[research] Conference wrap-up, and looking for good podcasts from Japanese universities

[unjapanologist]

Originally 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.

Comments

[aoi-shu.livejournal.com]

AKEMASHITE~~~~~
Happy New Year, dear!
I hope to see you in a couple of months, meanwhile let's make world a better place ^_^ <3

[kethylia.livejournal.com]

The level of English in some of those abstracts is so low I can't even be certain what is being argued! Ah language barriers. Would've loved to meet all the people--including you, of course!--behind them, though...and I doubt that'll be happening any time soon. T_T

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?