I woke up late which caused me to miss breakfast and the first panel I planned to attend. I blame this on the death plague I acquired the night before flying out.
I had planned on attending a Television panel called, "Colorful Characters: People and Profiles". I'm sorry to have missed it. I'll have to see if I can't get the papers or presentations from their respective authors.
By waking up late I did however get a chance to take some leisure time to look at the book vendor tables. It was extremely productive to say the least. I talked with a couple of book publishers and one is a publisher out of the UK that is looking to move more in the US market. They're interested in my work and I plan on submitting some articles to them for publication. I also talked with another couple of publishers who are interested in my dissertation once I finish it up. All in all, I was really happy. PLUS (this is both good and bad....good for my brain, bad for my pocketbook) I found a TON of books that I'll be returning home with. 12 in total. I cannot wait to get reading as it all looks so good. Some of it is for my dissertation and some of it is just because it's of personal interest to me. It gives you a sneak peak into what I might do after the dissertation....
The panels today really blew me away. I was fascinated by the knowledge and eye opening discussions that took place today. I attended two panels on SciFi, Fantasy and Horror and a panel on Text and Textualities of directors in movies.
Check out my Twitter as I tweeted throughout the day on what was going on in each panel as it happened.
As a little recap though, some of the highlights that really excited me were the following:
For starters, I really enjoyed the deep discussion we had in one panel about Zombies and their meanings in Romero's movie and their role within culture. Even more so we discussed what Romero's movies meant and the commentary behind them. It was a really good and deep intellectual discussion. I also heard a few pieces that really change my perspective on popular works such as Stephen King's The Shining and the movies The Grudge as well as District Nine.
Lunch was a great opportunity to network and discuss what other people's interests and studies where. I met a great gal who studies health and popular culture and is recently working on health/disease based communities in cyber space. Her work is completely fascinating and many of the communities she's looking at, while small, have great implications for future studies on health related communities, especially in social media research on things like the patient journey.
One of the things that I've been blown away by is how passionate everyone is about popular culture. Not only are they passionate people but they are friendly and eager to share their knowledge in a huge and diverse array of topics. I definitely want to do more with the organization so I attended their business meeting to look for those opportunities. I'm now on the AV (audio visual) subcommittee, their new social media guru and I'm going to help the executive secretary out with a post conference quantitative survey. I'm extremely happy and pleased to be helping out!
I ended the day attending a film panel. All of the speakers were extremely captivating and I walked away with some great book suggestions to help me in my own research. Beyond being an interesting and enjoyable movie I never thought about Inglorious Basterds to the extent they did. They discussed how the movie really makes us look at the dehumanizing process to make brutality acceptable and about the genius directing of this movie. As one panelist said, "This is a movie that teaches us to watch movies". They pointed out little things I never noticed in the movie like how one of Shosana's dresses had a 1970s zipper on it (completely intentional), how the projector scene was an intentional Romeo and Juliet discourse, the scene prior to Bridget von Hammersmark's death is very much a reverse Cinderalla story and that Quentin Tarantino's hands were the ones used in her death scene, not actor Christoph Waltz's hands. Paul Booth talked about director Richard Kelly's work - Donnie Darko, Southland Tales and The Box. I learned a new respect for this director and the complexity of his films and cinematography.
This conference has made me pine to join the ranks of academia and teach again but I also gained a newfound respect for what I do. It has given me a unique set of skills that I can use in my continuing research. It has given me renewed vigor to know that I'm absolutely in the right field of studies and have the drive and confidence to go forward and finish my PhD. There's absolutely a feeling of belonging and respect.
I'm sad tomorrow is the last day but ready to get home to see my kids and husband. Hopefully the death plague and the push I'm making to get through the conference won't do me in!
