CFP 2014 AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium (5/1/14; Los Angeles 7/3-6/14)

2014 AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium
full name / name of organization:
Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation
contact email:
mkoulikov@gmail.com
Call for Papers / Call for Speakers

2014 AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium

July 3 - July 6
Anime Expo 2014
Los Angeles Convention Center (Los Angeles, CA)
www.anime-expo.org

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Marc Steinberg (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada)

Submission Deadline: May 1, 2014

Japanese animation (anime) and comics (manga) represent one of the major contributions that Japan has made to global visual and popular culture. Indeed, for many people, their first - and sometimes only - contact with Japanese culture at all is through Japanese visual culture.

The field of anime and manga studies is young, only about 30 year old, but extraordinarily vibrant. It welcomes a wide range of interpretations and approaches, draws on different disciplines and methodologies, and can involve both academics, industry professionals, independent scholars, and fans/enthusiasts.

A major goal of the Anime and Manga Studies Symposium is to bring together speakers from diverse backgrounds, fields and areas to exchange ideas, explore new directions, and contribute to building a community of anime and manga studies. Uniquely, the Anime and Manga Symposium is an integral part of the schedule of Anime Expo, the largest gathering of fans of Japanese popular culture in the U.S. This will give speakers an opportunity to present their research and scholarship directly to public, non-academic audience, to interact with fans of anime and manga from around the world, and to become participants in a celebration and appreciation of Japanese popular culture. In turn, the Symposium also serves to introduce convention attendees to the ideas and practices of formal scholarship of Japanese visual culture.

Submissions on a wide range of topics dealing with anime and manga will be considered. Possible areas to explore can include—but are not limited to:

• Critical studies of individual creators, directors and animators, especially in larger contexts such as anime/manga as a whole, animation, comics, Japanese literature/film, science fiction, war literature, etc.
• Close readings of particular works, with a focus on genre conventions and subversions and relationships to previous works in anime/manga and other media.
• Gender and Sexuality: Fan service and objectification, the male and female gaze, the interplay of male and female creators, producers, and audiences
• Age, class, race, ethnicity/nationality and other social differences
• Reflections on current social, political and ecological issues
• Responses to the world and to Japanese history: The 3.11 Tohoku Disaster, World War II, interactions between Japan and other countries
• The impact of new technologies (wireless communication, augmented reality, mobile computing) on storytelling in anime/manga
• The use of remix culture: Adaptation and interpretation of Eastern, Western and other literatures and visual media in Japanese popular culture
• Copyright, obscenity, and other legal issues
• Anime and manga as tools of globalization and agents of promoting Japanese culture
• The history and evolution of anime/manga fandom outside Japan: Fan practices and experiences—clubs, conventions, cosplay, fansites, fansubbing, anime music videos
• The future of anime/manga consumption – streaming, online comics, crowdsourcing, etc.
• Potentials for anime/manga as platforms for social change and anime/manga fans as actors of social change
• The ethics and challenges of presenting Japanese popular culture products around the world

The Symposium particularly welcomes presentations on newer/emerging works and creators.

Speakers are also welcome to submit proposals for roundtable discussions on these and related topics.

Potential roundtables can include:

• Differences in theoretical approaches to anime and manga
• Anime/manga fan practices and activities in different countries, cultures and regions
• New directions, new opportunities, and new challenges in thinking, writing, and teaching about anime/manga

The AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium will be open to all AX attendees. Speakers are urged to consider subjects that will be of interest to general non-specialist audiences and do not require significant backgrounds in Asian Studies, media theory, literature, etc.

For consideration, please submit the title of your paper or panel, an abstract (300 words maximum) and a CV to mkoulikov@gmail.com

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: May 1, 2014

All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

All invited participants will be offered free admission to Anime Expo.


By web submission at 02/17/2014 - 21:49

Cityscapes of the Future CFP (6/30/13)

Call For Papers: Cityscapes of the Future (edited collection)
Call for Papers Date: 2013-06-30
Date Submitted: 2013-04-12
Announcement ID: 202986

Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction

The city has played a pivotal role in science fiction narratives since the earliest days of the genre. Towering megastructures, dystopian urbanity and the otherworldly configurations of alien cities have contributed greatly to representations of imagined futures.

Our project aims to take a broad view of the science-fictional cityscape, in any medium (television, film, novels, comics/graphic novels, anime, video games, etc.).

