Downloadable Conference Program [with Zoom links]
About the Conference
This conference is organized by student organizations Kino Club 313, the Wayne State Comics Collective, Knit Lit, and the Warrior Gaming Group, with support from the Pop Culture Working Group. We appreciate the financial support of the Turner Lecture Series.
For more information about the various pop culture student organizations at Wayne State, please visit kinoclub313.com, wsuknitlit.wordpress.com, warriorgaminggroup.wordpress.com, and our social media accounts:
The Kino Club 313 website also features a blog where we post reviews, listicles, articles, and interviews written by undergraduate students, graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty from Wayne State and beyond. If you are interested in contributing to our blog, send an email to kinoclub313wsu@gmail.com – we’d love to publish your work!
About the Virtual Conference
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, conference organizers opted to postpone our original conference, slated for March 2020. In addition to postponing the conference to September 2020, we have also decided to move the conference fully online. Many of the conference presenters who were originally scheduled to present their work in person or on our “Skype track” have submitted their work for asynchronous presentation. We will be posting these submissions – which range from short blog posts to longer essays to posters to pre-recorded video lectures and panels – the week leading up to the conference on our WordPress and YouTube platforms (Monday, 9/21 through Thursday, 9/24).
We encourage all presenters and attendees to read, comment, like, and share these submissions, which will be available for one calendar year following the conference (and then will be archived). We are also hosting several synchronous events during the conference, including trivia, crafting, discussion sessions, and our Turner Keynote Lecture. All synchronous events will be held over Zoom. Full Zoom invitations can be found on our Eventbrite page.
Conference Code of Conduct
The WaynePop Organizing Committee is committed to providing a harassment-free experience for all conference presenters and attendees. All conference-goers are required to follow the below guidelines when communicating with each other (before, during, and after the conference, in all of our virtual spaces):
- If a speaker/attendee indicates a preferred name, nickname, or pronouns, please use those
- Keep comments civil – any derogatory or harassing comments will be deleted and the commenter will be blocked from further participation
- In Zoom meetings, please keep your microphone muted and use the “raise hand” feature to indicate that you’d like to ask a question or make a comment
- Please keep questions and comments brief during synchronous events; moderators will do their best to ensure that everyone who would like to will have the opportunity to speak
- In the case of high attendance at a synchronous event, moderators may ask attendees to use the chat exclusively and read selected comments aloud
- Use the conference hashtag (#WaynePop2020) in Facebook comments and tweets to ensure that conference-related materials are easy to track and follow
- Report violations of this code of conduct to conference organizers at waynepop@wayne.edu or via FB messenger, Twitter DM, or in the Zoom chat
How to Participate
1) Register on our Eventbrite page – this is where you’ll receive Zoom links for all synchronous events!
2) Like/Follow/Subscribe to our social media pages and blog:
- Facebook Group: for announcements, important links, and conversations before, during, and after the conference
- Twitter: for announcements, important links, and live-tweeting during synchronous conference events
- WordPress: for access to written and image-based conference presentations (blog posts, longer essays, posters, comics)
- YouTube: for access to audiovisual conference presentations (pre-recorded papers, workshops, and panels)
3) Read/Comment/Share our conference presentations – we are hosting videos, informal blog posts, longer essays, posters and comics from pop culture scholars around the world! Conference submissions will be released on a staggered schedule starting Monday, 9/21 through Thursday, 9/24. Submissions will remain available to read and comment on after the conference is over for one year.
4) Attend synchronous conference events Friday, 9/25 and Saturday, 9/26. For a full schedule of synchronous events, see pages 7-9. Synchronous event schedule-at-a-glance:
- Day 1 Welcome/Meet & Greet [9/25, 2 PM EST]
- Knit Lit: Fiber Arts & Reading Group [9/25, 3 PM EST]
- Warrior Gaming: Trivia Night [9/25, 5 PM EST]
- Day 2 Welcome/Speed Geeking [9/26, 12:30 PM EST]
- Roundtable: Pop Culture Pedagogy [9/26, 2:15 PM EST]
- Turner Lecture: Shelley Streeby (UCSD) [9/26, 4 PM EST]
NOTE: This virtual conference is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Please RSVP on Eventbrite to access Zoom invitations for synchronous events and follow our social media sites for access to asynchronous submissions.
Index of Conference Submissions
Note: All conference submissions listed below will be presented asynchronously and available for viewing beginning on Monday, September 21st. Submissions will be available until March 2021, at which point they will be archived. Submissions here are listed in alphabetical order by the first listed author’s last name and categorized by submission type.
