Category: Call for Papers

Call for Papers – Mechademia: Second Arc, 17.1 “Cosplay, Street Fashion, and Subcultural Styles”

One concept that, for many people, is probably the most closely associated with anime/manga is cosplay. In turn, studies of cosplay are a major area in anime and manga studies in general – just some prominent examples include Melissa de Zwart, Cosplay, creativity and immaterial labours of love, Joel Gn, Queer simulation: The practice, performance and pleasure of cosplay, and Alexi Hieu Truong, Framing cosplay: How ‘layers’ negotiate body and subjective experience through play. And in 2006, when Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and Fan Arts launched with its “Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga” issue, one of the articles in it was Costuming the imagination: The origins of anime and manga cosplay.

Despite their increasing visibility the importance of costume, fashion and style is often overlooked; they escape focused scholarly attention because, paradoxically, they are so patent and obvious, we may think anyone can talk about them.

Seventeen years have passed since then. And now, Mechademia has announced the Call for Papers for a full issue on “Cosplay, Street Fashion, and Subcultures”, guest-edited by Dr. Masafumi Monden (Lecturer, Japanese Studies, University of Sydney, author of, among other publications, Japanese Fashion Cultures: Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan), and currently set for publication in the fall of 2024. The CFP suggests several broad questions or ideas to consider when thinking about cosplay and its relationships to fashion, street fashion, culture, and subculture. One of these questions is the nature of the difference between the ideas of “fashion” and “style”. Another is place that the body holds when approaching concepts related to fashion.

Within the broad issue scope, authors are invited to consider a wide range of topics and themes. Some of these can include:

  • Marketing and consumer culture
  • Sexuality and/or gender
  • Fandom and subsequent communities
  • Activism, resistance and protests
  • Beauty and aesthetics

The expected word length for submissions is between 5000 and 7000 words, and the submission deadline for the issue is July 1, 2023.

The full CFP, with additional details, is available on the Mechademia website.

Call for Papers – Mechademia: Second Arc, 17.2 “Methodologies”

Since its relaunch in 2018, with a more ambitious twice-a-year publication schedule and an expanded scope on “East Asian popular cultures, broadly conceived”, Mechademia has established itself as the leading publication in the anime and manga studies space. Eight issues have been published so far, featuring both original essays, and translations of major previously published Japanese scholarship and commentary, from authors who can justly be viewed as representing the cutting edge of the field of East Asian popular culture studies. And, the Mechademia editorial calendar is filled for the foreseeable future, with Volume 15.2, 2.5D Cultures on the schedule for Spring 2023, 16.1, Media Mix, for the fall, and 16.2, Media Platforms and Industries for Spring 2024. And now, Mechademia is also actively looking to fill a Fall 2024 issue, with the subtitle Methodologies, to be guest-edited by Dr. Jaqueline Berndt (Professor, Japanese Language and Culture, Stockholm University).

This journal issue invites those engaged in research on East and Southeast Asian popular media and related global fan cultures to foreground their theoretical frameworks and methodological assumptions, and to critically reconsider their methods of analysis in order to explore new possibilities for inter-disciplinary collaboration.

Submissions of between 5,000 and 7,000 words, using the Mechademia Style Guide, are accepted until July 1, 2023.

The Call for Papers for the issue highlights several potential questions to consider. Among them:

  • What allows for conceptualizing manga, anime, video games, etc. as “popular culture” and not “subculture,” as Japanese-language discourse more often has it? What difference does it make to speak of “media culture” rather than “popular culture” in this regard? What would be an up-to-date name for the wider research field covered by Mechademia?
  • Allegedly, there has been an overemphasis on textual analysis, but what type of textual analysis is meant by that? What type of formalism does research in media representations of gender, ethnicity, youth nationalism, etc. require today?
  • What institutional factors have led to the persistent overemphasis on subjects related to Japan and/or based in Japan studies? What limitations and potentials does this overemphasis hold?
  • What hampers the interrelation between English-language and Japanese-language scholarship (including publications by non-Japanese nationals in Japanese, and translations of popular or non-academic Japanese media criticism in English)? What facilitates mutual ignorance or exclusion? And how can these obstacles be overcome?

