Thanks! I hope you find something great to do for your Ph.D. The last few years I see more and more undergraduate students at my university picking pop culture-related subjects for master's theses and such, and many of them wonder at first if they'll be "allowed" to study games/manga/whatnot, or if it's "useful". It doesn't matter what subject you pick, really, so long as you have enough trustworthy sources to work with and actually have something intelligent and meaningful to say about it. Good luck to you too!
Oh, do I know what you mean about how different those stories sound. The first HP dj I picked up was so discombobulating that I just had to find out more. It's even more striking if you actually see the djs. (There are scanlation sites...)
The racism debate made me realize what a clueless arse I can be and how little our institutions of learning actually teach us. Probably would've taken me another ten years to realize if I hadn't started hanging around here. *hugs LJ* It made me think a lot about how white Japanese studies people like me actually approach the non-white people we've made a livelihood out of studying. But I'll post about that once I've finished thinking it through.
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Oh, do I know what you mean about how different those stories sound. The first HP dj I picked up was so discombobulating that I just had to find out more. It's even more striking if you actually see the djs. (There are scanlation sites...)
The racism debate made me realize what a clueless arse I can be and how little our institutions of learning actually teach us. Probably would've taken me another ten years to realize if I hadn't started hanging around here. *hugs LJ* It made me think a lot about how white Japanese studies people like me actually approach the non-white people we've made a livelihood out of studying. But I'll post about that once I've finished thinking it through.