“It feels like home, this is my Malmö” : Place, media location and fan experiences of The Bridge

Summary, in English

This article focuses on fan experiences of place in the Scandinavian crime series The Bridge (Bron||Broen). It offers four in-depth portraits of fans representing different modes of engaging with geographies of the imagination based on participant observations and qualitative semi-structured interviews with 80 audience members conducted in Denmark, Sweden and the UK. The analysis draws attention to fans’ emotional engagement with the show, and to how the experience of the media location of a drama set in the borderland between Denmark and Sweden induces a ‘sense of place’ in fans’ imagination. Based on the analysis of fans’ experience of place in the drama and the emotional landscapes of Scandinavian crime fiction more broadly, the article engages in a broader discussion of the significance and contingency of place to fans’ emotional experience of television drama. I argue that the relationship between media fandom and sites of media production is best understood in terms of a series of continuities and disjunctures between the materiality/virtuality of media tourism and travelling. These are actualised and shaped by the different dimensions of knowledge – from locality to genericity, embodied to imagined – that fans bring into the playful and affective process of engaging with media. The findings of this kind of longitudinal, empirical research into the lived experiences of place thus add to a nuanced understanding of the relationship between media fandom and sites of media production based on prolonged and in-depth interactions with audiences.

• Author: Tina Askanius
• Publishing year: 2017-11-01
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: Participations
• Volume: 14
• Issue: 2
• Links: https://www.participations.org/Volume%2014/Issue%202/2.pdf
• Document type: Journal article
• Topic: Media Studies
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1749-8716