For an example of a recent methodology-focused study on a topic related to East Asia, although it does not deal with East Asian popular culture specifically, consider Xiang Li, Citing East Asia: A citation study on the use of East Asian materials in East Asian Studies dissertations, College & Research Libraries, 80(4), 561-577.

The full CFP, with additional details, is available on the Mechademia website.

Call for Papers – Mechademia 2023 Conference: “Aftermath”

Mechademia 2023 – Aftermath
Kyoto International Manga Museum
May 27 – May 29, 2023

Originally launched at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design as “Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits”, the annual Mechademia conference is now a premier site for new research on a wide range of topics related to Japanese popular culture, including anime and manga, but also encompassing video games and fan activities and practices. Last year’s conference was held in Los Angeles immediately preceding the Anime Expo convention, and for 2023, Mechademia will take place in Kyoto, at the Kyoto International Manga Museum, and potentially at Kyoto Seika University (home of the Graduate School of Manga). Options for line presentations will be available, but in-person participation is strongly encouraged.

The keynote speaker for this year will leading manga scholar Prof. Jaqueline Berndt (Stockholm University). Some of recent work includes contributing the introduction to the new Stockholm University Press open-access essay collection Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the essay More Mangaesque than the Manga: ‘Cartooning’ in the Kimetsu no Yaiba Anime to a special section on Demon Slayer in an issue of the journal Transcommunication, and serving as one of the co-editors for Shojo Across Media: Exploring “Girl” Practices in Contemporary Japan. Prof. Berndt has also written adn lectured widely on the future of anime and manga studies as a field.

The theme for 2023 will be “aftermath” – in connection to concepts of a “a sense of destruction”, apocalyptic images, and shifts in lived experiences in response to these events and changes. Some suggested topics that participants are invited to consider in their papers include:

  • Methodological shifts within the field of anime and manga studies
  • Effects of digitalization on media mixes
  • BL as a global genre
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Call for Book Chapters – Explaining Isekai

Anime is not a genre – but considering genres is one of the ways to at least begin critically approaching Japanese animation. In this way, Rayna Denison presents a focus on anime genres “because of the way genres are often seen, like anime, to operate as cultural categories or phenomena”. And, as Denison points out, studying genres calls for an awareness not only of differences between them, but also of their “meanings”, such as the ways that both audiences and critics respond to particular ones. This kind of awareness can highlight instances where particular genres draw popular attention, but remain relatively obscure in terms of criticism and analysis. Denison herself uses the example of horror anime, while Lucy Fraser and Masafumi Monden, in The maiden switch: New possibilities for understanding Japanese shōjo manga (girls’ comics) have examined “early 1980s and 1990s shōjo manga that were primarily targeted at the youngest band of readers, stories with early adolescent heroines in light, romantic, and fairytale-like narratives” – in contrast to “texts that enact more explicit gender subversion”.

isekai (literally ‘different world’) is an anime and manga genre whose plots usually consist in a main character that enters (or is forcibly transported) to a fantasy world, whose setting can combine fantasy Middle Age elements with a science fiction or steampunk appeal.

Oscar García Aranda, Representations of Europe in Japanese anime: An overview of case studies and theoretical frameworks

One genre where this kind of gap between popularity and critical recognition is particularly prominent is isekai. Definitions for it include “(literally ‘different world’)…an anime and manga genre whose plots usually consist in a main character that enters (or is forcibly transported) to a fantasy world, whose setting can combine fantasy Middle Age elements with a science fiction or steampunk appeal” (Oscar García Aranda, Representations of Europe in Japanese anime: An overview of case studies and theoretical frameworks), and “a specific genre of storytelling in which people move from one world to another, usually through some sort of a portal such as a gate or a doorway” (Giovanni Tagliamonte and Yaochong Yang, Isekai: Tracing interactive control in non-interactive media), although these authors add to the definition, noting that “isekai usually refers to a specific set of qualities: amateur-publishing, fantasy worlds with varying levels of game-like qualities, and a self-reflexive commentary aided by platform publishing”, and as a recent Japan Times report notes, isekai has “dominated the manga and light novel markets“. But beyond a few essays and articles such as these and Zachary Samuel Gottesman, The Japanese settler unconscious: Goblin Slayer on the ‘Isekai’ frontier, and Tani Levy, Entering another world: A cultural genre discourse of Japanese isekai texts and their origin in online participatory culture, it remains a genre that is yet to attract significant scholarly attention.