Written Presentations
| Author | Affiliation | Title | Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| Collins, Heidi | Mid Michigan College | The Farce of the Revolution: The Théâtre du Soleil’s 1789 |
Theatre, 20th-Century Theatre, Théâtre du Soleil |
| Drazen, Patrick | Independent Scholar | Rewriting Martyrdom: Variations on Japan’s Most Famous Christian Martyr: Amakusa Shirō | Comics/Graphic Novels, International, Adaptation |
| Edwards, Andrew | Wrexham Glyndwr University | Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s Jack the Ripper! Rewriting history as a superhero story in From Hell | Comics/Graphic Novels |
| Fortune, Cornelius | Bowling Green State University | Behind Closed Doors: Connecting Joyce’s ‘Wandering Rocks’ with Morrison’s Rock Poetry |
Literature, 20th Century, Multidisciplinary/ Interdisciplinary, James Joyce |
| Polasek, Kelly | Wayne State University | Antiwar Literature and Anti-Censorship at the Dawn of the Atomic Age: John Hersey’s Hiroshima in Context |
Literature, 20th Century |
| Profitt, Blue | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | “He appeared […] clad only in a pair of low-cut blue jeans:” Incipient Female Gazing at The Outsiders (1983) |
Film, Gender/Queer Studies, 20th Century |
| Thompson, Whitney | Independent Scholar | Will the Real Steve Rogers Please Stand Up?: Conflicting Nationalist Narratives in Captain America Comics |
Comics/Graphic Novels, 20th Century, 21st Century |
| Williamson, Zachary | The New School | The Performance of Continuity: Longbourn and Late Capitalist Rhetoric of History |
Literature, International, 21st Century |
| Zestanakis, Panagiotis | Institute of Media and Communication, University of Hamburg | Using Informal Facebook Archives: Lessons from Greece |
21st Century, Digital Humanities, Archival |
Audiovisual Presentations
| Author | Affiliation | Title | Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| Artemjeva, Lyudmila | Kozma Minin Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University |
The Shakespeare Authorship Question in Science Fiction: Quest for Conspiracy |
Literature, International, 21st Century |
| Cooper, Matthew | DePaul University | You’re All Rebels…Aren’t You?: Star Wars, “Re-Pairing,” and Fan Alienation |
Film, Fan Studies, 21st Century |
|
Jordan, J. Scott;Carpenter, Nathan; Craig, Byron; Hunt, Stephen |
Illinois State University |
Who’s Watching the Watchmen?: Utilizing Twitter as a Cultural Space for Collectively Writing History [Panel] |
Comics/Graphic Novels, Film, Television |
|
Jordan, J. Scott; Hintz, Vanessa; Wesselmann, Eric; Carpenter, Stanford |
Illinois State University |
Wild Histories and the Move Toward Narrative Pluralism: Popular-Culture Narratives as the Multi-scale Embodiment of Identity in Supernatural, Black Panther, Halloween, and Black Lightning [Panel] |
Comics/Graphic Novels, Film, Race/Ethnicity Studies |
| Muchransyah, Azalia P. | The State University of New York at Buffalo | Causality Dilemma: How Cinema Serves as a History-Making Tool in Indonesia |
Film, International, 20th Century |
| Sharpe, Melissa | Independent Scholar | Look around, look around: How lucky we are to have Eliza to explore character development with students |
21st Century, Pedagogy |
| Wesselmann, Eric | Illinois State University | Using Marvel’s Civil War Stories to Discuss Freedom, Security, and Moral Decision-Making |
Comics/Graphic Novels, Pedagogy |
Poster/Other Visual Presentations
| Author | Affiliation | Title | Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bove, Bryan | Bowling Green State University | “Bobby…you’re gay”: Marvel’s Iceman, Performativity, Continuity, and Queer Visibility |
Comics/Graphic Novels, Fan Studies, Gender/Queer Studies |
| Linares, Trinidad | Bowling Green State University | “Bitch McConnell”: The Pop Cultural Tweaking of History |
Literature, Gender/Queer Studies, Race/Ethnicity Studies |
Schedule of synchronous events
Friday, September 25
2:00 – 3:00 PM (EST)
Conference Welcome/Meet & Greet
Welcome to #WaynePop2020! Learn more about the conference and meet your fellow presenters and attendees.
