Interface 2023

The Cultural Inbetween:

Exploring Distinctions Within Popular Culture

Virtual Conference

Date: Thursday, April 27th, 2023

This virtual one-day conference seeks to draw together interdisciplinary presentations to create a generative and multidisciplinary understanding of popular culture. Presentations of 15 minutes will be organized in round tables followed by a Q&A and discussion to encourage collaborative and cross-disciplinary thinking.

Panel 1: Cultural Forms of Representation

  • 8:45 AM —10:15 AM EST Moderator: Maki Salmon

Elloit Cardozo (Jadavpur University) & Pradnya Waghule St. Joseph’s University)

“Trend bana yaha pe MC Stan ko hate karte’: Reading online discourses of gatekeeping popular culture in India”

Elloit Cardozo is an MPhil research scholar at the Department of English, Jadavpur University  and a fellow at the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies in Kolkata, India. He  also teaches the module on hip hop and research for the University of Mumbai’s certificate  course on hip hop.

Pradnya Waghule is currently pursuing a PhD at St. Joseph’s University, Bengaluru, India.  She is interested in areas of cultural representation. Her work on cultural texts has been  published in online and print publications.

Catherine Wild  (University of Winchester)

“Misty as a reflection of 1970s Zeitgeist”     

Dr. Catherine Wild completed her PhD in 2019 at the University of Winchester with her thesis focusing on the girls’ comic Misty (1978-1980). Catherine writes about the darker side of life, her areas of expertise including: the Carnivalesque; the Uncanny; the Gothic; horror; terror; elements of Hauntology; social history; comics structure, function and creation; threshold concepts; and textual intervention. She creates comics scripts and fictional texts, often using a format generated through collaboration with 2000AD creator Pat Mills. Catherine takes inspiration from her experiences and perceptions of her own life, as well as the style of Mills’ Misty comic and the content of the many British girls’ annuals that she has collected over the years. She has worked as a lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at the Universities of Winchester and Bournemouth for ten years and teaches English and Literacy to people seeking asylum on a voluntary basis.

Aydin Karasapan (Carleton University)

“Where do video games as an art form fit?”

Aydin Karasapan is a student pursuing his MA in Philosophy with a specialization in the Digital Humanities at Carleton University, where he works as a teaching assistant. His research focuses on the capacity of interactive digital technology to disrupt, augment, or displace conventional means of producing and communicating information. His current research project focuses on the prospects for improving the educational value of student textual engagement through digital innovation of the written text as a medium. His project involves in depth examination of digital educational applications, social media platforms and video games to better understand the way that differences in the designs and implementation of interactive digital technologies affects the quality and outcomes of people’s engagement with those technologies. His research interests span the domains of social epistemology, cultural informatics, aesthetics, and game and user experience design theory.

Panel 2: Narrative and Artistic (Re)Imaginings

  • 10:30 AM —12:00 PM EST Moderator: Victoria Hawco

Onur Karaköse (Hacettepe Üniversitesi)                                   

“Morphing Hopepunk into Queer Futurism as Multiplicative Speculation in Becky Chambers’ A Psalm For The Wild-Built”

Onur Karaköse currently works as a Research Assistant in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University. He obtained his BA in Political Science and International Relations in 2013 from Yeditepe University with a double major in English Language and Literature in 2015. He finished his M.A. in English Language and Literature at Ankara University with a thesis on Post-1990s Contemporary British Drama. His research interests are American Drama, Life Writing, Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Valeria Giudici (Sorbonne Université)                                                

“The (in)formal in art. Breaking the wall of institution with JR’s works”

Valeria Giudici is a PhD student in Cultural Geography at the Sorbonne Université of Paris with a thesis entitled “Contemporary art at the service of disused industrial urban fabric” (Prof. Edith Fagnoni). She is well acquainted with urban cultural projects, as she has a Master degree in Cultural design (Milan, 2022), with deepening towards urban regeneration through culture. She also has a Master in Comparative Modern Cultures (Turin, 2021), with a thesis on identity in the philosopher Albert Memmi (“The border between belonging and alienation in Albert Memmi’s La Statue de Sel”, rated with honour and dignity to be published). She has attended international curatorial and art exhibition courses. She has published internationally and holds lectures in Italian, English and French https://laboratoire- mediations.sorbonneuniversite.fr/valeria-giudici/

Rachael Beaty (Loyola Marymount University)

“Dada, Neo-Dada, Situationist, and Fluxus movements”

Rachael Beaty is recent graduate from Loyola Marymount University, CA with  a Master of Arts in English Literature. She also attended the University of California in Los Angeles and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Literature and Culture.

Panel 3: At the Intersections of History and Pop Culture

  • 12:15 PM —1:45 PM EST Moderator: Ayşegül Oğur Rigato

Jason Croizer (University of New Brunswick)                               

“These Nigiri are Great! Jelly-Filled are my Favourite: Unpacking Anime’s Position Within 1990s American Culture”

Jason Crozier is a PhD student in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University. His research on the importation and localization of Japanese anime in North America focuses on questions of orientalism, commodified and common sense racism, and the reframing of the Japanese-American relationship post-WWII. He looks at authority within anime fan communities and the prioritization of white voices within fan spaces and sites of anime production globally. Jason’s previous work focused on the racialization and commodification of Black professional wrestlers, arguing for a renewed focus on wrestling as a significant site of cultural expression and scholarly negotiation.

Victoria Pelky (Carleton University)                                                  

“Dark Side of Nature: Societies Fascination with Dark History, Serial Killers and Other Dark Elements”

Victoria Pelky is a second-year Ph.D. student in the school of Indigenous and Canadian Studies here at Carleton University. After concluding her undergraduate degree in History and French at Trent, her master’s research focused on the place of Francophone minorities in Canada and the role of language in politics and in fostering community identities. Now, as Ph.D. student, she is looking at the representation of Indigenous peoples in Canadian Museums and the larger impact of institutions on the creation and perpetuation of Canada’s colonial national identity. With her interest in public and self-understanding and her interest in dark history stemming from watching the many documentaries on various streaming platforms, she looks to understand why we watch and do what we do and how does that affect us.

Liza Wemakor (UC Riverside)                                                

“Electric Relaxation: Black Women’s Love, Black Men’s Perspectives”

Liza Wemakor is a second-year English Ph.D. student at UC Riverside, where she studies black feminist fictions, with a focus on speculative fiction and “black naturalism” in twentieth and twenty-first century American media. Wemakor also writes speculative fiction; her debut novella (‘Loving Safoa’) will be published by Neon Hemlock Press in 2023.https://carleton-ca.zoom.us/j/93933794135?pwd=RXhoY1BBcjBYTEFWSWJpaGliRkVYUT09