It is with this mind that Dr. Michael Cserkits has announced a call for papers for an Explaining Isekai essay collection. Proposals of 200-400 words for papers on range of topics, such as the history of isekai, gender and social aspects, violence and the military, and case studies of particular titles, will be accepted until January 23, 2023. The expected length for the final papers is approximately 5000-7000 words, with expected submission in August 2023.

The full Call for Papers is available below and at https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/11213439/explaining-isekai-%E2%80%93-call-contributions.

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Call for Papers – Journal of Anime and Manga Studies v. 2

In their editors’ introduction to the essay collection (“designed as a comprehensive undergraduate and graduate textbook”) Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, Alisa Freedman and Toby Slate refer to Japanese popular culture studies as “a field in formation”. Classes on different aspects and dimensions of Japanese popular culture are now fairly common at American colleges, and scholars are continuing to explore a wide range of approaches to this general topic in books, book chapters, and journal articles. A major new development in the field’s institutionalization took place earlier this year with the official launch of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies. JAMS is not the first publication of this kind, but between its name and its open-access format (i.e., free availability online), it can have a significant contribution on promoting this field and introducing the idea of academic approaches to Japanese popular culture in general and anime and manga studies in particular to the academic community, and really, to all those who are interested in these kinds of approaches.

The journal’s launch volume featured five full-length peer-reviewed articles and a range of subjects, as well as several analytical approaches that have never before been tried in anime and manga studies. And now, the JAMS editorial team has announced the Call for Papers for the next issue.

In line with the general goal and mission of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, this call is general and interdisciplinary – the only guideline is that papers should discuss “anime, manga, cosplay, and their fandoms as analyzed from any number of scholarly perspectives”. All types of authors – faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and “independent scholars” are welcome to submit their work, and the papers can be broadly theoretical, or based on qualitative or quantitative research. Book review proposals may also be considered.

Maximum length: 7,500 words (however, significantly shorter or longer submissions may be accepted at the discretion of the journal’s editor)

Submission deadline: February 1, 2021

So, if you have plans to publish your research on anime/manga, or have ever wanted to try, the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies can be a great opportunity to have your your research undergo a formal peer review process, and then have the result appear as a formal publication in a new journal. I know I am already looking forward to reading the papers that will appear in the new volume, and I’m confident that plenty of other people are too.

So, to all potential Volume 2 authors, good luck!

The full Call for Papers, with additional details, is available online.

Call for Papers – The Waseda Symposium on Demon Slayer (鬼滅の刃)

One of the last places I expect to see a mention of a “smash-hit Japanese comic book” is the business section of the New York Times. And yet, on October 20, the Times highlighted the unexpected and unparalleled success of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train, which set a new box office revenue record on its opening weekend, and has since gone on to become the second highest grossing film of all-time in Japan.

At this point, it’s becoming hard to under-emphasize how much of a big deal Demon Slayer is on the Japanese popular culture landscape. And, now, Waseda University has announced a Call for Papers for The Waseda Symposium on Demon Slayer (鬼滅の刃) (to be held as an online event/webinar)

Suspensions of Concentration: Kimetsu no yaiba and Blockbuster in the Year of the Global Pandemic
Waseda University / online
March 15, 2010

“By scrutinizing Kimetsu no yaiba in relation to these and other issues, we will collectively reflect on the location of anime in its broadest sense. 

This one-day online symposium is an attempt to accomplish this objective by exploring a wide range of issues that are concretely related to Kimetsu no yaiba yet have implications beyond the single media franchise. The following are examples of possible topics for presentations and discussions:

The anime industry and media mix, fan culture, cosplay and social media, anime songs and music, voice acting and actors genre systems, intertextuality, action and spectacle, speed and kinetic dynamism, narrative motifs, iconography, visual style, historical imagination, the political unconscious, affect, violence, censorship, gender and authorship, transnational reception and consumption, labor and marketing, COVID-19 and the culture industry, etc.

