Pop Culture Lab

San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) may be a mecca for pop culture fans, but for Melanie Kohnen, associate professor of rhetoric and media studies, it’s also ground zero for substantive academic research.

Melanie Kohnen, associate professor of rhetoric and media studiesSDCC features celebrity panelists, high-profile announcements regarding film and television releases, and a showroom the size of a football field for artists and creators to sell merchandise. As San Diego transforms itself to support the influx of 150,000 attendees, the city becomes a billboard for the event, with buildings and public transit wrapped in advertisements for the hottest new shows, movies, and comics.

“I never thought that I would do research on Comic Con,” says Kohnen. “I first went to the event as a fan … just somebody who was interested in comics, television, and film. As often happens with scholars, something that you’re just interested in turns into research.”

Research ‘Activated’

Kohnen’s research focuses on Comic Con’s free experiences, called activations, which mimic a pop-up theme park designed with fans in mind.

While activations are free, fans pay for these experiences with their time, often waiting hours to enter fully rendered pop-up sets complete with props, live actors, photo opportunities, interactive components, and a variety of other exclusive benefits mimicking fans’ favorite shows, movies, and other media. No activation is the same, ranging from temporary building facades that appear as if you’d walked straight onto a television set to pop-up premieres fitted with food, drinks, and live performances.

Beyond spending hours in line, fans also contribute their personal information to enter, creating a bridge between the in-person events fans covet and the digital economy that values collecting fans’ information and facilitating the spread of online hashtags and social media engagement.

Kohnen focuses her research on how marketers think of activations, how fans experience them, and how user data is extracted for ever more precise advertising. “Activations are not just sites at Comic Con,” she says. “They are points where the media industry and audiences interact.”

Preparing to ‘Swarm’

Five years ago, Kohnen teamed up with Canadian researchers Benjamin Woo and Felan Parker to advance her research by “swarming” Comic Con. “Swarm ethnography is when a team of researchers goes into a field site, everyone does their chunk of research, and shares notes,” explains Kohnen. It requires careful planning—getting passes nearly a year in advance, deciding which panels to attend, and dealing with the complicated logistics.

The researchers she works with bring a range of perspectives, encompassing scholarship in immersive theatre, marketing, digital media, social media, anthropology, and media studies—with many of these disciplines overlapping.

Originally, the team was slated to begin their work in 2020, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, SDCC went virtual—which meant their ethnography did, too. By the time the team was able to attend in person in 2023, the researchers were better prepared to work effectively together.

“We would not have been able to do the project in the same way as we did when we finally went in person,” says Kohnen. “It gave us time to get to know one another, read each other’s work, and plan for how to organize the swarm ethnography.”

The team’s research resulted in a paper titled “From Comic-Con to Amazon: Fan Conventions and Digital Platforms,” which was published in the scholarly journal New Media & Society. The study argues that SDCC’s pandemic-era shift to digital platforms wasn’t a disruption but an acceleration of existing trends, detailing how the convention had already begun operating like a media platform—blending fan engagement, industry marketing, and data-driven experiences.

The Class Connection

Kohnen often brings her research findings into the classroom. In her Media Design and Criticism class, for example, Kohnen integrates her discussion of the television audience with her experience at SDCC. As she walks students through her website, she encourages them to reflect on the semester’s readings about television advertisements, the role of the audience, and media itself.

Kohnen’s students also get the opportunity to interact with industry artists in the classroom. Guests have included Tillie Walden, Eisner Award–winner and professor at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and Kelly Sue DeConnick, a Portland-based artist whose work helped guide Marvel’s recent film depiction of Captain Marvel. Kohnen frequently taps into Portland’s robust comics community, which hosts its own annual Rose City Comic Con.

Kohnen enlivens her classroom in other ways. She’s invested in helping students explore innovative digital formats, including video essays and StoryMaps, a multimedia storytelling platform. Kohnen uses a StoryMap to capture her own work with SDCC.

To help people engage with their work, the research team created a comic book of their findings.“In StoryMaps, you can make general observations about Comic Con,” explains Kohnen, “the experience of being in a line, or the chatter around you, or visuals of what you see as you walk around. All of those are really important impressions.”

Together, these experiences allowed Kohnen and her fellow researchers to create multimedia reflections, including a comic book of their findings.

“Diversifying the ways of doing scholarship is a way to engage more people in the work,” explains Kohnen. “I also integrate those methods in my classes. “There’s a really interesting way in which you can not only create multimedia, but also use it as a form of analysis to understand media differently.”

In the end, Kohnen’s research—like SDCC itself—is a constantly evolving story, shaped by “the awareness that you can never capture everything about Comic Con.” But for her, that’s both the challenge and the opportunity that keeps her returning year after year.

Rhetoric and Media Studies