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unjapanologistOriginally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.
Some final notes and observations following "Comics Worlds and the World of Comics" in Kyoto. I had a great time, learned a lot, and was quite impressed in general. The amount of fail was surprisingly small for an academic gathering (a few people excepted), and several presentations gave me some very helpful pointers and new ideas.
My personal favourites were CJ Suzuki and his insights on manga studies from an SF research perspective, Mizoguchi Akiko on yaoi readers, and Thomas Becker on the need to supplement semiotic analysis of manga/comics with considerations of social circumstances (abstracts).
Before I launch into a long-winded enumeration of vaguely connected impressions, a small request: please drop me a note if you know of a place to find good recordings of university lectures in Japanese, preferably humanities- or sociology-related. During the Q&A after my own presentation and the other Japanese lectures, I realized that my listening comprehension of Japanese in an academic context needs a lot of work. There were several presentations where I lost track of what was being said entirely after mere minutes. My interpretation from Japanese to English during the last session went surprisingly well, considering. I'm looking for ways to up my listening comprehension now but am not familiar enough with podcasts to be able to tell the useful stuff from the not so useful. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
Notes on the conference in general:
- Having all sessions in one room instead of running parallel sessions was a great decision. It eliminated all sorts of practical difficulties and ensured that all conference-goers stayed with the program and followed the same narrative from beginning to end.
- I do all my note-taking online these days, so the lack of reliable wifi in the conference space was a serious inconvenience. A lot of the time I could not tweet, look for background info on what was being said, or find info on speakers to put me back on track when I couldn't follow their Japanese. I do realize that I'm crying into the wilderness a bit here, but a lot of humanities people do like to do useful academic things with the interwebs, all the time :)
- There was an impressive effort to make the whole conference accessible to those who speak either no English or no Japanese, with translations of papers and consecutive interpreting being offered for all sessions except the first workshop (where I presented). Given how problematic language issues usually are for manga researchers and readers, this was a real breath of fresh air. However, presenters were obliged to stick closely to papers they'd handed in weeks before in order not to disrupt the interpreting, and several people felt this made for a very restrictive and traditional format. I was tremendously glad myself that I had no interpreter and could continue tweaking both the content and delivery of my presentation al the way through. Also, I have difficulty concentrating when all there is to focus on is one person sitting still and reading from a piece of paper, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one, certainly among the younger crowd. The translating and interpreting made this the only kind of delivery that presenters could choose, and that's problematic. Not that I have a good solution to the problem of marrying interpreting with ad-libbing by presenters. Using professional interpreters instead of relying on the young researchers would no doubt be prohibitively expensive, and dropping interpretation entirely would be a no-no for this kind of conference. Hmmm.
- Professor Jaqueline Berndt and other people from Seika University and the research center at the manga museum did a fantastic job of making everything run smoothly and tying all presentations together. Organization was truly superb, and although there were the kind of hitches that come with any big first-time conference (or indeed, any conference), they were generally overcome very quickly. Kudos.
- I had great fun mingling and ended up with a million cards, which made me wish there was more contact info for the participants given on the conference website. Someone from the museum research center assured me that an online mingling space would be created soon, in time for the next conference in Cologne later this year -"Intercultural Crossovers, Transcultural Flows: Manga/Comics". Looking forward to that.
Notes on my own presentation:
- Since I had only fifteen minutes, I cut a massive amount of stuff and ended up concentrating on how copyright laws influence the place of derivative works in comics/manga research in a way that is makes no academic sense whatsoever. Dropping all mention of how problems within academia itself reinforce this copyright-induced attitude towards derivative works was necessary in view of the time limit, but I wasn't happy cutting that part, and I'll definitely work it into the final paper that will be published in the conference proceedings. Another thing I will definitely add is more hard data about derivative works and studies devoted to them.
- Someone suggested that there are more accurate/better terms than nijisosakubutsu (二次創作物) for derivative works in Japanese. I'm not inclined to agree, since no source I've consulted up to now even hints that this word is inaccurate in the context I'm using it in, but I'm going to look further into legal terminology surrounding derivative works regardless (and add a bunch of relevant terms to my embryonic dojinshi terminology glossary).
- Prezi was obviously a big hit, given how many people came to inquire about the software, although someone correctly remarked that there were a lot of text blocks poking into some screens that made things look messy here and there. Better layout next time.