3:00 – 5:00 PM (EST)
Knit Lit: Fiber Arts & Reading Group
Chera Kee (Wayne State University), Host
Do you like to knit, crochet, embroider, quilt, or otherwise dabble in the fiber arts? Do you like to chat about your favorite books and other media? Join us for September’s edition of Knit Lit – our theme this month is “Back to School”! All are welcome to attend (even if you don’t have a craft to work on).
5:00 – 7:00 PM (EST)
Warrior Gaming: Game Night & Trivia!
Chera Kee (Wayne State University), Host
Jose Guzman, Trivia Master
Join your conference organizers and fellow attendees for party games and trivia!
Saturday, September 26
12:30 – 2:00 PM (EST)
Welcome/Speed Geeking
Welcome to Day 2 of #WaynePop2020. Spend some time meeting fellow presenters and attendees before we start “speed geeking”! During speed geeking each presenter will have 2 minutes to pitch their current research and the audience will have 3 minutes to respond. This is a great way to learn about everyone’s research interests and connect with people. The last 30 minutes of the speed geeking session will allow participants to enter breakout rooms based on research interests.
2:15 – 3:30 PM (EST)
Roundtable: Pop Culture Pedagogy
Shelby Cadwell (Wayne State University), Facilitator
Erin Bell, Ph.D (Baker College), Participant
Jan Blaschak (Wayne State University), Participant
Courtney Bliss (Bowling Green State University), Participant
Cornelius Fortune (Bowling Green State University), Participant
Ella Tucan (Wayne State University), Participant
Synopsis: What does it look like to use popular culture texts in the classroom? How does that vary from one discipline to another? What do students and teachers stand to gain from introducing television, comics, podcasts, social media, or other “lowbrow” forms of entertainment into college courses? This roundtable will discuss these questions and more with a group of professors and graduate instructors from both Wayne State and other area universities/colleges.
4:00 – 5:15 PM (EST)
The Turner Lecture was introduced by the generous donation of the Turner family in memory of Dennis Turner, who was an Assistant Professor of Film in the Department of English from 1981 until his untimely death three years later. Dennis had a wide knowledge of film with special interests in French and German cinema, particularly in the work of Godard, Herzog, Fassbinder and Truffaut. He was the author of seven articles on film and was also working on a book on New German cinema and a screenplay at the time of his death. The Dennis Turner Lecture is given by a prominent film scholar or practitioner, to honor the memory of this extraordinary scholar and teacher.
Speculative Archives: Hidden Histories and Ecologies of Science Fiction
World-Making
Chera Kee (Wayne State University), Moderator
Shelley Streeby (University of California, San Diego), Turner Keynote Speaker
Synopsis:
This talk explores connections among the place-, space-, and world-making projects, speculative fiction, and archival memory-work of Judith Merril, Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Nalo Hopkinson. I consider archives not only as repositories of story drafts, fragments, and biographical materials, but also as research engines; tools in world-making; and time travel technology that facilitates the significant distortion of the present by connecting and critically juxtaposing hidden histories and possible futures. Throughout, I analyze how archives both illuminate and are active tools in advancing these writers’ creative involvement with libraries and other memory projects and their collaborations in creating spaces of schooling to help make worlds not organized by nationalism, possessive individualism, and mastery of the non-human environment. I argue that their archiving shaped then and now reveals non-national affiliations and networks among peoples and movements and the imagining of ecologies that do not depend on imperial resource extraction and the hierarchies of racial capitalism.
Keynote Bio:
Shelley Streeby is a professor of ethnic studies and literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her book Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism was published by the University of California Press in the American Studies Now! Series in 2018. She is also author of Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture (2013) and American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (2002), which received the ASA’s Lora Romero Prize. She is co-editor (with Jesse Alemán) of Empire and the Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (2007) and, with Ramzi Fawaz and Deborah Whaley, of the forthcoming Keywords for Comics Studies (NYU Press). Since 2010 she has directed the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She is currently working on a new book, Speculative Archives: Hidden Histories and Ecologies of Science Fiction World-Making.
Conference Organizers: Shelby Cadwell, Matt Linton, Bernadette Kelly, Colleen Hart, Beth Fowler, Lisa Alexander, Elena Past, Jan Blaschak, Samuel Beale, Amy Latawiec, Julianne Meiu, Elsa Nilaj, and Cham Smadi. With special thanks to faculty adviser Chera Kee and graphic design intern Eli Hart (College for Creative Studies).