We invite papers that critically discuss any aspects of the Kimetsu phenomena including – but not limited to – the list of topics mentioned above.”

Proposal length: 250 words
Submission deadline: January 9, 2021

Send proposals to: wasedakimetsu@gmail.com

The full Call for Papers is reproduced below and available at H-Net H-Announce.

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Call for Book Chapters – “Libraries/Archives/Librarians in Comics”

“The editors of a new collection of articles/essays are seeking essays about the portrayal of libraries, archives and librarians in graphic novels, comic strips, and sequential art/comics. The librarian and the library have a long and varied history in sequential art. Steven M. Bergson’s popular website LIBRARIANS IN COMICS is a useful reference source and a place to start as is the essay Let’s Talk Comics: Librarians by Megan Halsband. There are also other websites which discuss librarians in comics and provide a place for scholars to start. 

Going as far back as the Atlantean age the librarian is seen as a seeker of knowledge for its own sake. For example, in Kull # 6 (1972) the librarian is trying to convince King Kull that of importance of gaining more knowledge for the journey they about to undertake. Kull is unconvinced, however. In the graphic novel Avengers No Road Home (2019), Hercules utters “Save the Librarian” which indicates just how important librarians are as gatekeepers of knowledge even for Greek Gods. These are just a few examples scholars can find in sequential art that illustrate librarians as characters who take their roles as preservers of knowledge seriously. We will accept essays related to sequential art television shows and movies e.g., Batgirl in the third season of Batman (1966); Stan Lee being a librarian in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) movie. 

Any topic related to librarians/archives/librarians in comics and sequential art will be considered. 

We are seeking essays of 2,500-5,000 words (no longer) not including notes in APA style for this exciting new volume. 

Please send a 300-500-word abstract by November 15th to  

Carrye Syma
Carrye.Syma@ttu.edu  
Assistant Academic Dean and Associate Librarian 
Texas Tech University Libraries”

FULL DETAILS

Ed. note:  Manga in libraries has been the subject of several different recent academic studies, such as The institutionalization of Japanese comics in US public libraries (2000-2010), and Librarians’ perceptions of educational values of comic books: A comparative study between Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The “reverse” of this – libraries and librarians in manga – has not. The reason for this is not difficult to identify – overall, it is just a very marginal topic in manga studies. Nonetheless, at least in comics studies more broadly, it has been approached in the past – as, for example, in The long, strange trip of Barbara Gordon: Images of librarians in comic books, and there is no reason why “Libraries/Archives/Librarians in Comics” would not be open to one or more essays on depictions of libraries/librarians in manga. The key question, of course, would be how to actually structure this kind of chapter – it would have to be more than just a “survey”. Some potential angles could include a comparison of how manga portray libraries/librarians with how American comics do, or, alternately, with portrayals in other Japanese fiction, or an examination of some unique angles in these portrayals – such as the militarized Library Forces depicted in the Library Wars manga series.

Call for Papers: “Anime and Manga Fandom Before 2000”

Japanese animation came to the U.S. in the early 1960’s, with the first television broadcasts of Astro Boy. But it took several dozen years for anime fandom to develop outside Japan, and actual descriptions of how anime/manga fandom around the world developed between the 1960’s and the 1990’s are still few and far between. How did non-Japanese viewers actually perceive Japanese animation during these years? How did fan communities form? At the most basic level, what did anime fans actually do – where were anime clubs formed, when did anime conventions start, how were they organized? What technological or social affordances did fans benefit from? How did anime fans interact with broader fan circles, and engage with broader social structures. How difficult were these interactions or engagements? Answering these kinds of questions is crucial for learning about how anime fandom actually came to take the form that it it has now, as well as for establishing a historical record.

