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In this article we focus upon the ways that “migrants” in Melbourne have used David Bowie to story and make sense of their arrival to Australia, often as refugees or as people looking for a better life. In relation to identity and belonging, some recent work on music fandom (Groene and Hettinger 2015; Lowe 2003), has imposed a meta-frame on the empirical method, substituting voices for a top-down analysis and interpretation. Our approach is to instead draw both upon auto-ethnography and to allow our fellow fans to “story” their own responses, in an attempt to get beneath the modes of feeling that music fandom ignites – situated within the narratives that people construct as they talk these stories. We argue that Bowie’s alternative and outsider status resonates keenly with people who find themselves “strangers” in a new land.

In her monograph Remembered Reading (2015), Mel Gibson builds on her field work, interviews and meetings with readers of girls’ comics to recover the history and memory of this forgotten genre. Drawing on these shared memories and recollections, Gibson presents a readers’ history of British girls’ comics that reveals how these readings were part of identity constructions and personal histories, tied up to public factors of gender, age and class. In doing so, Gibson revises many stereotypes that have characterized girls’ comics, sketches a much more nuanced picture of the genre, and highlights the complexity of readers’ engagement with comics.