- There will be videos of the talks posted at some point in the near future. I'll analyze my delivery after I've seen the video (if I ever work up the nerve).
Congratulations to the organizers for a great conference, extra special thanks to the many people who gave me helpful feedback, and a very fruitful 2010 to all.
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Happy New Year, dear!
I hope to see you in a couple of months, meanwhile let's make world a better place ^_^ <3
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I miss talking to you about Draco fandom, lol, so much yet to discuss hahhah ^^~
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Okay, feedback (just on the basis of your abstract, obviously, unless you wanna send me your whole paper, hint hint) for you to take or leave as you like:
(Don't hate me! I'm not trying to be provocative!)
This might be a cultural difference (says the Ugly American), but "Comics Studies" doesn't sound like a real academic discipline to me. How many degree-granting departments of "Comics Studies" are there in the world, and do they look set to reproduce further across the academy? Maybe some scholars like playing in their own little sealed-off world, but as far as I'm concerned even the "big" disciplines--Sociology, Communication, Anthropology, Asian Studies--can be incestuous, too isolated from other disciplines and the non-academic public at large. Maybe instead of proposing/outlining some hyper-specialized new discipline, you could instead talk about how your ongoing research cuts across disciplines and puts them in dialogue with each other?
At least for me, one of the biggest ongoing challenges of my academic career is convincing other people in my chosen discipline(s) that I'm "one of them." And accomplishing this is *critical* if I'm to get my degree and a job afterward. Don't get trapped between a rock and a hard place! So maybe save the creation of new disciplines till after becoming a full professor?
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Personally, I'm against trying to wrangle the study of comics/manga/other comic-like media into a "hyper-specialized new discipline", for the exact reason you cite. We already have plenty of workable theories and methodologies from a variety of places that should be doing a lot more cross-pollinating in any case. Besides, if researchers of comics/manga/etc were to make themselves a separate disciplinary playpen because they want their work to be recognized within academia, they'd just be internalizing the exact same system that once made comics into something unworthy of academic scruteny. In my presentation, I tried to illustrate that by analysing how the field of 'comics studies' whose properties this conference debated is already marginalizing fan-made comics and dojinshi in its efforts to seem proper and legitimate. (I ended up deviating considerably from the original abstract. I concentrated on the influence of researchers' ideas about copyright law on their treatment of fanwork in the presentation, which you can see here (http://prezi.com/_x7wudfrex2d/) with little English translations under the Japanese. The paper isn't finished yet, but if you're interested, I'll send you a copy or link to it when it's done. Not sure if I'll be allowed to post it on my own site.)
The language problem... English as a lingua franca works really well for native speakers or people whose mother tongue is close enough to English to make it fairly easy to master, but all others are put at a huge disadvantage. Translating things is all nice and good, but translation imposes its own limitations (see post) in addition to being incredibly time-consuming and expensive if you want it done more or less right. I'm pretty much stumped on this issue.
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As for language...yeah, it's frustrating the way that academics working on precisely the same topics are walled off from each other by language barriers. Interestingly, I've heard that in the STEM fields English has already won as the lingua fraca. The humanities and social sciences, perhaps for reasons of ideology, don't completely fall in line behind one language.
*curious* How far along are you in your dissertation? (Actually, come to think of it, how do PhD programs in Belgium work, anyway? >_< ) I'd love to read what you've written!
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PhD programs in Belgium seem to be pretty different, organization- and finance-wise, between different faculties and different institutions. Four years is the overall norm for a PhD program, but that's when you have a full-time scholarship, so people who research while doing other things to pay bills (like me -I do a lot of uni administration and translation work) tend to take a couple years longer. I just started my second year and am trying to shake off the administration job and flee for Japan so I can finish within four years instead of doing research in spurts in between much less amusing work ;) And actually have time to write the three articles and book chapter I'm supposed to finish in the next half year. If you'd like to read something meatier than blog ramblings, there's one unpublished article that I wrote after conducting a pilot test of my methodology. It was a very early effort and I don't want to re-submit it anywhere because it's just not mature in many respects, but you can download it from here (http://prezi.com/cckomwodfph5/view/#104) if you want (for context, that's a direct link to the prezi on my homepage (http://nelenoppe.net/fanficforensics). Let me know if directing you to the download in this way is problematic in any way -I'm experimenting with prezi software for site navigation). I'd love to hear what you think of it, if you have the time!
