Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:07am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Activism, Advertising, and Promotion in Social Media Session Chair: Barbara Dietlinger, University of North Texas Discussant: Paula Harper | |
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Man’s Best Brand: Pets, Fandom, and Promotional Intimacy in Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend Wilfrid Laurier University Scrolling through a tracklist reveal, the same dog reappears—new fan, same puppy, same soft lighting. Each post promises access: not just to an album, but to proximity, warmth, and recognition. What looks like cuteness is, on closer listening, a carefully staged encounter between star, fan, animal, and algorithm. This presentation examines the intersections of pets, fandom, album promotion, and star personal branding through a case study of Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend (2025), focusing on the fan-integrated tracklist reveal series that featured hand-selected fans posing with a golden retriever puppy. Situating the campaign within frameworks from fan studies, celebrity studies, animal studies, and cultural branding, I argue that Carpenter’s strategy exemplifies a broader shift in contemporary pop marketing toward staged intimacy, affective participation, and symbolic interactivity, in which pets function as affective mediators between star, fan, and platform (Love 2019; Palmer 2020). Across this album era, canine imagery circulates through music videos, social media posts, interviews, and fan practices, producing “promotional domesticity”: a branding mode that situates the pop star within scenes of care, loyalty, and emotional availability. Drawing on scholarship on fandom’s affective labor and participatory economies (DiPiero 2025; Vesey 2024), I examine how pets help reframe promotional activity as everyday intimacy rather than overt marketing. The dog becomes a semiotic anchor for cuteness, trust, and moral legibility, aligning Carpenter with culturally feminized expectations of nurture and relational authenticity (Hansen 2019; Ngai 2012). Through analysis of visual composition, captioning strategies, paratextual media coverage, and fan responses—including meme-making, fan art, and algorithmic amplification—the article demonstrates how the tracklist reveal functioned as a performative act of co-authorship rather than a unidirectional publicity event. At the same time, the campaign foregrounds tensions central to contemporary fan–celebrity relations: the commodification of care, the anthropomorphization of animals, and the strategic ambivalence of participatory culture under platform capitalism (Abidin 2018). Ultimately, this study argues that Man’s Best Friend reveals how pets operate as crucial symbolic infrastructures in twenty-first-century pop stardom, mediating intimacy, gendered affect, and fan visibility while complicating prevailing narratives of empowerment and authenticity in digital celebrity culture. | |