MPCA 2010 Day 3 - Wrap Up

I was hoping to get this blogged the final day of the conference but the death plague I caught before leaving finally got to me. I pushed myself really hard to make it through the final day and while I'm still paying for it health wise I had an amazing time and absolutely cannot wait until next year's conference in Wisconsin.

For this third and final day I spent the first part of the morning in meetings. I had a great breakfast and got to talk with the other area chairs for the conference and listen to plans for next years conference.

Afterwards, I was planning to attend a session on Religion and Popular Culture but was instead invited to the executive committee's meeting. I'm glad I had the opportunity to stay and hear how much passion, effort, pre-planning and work goes into these meetings. The executive committee is really interested in being able to balance out the financial needs of the organization with the wants and desires of those attending and presenting at the conference. To help them with this I'm going to be pulling a survey together for all conference attendees to take. These results will help the organization figure out how best to handle upcoming conferences and to continually refine and make the conference a fantastic experience for all. If you're an MPCA member please look for that in the coming weeks. We need everyone's feedback so please let your voice be heard!

I'll also be starting a twitter feed, blog and working on a Facebook page for the association and it will house important information, snippets of people's work, interesting news, book reviews and more. If you have any ideas of things you'd like to see, please email me and let me know and I'll make every attempt to make that happen for you.

I was able to attend the last two panels of the conference. The first was on Detective fiction with talks on the work of Dan Brown, the show, The Wired and City of Glass. While I'm not personally into that genre, it was a great discussion of this genre and spurred thoughts and conversations on the understanding of genre in general within literature and other forms of media. Styles of writing are shifting and yet we, for the most part, continue to use the same classifications of genre that we've always used. It's a nice way to be able to find things at your local bookstore but does it truly capture the essence of modern writing? We see this problem in video games as well. Genre is becoming so loose, crossed and fluid that I wonder what the future of it will be. We clearly need to rethink it but we of course can't compartmentalize things to a point where everything is it's own genre. There has to be a happy medium in there somewhere.

The very last panel of the day was about Fandom, fan works and Fanfiction. I personally love theories and work on Fan culture and this discussion was an amazing way to wrap up the conference for me. There was a somewhat heated discussion at the end about copyright issues and the ethics behind fan fiction. I feel divided on the issue myself. On the one hand these fans are boosting the fandom of a particular work by keeping it alive. Think of Twilight. Would Twilight be as popular without the fans to keep the flames alive? We can't tell people, "Be fans but only buy our official products and don't carry it further". What is it they say; "imitation is the best form of flattery" and I think these examples are no exception. But at the same time when you take the author's characters and twist them in such a way that there is little resemblance to the original intent, it feels dirty or sacrilege to the author's work.

There was an art major in the room at the time who was absolutely appalled by people stealing work like that and she felt that it made her career and passion a joke. If it was okay for people to just swoop in and take something already made and twist it for their own what was the point of coming up with something at all. I understand a bit of how she feels. I have gone to college and studied and worked really hard to become an anthropologist and work as an ethnographer. It really grinds me like nothing else when people call themself an ethnographer when they in fact have no theoretical background in it or little to no training. What good is my 15+ years of training when anyone can say they do what I do? I suppose this is the argument against fan fiction. If, I were an author, carefully cultivated a world and populated it with characters of my own making, how would I feel if someone then took that hard work and turned it into their own? For some authors it's awful, for others they love the attention. The bottom line is that fan studies is an amazing realm of work and needs to continue to explore the many facets of fan cultures, authority, authorship, transmedia, and the transformative power and nature of their passion.

All in all, my brain left very full and happy with the weekend events.