Benjamin Woo (Photo by Bryan Gagnon)
Communication and Media Studies Professor Benjamin Woo, author of Getting A Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture, is building on his Comic-Cons Research Project with the support of a $102,825 Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Woo and co-investigator Felan Parker (University of St. Michael’s College) will be working with five academic collaborators across North America to conduct a “swarm ethnography” of the San Diego Comic-Con. Their project is entitled “Swarming Comic-Con 2021: A Collaborative Ethnography of Industry-Audience Relations in the Entertainment Industries.”
“Like many of us, researchers look to Comic-Con to glean how the relationships between creative industries and their audiences are changing,” explained Woo. “This project brings a number of those scholars together onto one research team that, along with Carleton students, will carry out structured and coordinated fieldwork at Comic-Con.”
The goals for this project include:
- Contributing to the research on the structuring role conventions have come to play in the entertainment industry;
- Developing an account of how large conventions intervene in the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural goods;
- Developing new collaborations between interdisciplinary scholars in Canada and the U.S.;
- Providing experiential learning opportunities for graduate students and undergraduates to develop empirical research skills.
Friday, May 22, 2020 in Communication and Media Studies, General, News, Research
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