SMGS: MECHADEMIA CONFERENCE on Asia Popular Cultures invites submissions for conference presentation panels. The conference will be held at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design September 27th - 29th, 2013 and explores and celebrates global popular cultures influenced by anime and manga. Submission deadline: August 20th, 2013.
Register at: http://mcad.edu/events-fellowships/schoolgirls-mobilesuits/2012-registration
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SGMSatMCAD
For conference presentation panel, submit suggested panel title, and all abstracts, participant names and contact information; or for singular presentation paper submission, please send contact information and a 200-word abstract by August 20, 2013 to: Gretchen Gasterland-Gustafsson at: gretchen_gasterland-gustafsson@mcad.edu
Based on the book, Mechademia 5: Fantropologies, SGMS: Mechademia Conference will explore the breadth of fandom and fan cultures. Popular cultural objects and fans -- or otaku -- are at the center of an ever-expanding network of influences, differences, obsessions, practices, knowledges and performances. Fans have transformed Japanese popular culture into a pervasive global discourse. Fanthropologies will address the vast but disparate movements that have begun to define communities across ethnic and national boundaries. Communities linked by common passions and conceptions are sewn together by conventions, web sites, blogs, downloads, and other performative practices.
Mechademia - the book series and the conference -- creates new links between different communities, challenges the hegemonic flows of information, and acknowledges the broader range of professional, academic, and fan communities rather than accept their current isolation. This conference will move beyond pejorative or self-satisfied stereotypes of fandom to reveal the plurality and the potential agency of this emerging subjectivity and community. We aim at more than an ethnographic map of the fan landscape--more than case histories of fandom, or other approaches that might isolate or exoticize the fan. Instead, we seek proposals from a range of disciplines that investigate, interrogate and theorize the ruptures and the peculiarities that define fans and their unique communities - both actual and virtual.
With the addition of our special guest, Azuma Hiroki, the conference will also be looking at the political and economic issues, as well as issues of emerging changes in the self conceptions of the Japanese people after and around the Fukushima disaster. Azuma's controversial work in situating a future Fukushima as a tourist site and the concomitant implications for fan-like communities will enhance the scope of our study. Discussions and papers around the issues and fan structures evolving from this momentous event will also be welcomed.
Our subject area extends from the fandoms associated with anime, manga, games, subcultural fashion, and art, fan-based global practices and disaster issues associated with Asian popular cultures. Proposals may include textual readings that problematize the fan experience, critical theories of fandom, and investigations and excavations of fan-produced texts and performances.
The submission deadline is August 20, 2013. Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes in length. Projection and other technical facilities will be available in all conference session rooms. Details on hotel accommodation and schedules will be forthcoming. Check the SGMS Facebook site for updates.