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Not really--it goes back to what I was saying earlier about how there really is no such thing as "Comics Studies." For the most part, people who study comics are also allied with their own particular disciplines...and those disciplines have a lingua fraca that almost certainly isn't Japanese. You can't get power to roll uphill if it doesn't want to.
The STEM fields require a lot of resources, and the best resources and institutionalization of those resources are concentrated in the English speaking countries (especially, of course, the US). If you wanna work in a great lab, knowing English increases your chances of finding one that will take you. So even though most humanities scholars don't need research equipment anywhere near the level of a, say, bioengineer, the prestige accrued by STEM cousins in the same university is passed down to the humanities as well.
Besides, it goes back to the question of how big an audience you want. Even within the global academy, the size of the English-speaking academy is incredibly large. Even though I come from the US, I have trouble wrapping my brain around the numbers! In the relatively small field of Communication (ha ha), the US disciplinary association actually has more members and a bigger annual conference than the "international" disciplinary associations (one of which was founded by Americans, anyway). Maybe some scholars prefer to use English because it gives them prestigious outlets for their work, but I've met many, especially in Asian countries, who feel they must master English simply because they want to be able to share their findings with the rest of the world--and let's face it, the rest of the world isn't going to learn Japanese or Korean just to hear what they have to say. *sighs* (Maybe the Chinese will be more fortunate, but academic freedom in Mainland China still leaves much to be desired.)
Four years is the overall norm for a PhD program, but that's when you have a full-time scholarship, so people who research while doing other things to pay bills
So I guess it's similar to the UK model, then? Of course, my knowledge of what the UK PhD entails is based primarily upon my experience at Cambridge--and it's been suggested that this experience is not representative. *gulp*
EDIT: Just skimmed quickly over your paper and noticed that you don't really engage with the massive amount of literature on fans and fandom. Sandvoss's Fans has an excellent lit review (along with a presentation of his own ideas)--you might want to check it out. ^_^ I wrote a review of it here: http://kethylia.livejournal.com/605589.html
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That's the way it is and it's not going to change, but frankly, I'm amazed that there isn't more discussion about the huge downsides of this system. Imagine demanding that American twenty-year-olds become proficient in Chinese if they want to make a name for themselves in bioengineering/sociology/name your field. It does sound absurd, but it's pretty much the equivalent of asking young Japanese researchers to express themselves in the Queen's good English if they want to be heard. Learning a language that is totally unrelated to your own and that's of no use to you in daily life is difficult and time-consuming, and learning to express yourself in that language on an academic level is fiendishly hard. Less than perfect language ability immediately reflects badly on a scholar's credibility. Anyone who has to jump through all those hoops before being 'allowed' onto the international academic scene in any field is at huge disadvantage compared to native English speakers. Whatever the odds are of this system ever changing, it's extremely problematic, and that should be recognized and talked about.
Like you say, English is quite firmly ingrained as the default language in very many fields (if not all), and I don't believe for a minute that that would change if people suddenly started complaining. But I'm interested to see what the reactions would be. There are undoubtedly translation and language experts with bright ideas about this problem, and I'd love to hear them make some noise.
I must admit I don't know much about PhD programs except those in Belgium and Japan. You're nearing the end of your program, right? Four years?
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Another one for the mile-long 'to read' list... Yey? I really need three months off from absolutely everything so I can just read some bloody books :)
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I see quite a bit of discussion about it in the UK, perhaps because the average British person is for all intents and purposes as monolingual as the average American...except that multilingual Europe is only a couple of hours away from the UK. The problem that's often cited is that for "everybody else," the obvious second language is English...but if your first language is already English, there's no consensus about what the second language ought to be.
When I was in high school, I put a lot of work into becoming fluent in Spanish--thinking, given number of Spanish speakers in the US, that it would be a useful language to master. Well, guess what? I never kept the language up because I never *had* to use it, and now all that's left of all those years of work is pretty high level reading comprehension in Spanish. Which I don't need, either. T_T
What *is* rarely talked about, though, is how the American academy is so supremely insular and self-supplying. Almost certainly moreso in that sense than the UK. I know this intellectually, but I admit it's hard for me to *really* understand that because my linguistic and cultural competency makes it "native terrain." I was warned back home, in not so many words, that while a year of two of experience abroad is viewed as a plus, actually getting your PhD abroad is just too damn much experience abroad from the American academy's perspective! (It sounds like a joke...but it isn't.)
