JAPANESE MEDIA AND POPULAR CULTURE MASTER CLASS – CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
In conjunction with the conference Experiencing the Media Mix: Anime, Manga, Video Games [concordia.ca/pcs] and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec Manga Year series of exhibitions [manga.banq.qc.ca/en.html], Concordia University is pleased to present a day-long Japanese Media and Popular Culture master class on Monday, February 6, 2012.
The master class is an opportunity for twenty graduate students from across Canada, who are studying themes related to Japanese media and popular culture, to gather with their peers and discuss research topics, methodologies and sources with a group of leading scholars in diverse disciplines, including anthropology, game studies, history, media studies, and sociology.
Further details after the jump
One half of the master class program will feature invited speakers Ian Condry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology),
Margherita Long (University of California, Riverside), Tom Looser (New York University) and Thomas Lamarre (McGill
University). The second half will feature guests from the Concordia academic community: Mia Consalvo, Matthew Penney, Bart Simon and Marc Steinberg. Following short presentations by the scholars, the day will be organized into breakout sessions to enable students to engage with the experts, and each other, in small groups.
Experiencing the Media Mix conference keynote speaker Otsuka Eiji, a leading Japanese theorist of manga, anime, fan
cultures and media mix practice, and also the creator of hit manga such as MPD Psycho, Leviathan, and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, will host a special one-hour Q&A section for Master Class participants.
Concordia University invites interested students at the graduate level to submit a CV, one page statement of interest, and letter of support from an advisor. The advisor’s letter must be signed on university letterhead. All documents must be sent electronically to masterclass@graduatestudies.concordia.ca. The deadline to receive applications and letters of reference is December 21, 2011. There is no participation fee, and funding support of $250 is available for participants traveling from outside the greater Montreal area. Space is limited and applicants will be informed whether they have been selected by January 10, 2012. The classes will be conducted in English.
EVENT DESCRIPTION
Experiencing the Media Mix: Anime, Manga, Video Games
Media mix is the Japanese term for the strategy of promoting transmedia synergy: the proliferation of work across different media platforms, from films to video games, comic books to amusement rides, novels to soundtracks. But the Japanese media mix is not only the object of industrial production and marketing practice, it is also an increasingly significant part of our collective media environment. We play, read, watch, write, copy and comment across media platforms on a daily basis: we experience the media mix. As such it is a phenomenon whose study demands new methodologies, new approaches, and new ways of thinking about both the Japanese media sphere and our own media environment.
Experiencing the Media Mix: Anime, Manga, Video Games is a three-day event composed of a symposium, a keynote
lecture, game-play performance, and master classes featuring local and international renowned scholars. It will provide a
dynamic, interdisciplinary and international milieu to shed light on the centrality of media connectivity and the importance of experience within the phenomenon of the media mix, and the forms of anime, manga and video games so central to it.