All relevant topics are welcome; we encourage interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives, as well as discussions of non-Western texts. We are especially interested in the following subjects:

• Postmodern SF and the City 
• Alien Cities 
• The City and the Body 
• Virtual Cities 
• The Victorian City and Contemporary SF 

Please send a 250-word abstract and a short biography to futurecityscapes@gmail.com by June 30, 2013. If accepted, complete essays of 5000-7000 words will be due by January 15, 2014. All submissions must be original and previously unpublished.

Dr. Yael Maurer, Shawn Edrei and Meyrav Koren-Kuik
The Department of English and American Studies
Tel-Aviv University
Email: futurecityscapes@gmail.com

JPC for August 2012

I seem to have missed posting this over the summer:

The Journal of Popular Culture (access at Wiley Online Library)
Volume 45, Number 4
August 2012
Pages 685–920


Editorial
Editorial: Something Wonderful This Way Came (pages 685–686)

Gary Hoppenstand

Guest Editorial
Deep Culture (pages 687–694)
Margaret J. King

Articles

Going Places: The Pleasures of Production and Imperial Visual Cultures in the Stratemeyer Syndicate's The Moving Picture Boys (pages 695–711)
Stephen M. Charbonneau

Chuck Versus the Machine: The Intersection of Biology, Technology, and Identity on Chuck (pages 712–726)
Joseph J. Darowski

“I Was Just Doing a Little Joke There”: Irony and the Paradoxes of the Sitcom in The Office (pages 727–748)
Eric Detweiler

Resistive Radio: African Americans’ Evolving Portrayal and Participation from Broadcasting to Narrowcasting (pages 749–768)
Judy L. Isaksen

Like Sportive Birds: The Girl Aviators Series and the Culture of Flight in America, 1911–12 (pages 769–788)
Lisa M. Stepanski

Transnational Transformations: A Gender Analysis of Japanese Manga Featuring Unexpected Bodily Transformations (pages 789–806)
June M. Madeley

Light for Light's Sake: Thomas Kinkade and the Meaning of Style (pages 807–827)
Julia Mason

“Say, Who Are You Anyway?”: Clowns, Childhood, and Madness in The Character of Harpo Marx (pages 828–845)
Richard Niland

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: The Web of Racial, Class, and Gender Constructions in late 1960s America (pages 846–861)
Anne Gray Perrin

Haunted Infocosms and Prosthetic Gods: Gibsonian Cyberspace and Renaissance Arts of Memory (pages 862–882)
Joel Elliot Slotkin

The Coexistence of Folk and Popular Culture as Vehicles of Social and Historical Activism: Transformation of the Bumba-meu-boi in Northeast Brazil (pages 883–901)
Meredith W. Watts and Simone Linhares Ferro


Book Reviews

Indie: An American Film Culture. Michael Z. Newman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 296 pp. $26.50 paperback. (pages 902–905)
Michael Civille

Cameras into the Wild: A History of Early Wildlife and Expedition Filmmaking, 1895–1928. Palle Petterson. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 236 pp. $45.00 paperback. (pages 905–908)
John M. Kinder

Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy. Matthew Alford. London: Pluto Press, 2010. 224 pp. $25.00 paperback. (pages 908–910)
Irene Garza

Haunted Ground: Journeys through a Paranormal America. Darryl V. Caterine. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011. 199 pp. $34.95 cloth. (pages 910–912)
Christopher Blythe

Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 318 pp. $22.80 paperback. (pages 913–915)
Meredith A. Bak

Football/Soccer: History and Tactics. Jaime Orejan. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 256 pp. $34.95 paperback. (pages 915–917)
Yuya Kiuchi

Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Hamilton Carroll. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 221 pp. $21.80 paperback. (pages 917–920)
Shelleen Greene

CFP Asian Popular Culture Conference

CFP (Deadline extended) Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits 2012: Intertexts and Intersections (Asian popular culture conference)
Location: Minnesota, United States
Call for Papers Date: 2012-09-28 (in 19 days)
Date Submitted: 2012-08-19
Announcement ID: 196473

Extended deadline for SGMS/Mechademia Conference on Asian Popular Cultures 2012
Minneapolis College of Arts and Design, September 28-30, 2012

Location: Minnesota, United States
Conference Date: 2012-09-28

Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits (SGMS) is an internationally-recognized, three-day workshop that explores and celebrates anime and manga.

Through its unique merger of academic and fan audiences, SGMS engages both anime's and manga's creative and cultural implications and practices.

SGMS 2012: Intertexts and Intersections Conference
September 28th-30th, 2012

Asian popular cultural has generated a vast array of manga, anime, games, and related merchandise, artifacts that have proliferated globally. The 12th annual SGMS Workshop and 2nd annual Mechademia conference focus on the characters, concepts, and ideas that have emerged from Asian popular culture, as well as the intertextual relations and intersections of these forms with other cultures and with other worlds.

