Introduction – On Being and Doing Academic Archers

With this, our fifth book in the Academic Archers library, we find ourselves taking the critical lens to our own being, looking now at our own fandom culture, the people therein, and the resulting data and artefacts we consume, circulate and produce. After seven years, four books, six conferences, and over 150 Academic Archers Research Fellows (an accolade given to all upon joining the community, regardless of any academic affiliation or qualification) presenting at conference, Fandom Culture and The Archers: An Everyday Story of Academic Folk gives you some of what we have learnt along the way. As ever, we offer the reader a book that is both scholarly and humorous, and that deliberately plays with the boundary points between the real and imagined of The Archers listenership.