Each year a small portion of AoIR conference fees go toward several Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships for junior scholars to attend the conference. We want to recognize our scholarship recipients and share with you a little bit about them and their research interests.
Who are you?
Eloy Santos Vieira. Post-Doc Researcher and Visiting Professor at Universidade Federal de
Where are you from?
Sergipe, Brazil.
What is your current area of study?
Pop Culture; Fan Studies; Digital Culture; Memes; Convergence and Social TV.
Describe the research you will present at AoIR2025
Panel:Ruptures, Dissent and Cancellation: Studies on Digital Fandoms in
Crisis
My presentation should focus on a cancellation case in Brazil. Since Brazilian fans display high
affective engagement and strong networked mobilization, using these capacities to advance
political agendas and preserve subcultural ideologies, we intend to show how the case studied
intersects activism, political polarization, identity disputes, and dynamics of belief.
Paper: Fan studies in Brazil: the internet-centric bias and its impact on understanding local
fandoms.
The research shows that the internet’s centrality in Brazilian Fan Studies—rooted in
international references and early links to Cyberculture—has produced a bias favoring urban,
connected, and privileged contexts. It is an initial effort to trace the historical roots of this issue
to fully recognize its impact on the theoretical-epistemological gaps it created over the years.
Have you presented at AoIR in the past? If so, what was your experience? If #AoIR2025 in
Niterói is your first AoIR conference, what made you choose this conference? What do
you expect from it?
This will be my first time attending an AoIR conference. I saw in AoIR 2025 the opportunity to
present some of the empirical and theoretical advances we have been developing in Brazil,
particularly at the intersection of Internet Studies and Fan Studies. In addition to sharing these
contributions, I look forward to engaging in dialogue with leading scholars in the field—including
those with whom I will be participating in the panel—as well as meeting new researchers. I am
especially interested in fostering exchanges with scholars from the Global South, whose
perspectives hold great potential for meaningful dialogue with the Brazilian context.
