provide a space for the academic analysis of individual transformative works and the fandom cultures from which they emerge. The journal aims to demonstrate the social, educational, and aesthetic value of fandom and fannish creations.

TWC is responsible for carrying out the OTW’s mission to promote scholarship on fanworks and fan practices. By offering a platform for fan studies scholars to share their research with the wider fan community, TWC seeks to strengthen communication between fans and academia.

In addition to publishing scholarship on transformative works and the fan community, TWC strives to explain the context of particular works and help establish fanworks as creative art forms in their own right.

Submissions to TWC cover a wide range of topics, including fanfiction, fanart, fanvids, machinima, cosplay, celebrities, film, TV, anime, comic books, music, video games, and other media or fan communities. The journal encourages a variety of critical approaches, including feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial theory, audience theory, reader-response theory, literary criticism, film studies, and posthumanism.

TWC also invites authors to push the boundaries of academic writing by experimenting with genre conventions. For example, authors may integrate personal essays with scholarship or incorporate hyperlinks to related content.

Our Team

The OTW supports all of its projects, and multiple committees contribute to the TWC project in some capacity. However, if you’d like to help exclusively with TWC work, check out the TWC committee. The TWC committee oversees the running and release of every journal edition. Committee members push article submissions through every step of production—copyediting, layout, and proofreading—to release every issue on time.

Get Involved

Opportunities to volunteer for TWC are posted on the OTW Volunteering page once or twice a year on average. For answers to common questions about volunteering and recruitment, take a look at our Volunteering FAQ.

Volunteer recruitment is announced on the OTW website and in AO3 news posts. It is also shared on all social media sites where we actively post. If you want to make sure you hear about the latest recruitment opportunities, check out our OTW News by Email service. This allows you to sign up to receive an email notification whenever we publish a news post (including recruitment calls).

If you have any other volunteering questions, reach out to our Volunteers & Recruiting committee. They handle recruitment and induction for all OTW committees.

Learn More

You can learn more about TWC in the TWC FAQs. If you have other questions, contact the TWC committee.