On Friday 8 October, I moderated the Anime in Academia panel at the 2010 New York Anime Festival.
The panel featured:
Casey Brienza (PhD student, Sociology, University of Cambridge)
Mikhail Koulikov (Online Bibliography of Anime & Manga Research)
Jennifer Fu (undergrad, Comparative Media Studies, MIT)
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After the panel, Persephone turned to me and said she did not really feel it was conveyed, exactly, how any of this was helping anime spread into academia. I fumbled to provide a defense but ultimately could not.
If you want ‘honest feedback’ and all, the first half was basic introductions of each of the panelists stating your resume essentially…before opening up the floor to Q&A. Normally I’m in favor of Q&A, but too much time was devoted to it.
To be constructive….I’d suggest that a better stratagem would be to take one academic anime article as an example, and explain how it went through the submission process start to finish.
I do not feel we can possibly have “peer review” for papers presented at say, that Minnesota conference a few weeks ago…if their contents are not made available to the public. This is only enforcing a closed-circuit “ivory tower” situation.
Some questioned why my panel at NYAF devoted a 20 minute chunk to explaining why the creators of Evangelion said the religious references were absolutely meaningless: it was inserted as a direct reaction to the fact that Freeman had presented on this very topic at the Minnesota conference (no, the religious symbols in Eva formed no coherent pattern that could match Jungian archetypes), and as a reaction to Charles Dunbar’s repeated presentation of a “Religion in Eva” panel along the eastern seaboard. Irony of ironies was that Japanator.com thought my panel was weird for spending so much time on this topic, because “isn’t it obvious that Eva has no religious merit?”
I was determined to be polite but I must respond with candor: you didn’t actually explain how to “get an article into academia” except on a vague level.
I do feel that print books “further the exposure of anime”….but the “academic articles” devoted to Eva….the absolute tripe Susan Napier passed off as “research”…..that isn’t “opening new doors for anime”, that’s convincing people this is high-end arthouse stuff which they’re not smart enough to understand.
I will not repudiate battle on a fair and level field, but neither will I tolerate a one-sided massacre of the weak by the strong. At the moment “anime in academia” seems dominated by a handful on the conference circuit, in a *consequence free environment* because many of these presentations are not made public. Theoretically, what if some of the panels at the Minnesota conference were *blatantly wrong*? Is there any safety net for that kind of thing? Anime in academia has more to do with a “smokey conference room old boys network” than a TRANSPARENT academic environment.
The way is not from above but from below. If there is hope, it lies in the Noobs.
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