Saturday, November 22, 2008

"I'm Ready For the Big Time, Is It Ready For Me" - Kermit & Fozzie

It's official. In February I'll be headed to Albuquerque, NM with Ian to present our paper at the Southwest/Texas Popular and American Culture Association's annual conference. Their theme this year is "Reeling in the Years: 30 Years of Film, TV and Popular Culture".

Ian and I are presenting a paper that explores issues of faith as escapism and fundamentalist identity in Joss Whedon's Firefly. It still hasn't really hit me that I'm gonna be presenting a paper at an academic conference, much less that I'll have four days of attending lectures on these topics:

American Culture
Libraries, Archives, Museums, & Popular Culture
Computers, the Internet, & Technical Writing
Literature
Ethnicity
Material Culture
Gender & Technology
Music
Film, Television, & Radio
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Human Relations
Special Topics
Teaching and the Profession

I also can't quite believe that my first foray into the academic sphere will be in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy category. But hey, we all know that's where all the real theological discourse in popular culture happens.

We'll be fine tuning, and well, writing the paper for the next two months, and I'll be finishing my crash course in Angel and Buffy, Whedon's epic TV contributions. I love this kind of homework.

4 comments:

Spiro said...

wow, that's so cool!

Jarrod said...

That is fantastical!

Sadly I am not familiar with Firefly and would prefer you try to relate Moltmaan's theology of hope to the Dominion's attack on Deep Space Nine. Maybe next time.

Kj said...

Oh Jarrod- if I had only known you knew what a Cardassian was, our two years at school might have been very different!

Anonymous said...

Cool! I'll be at the conference as well, presenting a paper on heteroflexibility in Buffy (specifically the comic book). I'm looking forward to being there and hearing about everybody else's papers!