An early, and immediately controversial attempt is Annalee Newitz’s Anime otaku: Japanese animation fans outside Japan (archived version), published in a 1994 issue of Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, and since then, cited widely in scholarly writing on fandom and on other, more general topics. Another, much more recent, is From vulnerable lives to cosmpolitan affects: Child fans of anime in the 1960s-1980s (Sandra Annett, Mechademia: Second Arc, 11). But one of the challenges of writing on early anime and manga fans and fandom is that so much of the sources to use in writing about this topic is ephemeral, such as pieces in local, and college newspapers and high school newspapers, and documents that in library science are referred to as “grey literature” – convention programs, enthusiast magazines and fan club newsletters – the kinds of materials that are often hard to locate and access, and generally, not likely to be preserved in library collections.

It is with these challenges in mind, as well as with the inevitable challenge presented by the aging of many of the “creators” of anime fandom outside Japan – in their thirties and forties (if not already older) 30 and 40 years ago, so approaching or past retirement age now, that a group of scholars, including several who themselves have been leaders in the field of anime and manga studies around the world, have issued a call for papers for an essay collection on “archival research in anime and manga fandom before the year 2000”. One of the collection’s co-editor will be Helen McCarthy, whose own writing, such as The anime! movie guide: Movie-by-movie guide to Japanese animation (1997) and Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation: Films, Themes, Artistry (1999), as well as numerous magazine articles, have been instrumental to the formation of the English language anime fan community.

Raiders of the Lost Archives: Anime and Manga Fandom Before the Year 2000 (more…)

Call for Papers: “Against Translation”

It’s difficult, and probably outright impossible, to put together any real numbers, but intuitively, I am confident in saying that the manga titles that are licensed for translation into English and commercial publication outside Japan represent only a small percentage of all manga that is actually published in Japan. In turn, this means that unless Western manga scholars are fluent in Japanese, they will be limited to only studying a relatively small portion of all manga that is potentially available for analysis. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, comics scholars – and the “comics studies” community, still largely do not interact with manga, or, for that matter, other comics that are not immediately available in English.

Comics scholars Dr Harriet Earle (Sheffield Hallam University) and Dr Martin Lund (Linnaeus University) are both acutely aware of this issue. And to approach it, they are proposing a focused edited essay collection in the new Routledge Global Perspectives in Comics Studies series – “Against Translation: Global Comics History and Memory” – “to bring together original scholarship on comics that are potentially not receiving the scholarly attention they deserve due to their lack of English translation or that have been studied in scholarship unavailable to an Anglophone audience.” Although the Call for Papers that they have prepared does not specifically mention manga, Dr Earle has invited me to share it on Anime and Manga Studies. The deadline for submitting a 300-word abstract is December 20, 2019, with full chapter manuscripts of up to 8,000 words due on May 15, 2020, and final submissions after all revisions and corrections on July 17, 2020.

The full Call for Papers is reproduced below, and available for download. All additional questions can be directed to the editors at translation.autographics@gmail.com. (more…)

Call for Papers – JAMS no. 1

Several months ago, I was excited to share news about the launch of a new peer-reviewed journal with a specific focus on Japanese animation, comics, and related topics – the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies. And now, JAMS has officially opened the Call for Papers for its first issue, currently on track to be published early next year.

Specifically, the journal welcomes all types of “scholarly analysis of anime” (and manga) and related topics such as cosplay and other fan activities and practices, from all kinds of authors, whether faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, or independent scholars, and is open to different forms of research methods and approaches, from critical readings to quantitative/data-driven studies. The recommended length for submissions is between 4,500 and 7,500 words, but longer or shorter manuscripts may be accepted after a discussion with the journal’s editors, and it is also open to book review submissions.The deadline for submitting a paper for inclusion in the inaugural issue is August 31, 2019.

In addition, JAMS has also updated its website with a full listing of its editorial board. The journal’s editors are a line-up of experienced anime/manga scholars, with varied backgrounds as authors and educators:

Dr. Frenchy Lunning (editor-in-chief, Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and Fan Arts)
Dr. Brent Allison, University of North Georgia (editorial board member, Mechademia)
Dr. Andrea Horbinski (copy editor, Mechademia)
Kay Clopton, The Ohio State University
Dr. Maria Bonn, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois
Elizabeth Wickes, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois

The full CFP is reproduced below, and archived on the Call for Papers website hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Department of English.

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