Lollies, zombies and serial killers, ginger beer, tea and restaurant critics will all come under the spotlight at the first PopCAANZ (Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand) conference in Sydney this week.
The conference will be held at the Vibe Hotel, Sydney, from tomorrow, June 30 until Friday, July 2.
The President of the new association is Dr Toni Johnson-Woods of UQ’s School of English, Media Studies and Art History.
Dr Johnson-Woods had been attending the American Popular Culture Association conferences for several years when she was asked to head PopCAANZ.
The response to the first conference has been overwhelming.
“We thought we’d be lucky to get 50 people but we’d outgrown our first venue within the first week,” she said.
With more than 150 people coming (“all we could manage for a first time”), it demonstrates the burgeoning academic interest in popular culture studies in Australia.
“One of the first topics we discuss is ‘what is popular’ — each discipline has a slightly different take,” Dr Johnson-Woods said.
“One thing is for certain, paradoxically we know what popular is, even if we can’t describe it.
"Personally I believe the more ubiquitous something is, the more invisible it becomes, the more complicated it is to ‘understand’ or analyse it. Too many factors come into play.”
International scholars from Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden, Brazil, the United States and France are attending the conference.
Recently Dr Johnson-Woods edited an international collection of scholarship on Japanese comics—Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. Many of the contributors will be at the conference including one of the leading European experts.
“During a research visit to Japan I became fascinated by the manga (comics)—I devoured them even though I couldn’t read a word,” she said.
“I discovered a body of academics all over the world who were researching the area, but their material was scattered through too many diverse journals. I approached them all and the result is a 20 chapter book which will be launched at the conference.”
Dr Johnson-Woods said as well as discussion on food and beverages, fashion would be well represented at the conference with papers on Bono’s sunnies, vampire dandies, and Mrs Peel’s catsuit.
Topics would also include Australian popular stage females, romance fiction and sports, Beatles music in film, pole dancing, comic books, and sex toy design.
“It’s not all academics, we have collectors, readers and enthusiasts,” she said.
Aside from sharing research interests, the main aim of the conference is for popular culture scholars to look for common grounds for future collaborations.
“Fashion in popular fiction is an area of particular interest to me, fuelled by my pulp fiction research,” Dr Johnson-Woods said.
“All of those covers with lurid lasses in lamé — evening gloves in a private eye’s office, a pirate costume in a night club. Women were so ridiculous costumed but so sexy at the same time!
“And then I found fashion signifiers in Canterbury Tales and Middlemarch and suddenly fiction is saturated with meaningful dressing.”
For a full program description please visit the official website at http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ipswich/popcaanz/program.html.
For interviews please contact Toni Johnson-Woods on 0402 422112 or Jan King at UQ Communications 0413 601 248.