Featured Speaker: Dai Sato

Dai Sato is writer of critically acclaimed and fantastically popular television series and films such as Samurai Champloo (2004), Casshern (2004), Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2004), and Cowboy Bebop (1998). He began his career as a TV scriptwriter, program planner, and lyricist at the age of 19, and later ventured into the video game and music industries. Today he is first and foremost an animation scriptwriter, but also creates scripts and concepts for various media. He has collaborated with some of Japan's best-known anime writers, using extensively his experience in game development projects and interactive club events. In 2007 he established Storyriders Inc., Ltd., of which he is the President and CEO.

Individuals should send an abstract of 250 words or less, including the presentation title, to:

sgms@mcad.edu

by August 30, 2012. Panel proposals of 3 or 4 individual papers should include a 250 words description of each presentation, each presenters vita / resume, and a clearly stated panel title.

Email: sgms@mcad.edu

Visit the website at http://mcad.edu//events-fellowships/schoolgirls-mobilesuits

Dr. Jessica M. Dandona
Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Email: sgms@mcad.edu
Visit the website at http://mcad.edu//events-fellowships/schoolgirls-mobilesuits

Mechademia 6 (2011)

The latest volume of Mechademia has been published. Here are the details:

Mechademia 6 (also on Project Muse)
User Enhanced
2011
Frenchy Lunning, editor

Manga and anime inspire a wide range of creative activities for fans: blogging and contributing to databases, making elaborate cosplay costumes, producingdôjinshi (amateur) manga and scanlations, and engaging in fansubbing and DIY animation. Indeed, fans can no longer be considered passive consumers of popular culture easily duped by corporations and their industrial-capitalist ideologies. They are now more accurately described as users, in whose hands cultural commodities can provide instant gratification but also need to be understood as creative spaces that can be inhabited, modified, and enhanced.

User Enhanced, the sixth volume of the Mechademia series, examines the implications of this transformation from consumer to creator. Why do manga characters lend themselves so readily to user enhancement? What are the limitations on fan creativity? Are fans simply adding value to corporate properties with their enhancements? And can the productivity and creativity of user activities be transformed into genuine cultural enrichment and social engagement?

Through explorations of the vitality of manga characters, the formal and structural open-endedness of manga, the role of sexuality and desire in manga and anime fandom, the evolution of the Lolita fashion subculture, the contemporary social critique embodied in manga like Helpman! and Ikigami, and gamer behavior within computer games, User Enhanced suggests that commodity enhancement may lead as easily to disengagement and isolation as to interaction, connection, and empowerment.

Contributors: Brian Bergstrom; Lisa Blauersouth; Aden Evens, Dartmouth College; Andrea Horbinski; Itô Gô, Tokyo Polytechnic U; Paul Jackson; Yuka Kanno; Shion Kono, Sophia U, Tokyo; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Christine L. Marran, U of Minnesota; Miyadai Shinji, Tokyo Metropolitan U; Miyamoto Hirohito, Meiji U; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, Wesleyan U; Matthew Penney, Concordia U, Montreal; Emily Raine; Brian Ruh; Kumiko Saito, Bowling Green State U; Rio Saitô, College of Visual Arts, St. Paul; Cathy Sell; James Welker, U of British Columbia; Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt U.

 $24.95 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-7734-4
336 pages, 57 b&w photos, 7 x 10, November 2011

CONTENTS:

Introduction
Thomas Lamarre

Countering Domestication

Under the Ruffles: Shôjo and the Morphology of Power
Frenchy Lunning
Girliness Is Next to Godliness: Lolita Fandom as Sacred Criminality in the Novels of Takemoto Novala
Brian Bergstrom
Beyond Domesticating Animal Love
Christine L. Marran
Exploited and Mobilized: Poverty and Work in Contemporary Manga
Matthew Penney

Commodity-Life

Tezuka Is Dead: Manga in Transformation and Its Dysfunctional Discourse
Itô Gô
Translated and with an Introduction by Miri Nakamura
How Characters Stand Out
Miyamoto Hirohito
Translated by Thomas Lamarre
Manga Translation and Interculture
Cathy Sell
Speciesism Part 3: Neoteny and the Politics of Life
Thomas Lamarre

Photo Play

Out of the Closet: The Fancy Phenomenon
Photography by Rio Saitô
Introduction by Frenchy Lunning

Desiring Economies

Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part 2: Bellmer's Dolls and Oshii's Gynoids
Livia Monnet
Desire in Subtext: Gender, Fandom, and Women’s Male-Male Homoerotic Parodies in Contemporary Japan
Kumiko Saito
The Sacrificial Economy of Cuteness in Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space
Emily Raine
Flower Tribes and Female Desire: Complicating Early Female Consumption of Male Homosexuality in Shôjo Manga
James Welker

