Introducing Fandom Culture and The Archers audio book!

Hello, and thank you for coming to listen to the audio book version of the Academic Archers book, Fandom Culture and The Archers: An Everyday Story of Academic Folk.

The book was edited by Dr Cara Courage and Dr Nicola Headlam, co-founders of Academic Archers, with contributions from a number of Academic Archers people. It was published in book form in May 2022 by Emerald, and is the fifth book in the Academic Archers library, and sits alongside our Saturday Omnibus podcasts.

We were rightly prompted to record this audiobook due to one of the book contributors, Laura Smith – whose chapter The View from Lakey Hill: how The Archers empowers, liberates and enables listeners who are blind, is the last in the book and of this audio book – asking if such a version were available. With the kind permission of our wonderful publishers, Emerald, we set about the recording, and here we are now, our very first audio book.

As its our first, and as we did this ourselves, working across time zones, degrees of technical competency and performance nerves, please keep the Academic Archers values of joyfulness, generosity and of kindness to heart when listening – this is a book created by a fan community for other fans in that community; we are not professional voice over artists, nor audio producers. Like everything we do at Academic Archers, its all voluntary and done for the love we have of those Ambridge residents and for each other. Forgive our occasional stumbles, accidental mispronunciations, the sound of the odd page turning…

What follows then is each of the contributors reading their chapter, in the order that they appear in the book, starting with a welcome from Cara Courage and her reading of the books' introduction chapter, On Being and Doing Academic Archers.