I don't hate you! ;) It's not immediately obvious from the abstracts listing, but my abstract was a direct answer to the stated goal of the conference (http://www.kyotomm.jp/english/event/study/isc01_e.php), which was to debate the possibilities of/limitations to a potential field called 'global comics studies'. Just to be clear, I didn't propose or endorse any new field -I was just asked to give my opinion on the general idea of 'global comics studies' from the viewpoint of my research.
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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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 11:07 pm (UTC)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.