Learning a language that is totally unrelated to your own and that's of no use to you in daily life is difficult and time-consuming, and learning to express yourself in that language on an academic level is fiendishly hard.
Yup.
Anyone who has to jump through all those hoops before being 'allowed' onto the international academic scene in any field is at huge disadvantage compared to native English speakers.
Alas. More evidence that it's not a meritocracy out there, that's for sure.
You're nearing the end of your program, right? Four years?
WHUT?! Where did you get that idea?! >_< I did a master's degree at NYU, which might be what you're thinking of. Nope, I just started the PhD program in Cambridge this past October. It's supposed to be three years long (Year One: Research Design, Year Two: Research Execution, Year Three: Writeup), and that's what I've got funding for, but new rule instituted just a couple of years ago says that I'm allowed up to a maximum of four years. Needless to say, I'm in a race against time with my funding, not with the four year maximum, which is why I'm starting to write *now*. >_<
Another one for the mile-long 'to read' list... Yey? I really need three months off from absolutely everything so I can just read some bloody books :)
*laughs* I know how you feel! One of the other PhD students in my department calls it "The Good Student Would Read This" list.
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I think I get your meaning. It's pretty hard for me to imagine growing up surrounded by only one language in daily life, media, education, etc. I've never spent long periods of time in the UK -are languages other than English actually used in the mainstream media so people have some exposure to them? Or is the foreign language education discussion more about the job market, where mainlanders who know more languages may (in theory) pose a threat?
Actually, schools in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium start teaching French and sometimes German before they teach English, but right now French and German are to me what Spanish is to you. The only languages I'm still more or less fluent in are the ones I started to learn for fun, because I wanted to read comics and manga in their original languages.
I was warned back home, in not so many words, that while a year of two of experience abroad is viewed as a plus, actually getting your PhD abroad is just too damn much experience abroad from the American academy's perspective!
That's quite... wow. What exactly would be problematic about getting a PhD abroad?
Nope, I just started the PhD program in Cambridge this past October.
Oops, yes, I did take mentions of starting writing to mean you were nearing the end of a program. Probably because I'm too disorganized myself to start writing anything at its proper beginning right from the start. Ganbare!
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Not sure about television, but certainly not in books, magazines, or newspapers. Probably not.
Or is the foreign language education discussion more about the job market, where mainlanders who know more languages may (in theory) pose a threat?
Isn't *everything* about the job market these days? >_< Yeah, the whole "must teach the children more languages usually gets articulated according to some losing battle for global competitiveness.
What exactly would be problematic about getting a PhD abroad?
Well, it's proof that you're not "one of them." From a pragmatic standpoint, you don't know the U.S. system. From an ethnocentric one, Americans think their higher education system is the best in the world, so if nothing on your CV rings a bell with them, they'll assume your credentials aren't worth their time of day. (I've even seen studies which show that American academics rate research publish in languages other than English as prima facie of lesser quality significantly more often than do non-American academics.)
Besides, it's gotten to the point now that if you're an American who wants an academic job post-PhD, the dissertation is only a *tiny* part of what you need to have accomplished. This applies to your field's job prospects in the US, and it is increasingly applying to mine: http://chronicle.com/article/Dodging-the-Anvil/63274/
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(When I was a student, there was quite a bit of rivalry between Japanese and Chinese studies. I joined the staff as a fresh-faced TA while still convinced that the teachers of both departments were surely above the students' petty squabbling and I would now be joining the ranks of very intelligent and rational adults. Heh. It's funny now, but the Awakening was quite traumatic at the time.)
This applies to your field's job prospects in the US, and it is increasingly applying to mine: http://chronicle.com/article/Dodging-the-Anvil/63274/
Thanks for the link. Every couple of months I go read some of Mr. Pannapacker's articles, to remind myself why I'm sticking to my non-uni-related translation job and incorporating as much practical tech and language study into my research as possible. I'm immensely glad I came across him before starting grad school. This piece (http://chronicle.com/article/Building-a-Secondary-Career/45587/) is still my favourite, especially the last two paragraphs. Are you aiming for a position in the US later on?
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I want a good job somewhere. If I have options, then we can discuss location. >_< Being in a PhD program is like playing a game of Chutes and Ladders, except I don't yet know whether I've landed on a chute or a ladder!
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