Untimely Effects

Transformation of Semantics in the History of Japanese Subcultures since 1992
Miyadai Shinji
Translated by Shion Kono
With an Introduction by Thomas Lamarre
The Logic of Digital Gaming
Aden Evens
Tsuge Yoshiharu and Postwar Japan: Travel, Memory, and Nostalgia
Yoshikuni Igarashi
Implicational Spectatorship: Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke
Yuka Kanno

Review and Commentary

War for Entertainment: The Sky Crawlers
Andrea Horbinski
Volition in the Face of Absurdity
Brian Ruh
The Past Presents the Future: Toward the Terra
Paul Jackson

トレンド Torendo

Wherein the Author Documents Her Experience as a Porcelain Doll
Lisa Blauersouth

Contributors
Call for Papers

CFP Transnational Boys’ Love (BL) Fan Studies, special issue of TWC (3/1/12)

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=185722

“Transnational Boys’ Love Fan Studies,” a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, edited by Kazumi Nagaike and Katsuhiko Suganuma, Oita University
The editors of this special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures seek papers examining the activities of transnational ‘BL’ (Boys’ Love) fans, fan communities, fandom, and the production of fan fiction beyond Japan and North America. Specifically, we are seeking contributors who are engaged in the exploration of non-Japanese and non-North American contexts (e.g. Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, and others). Transnational BL fan studies may also be incorporated into the broader socio/political critical frameworks offered by studies in economics, gender/sexuality, race/class, and other areas.

‘BL’ (Boys’ Love), a genre of male homosexual narratives (consisting of manga, novels, animations, games, films, and so forth) written by and for women, has recently been acknowledged, by Japanese and non-Japanese scholars alike, as a significant component of Japanese popular culture. The aesthetic and style of Japanese BL have also been assumed, deployed and transformed by female fans transnationally. The current thrust of transnational BL practices raises a number of important issues relating to socio/cultural constructs of BL localization and globalization.

We welcome submissions dealing with, but not limited to, the following topics:

--Case-studies and ethnographic examinations of BL fans, specifically examining fans’ sex/gender, age, occupation, class, race/ethnicity, et cetera.

--Local ethnographies relating to BL fans’ production, distribution, and use of these materials. Discussions concerning the ways in which broadly framed socio/political issues or forms of consciousness (e.g. gender/sexuality formations, authorities’ interference, censorship, and so forth) impact fans’ BL activities.

--Media and social responses to fans’ involvement in BL activities.

--Commercial aspects of BL and fans’ contribution to the development of BL economics.

--The integration of research on BL fans into a wider discussion of social theory, differing cultural discourses, and globalization.

--Discussions concerning the ways in which BL fans’ forms of production, distribution, and consumption might challenge traditional notions of Author, Reader, and Text.

--Theoretical overviews reflecting traditional/contemporary ideas of fandom, fans, fan communities, and fans’ means of communications, demonstrating how these ideas specifically relate to BL fans.

--Explorations of the ways in which BL participants are motivated to become involved in other fan-oriented activities (e.g. cosplay; female fans’ cross-dressing as male BL characters).

##Submissions##

TWC accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. Contributors are encouraged to include embedded links, images, and videos in their articles or to propose submissions in alternative formats that might comprise interviews, collaborations, or video/multimedia works. We are also seeking reviews of relevant books, events, courses, platforms, or projects.

--Theory: Often interdisciplinary essays with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offer expansive interventions in the field. Peer review. Length: 5,000–8,000 words plus a 100–250-word abstract.

--Praxis: Analyses of particular cases that may apply a specific theory or framework to an artifact; explicate fan practice or formations; or perform a detailed reading of a text. Peer review. Length: 4,000–7,000 words plus a 100–250-word abstract.

--Symposium: Short pieces that provide insight into current developments and debates. Editorial review. Length: 1,500–2,500 words.

Submissions are accepted online only. Please visit TWC’s Web site for complete submission guidelines, or e-mail editor AT transformativeworks.org.

##Due dates##

Contributions for blind peer review (Theory and Praxis essays) are due by March 1, 2012.

Contributions that undergo editorial review (Symposium, Interview, Review) are due by April 1, 2012.

Kazumi Nagaike, nagaikeoita-u.ac.jp
Katsuhiko Suganuma, suganumaoita-u.ac.jp
Oita University, Japan
Email: nagaike@cc.oita-u.ac.jp
Visit the website at http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/19