Tag: Anime Expo Academic Symposium


Jun
2025

Anime Expo 2025 Academic Program Schedule

categories: Anime Expo, Announcements, Programs

In three weeks, starting on July 3, Anime Expo, the largest Japanese animation and comics convention in the U.S., will once again return to the Los Angeles Convention Center. The AX 2025 schedule is packed with dozens of talks, presentations, premieres, guest appearances, company announcement sessions, and other live events. And, as it has for fifteen years now, though with some breaks (including for when AX itself was cancelled due to COVID), the Anime Expo live programming schedule will include a full Academic Program track – a unique opportunity for anyone who will be at the convention to sit in on one or more scholarly lectures and panel discussions on different aspects of anime and manga. This year, AX itself is organized around an “Academia” theme, and “Academics” is also the general topic for the Academic Program. When the Call for Papers for it was distributed earlier this year, some of the possible suggested topics that speakers were invited to consider included:

  • ways that anime and manga present or interpret knowledge and education, as well as classroom settings
  • specific educational/instructional uses of anime and manga
  • tools, techniques, methodologies, and trends in anime/manga research.

For 2025, the Academic Program is officially known as JAMS@AX Symposium, presented as a partnership between Anime Expo and the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies.

The full program for JAMS@AX Symposium 2025 consists of:

Thursday, July 3

10:00 a.m.
Keynote Address – Anime Goes to College
Emilie Waggoner (University of Colorado)

Emilie Waggoner is the Director of First Year Student Experiences at the University of Colorado Denver, where she teaches the unique course “Anime Goes To College: Analyzing Anime Characters Through a Sociological Lens”, as well as several others. She recently published Isekai as a Reflection of College Student Transition Theory (Popular Culture Review, Fall 2024), and is completing a EdD program in Leadership for Educational Equity.

11:30 a.m.
Performing Girlhood: Princesses, Cosplay, and Identity in Anime

  • Magical Girl Operation: Costume & Cosplay in Witch Hat Atelier
  • Azumanga Daioh and “Nichijou”: Absurdity and the Japanese Schoolgirl
  • The functional view in the constructed family: Animation as a Tool to Redefine the Concept of Family in Spy x Family
  • Floating Castles, Staged Narratives: Genre Conventions and Gender in Revolutionary Girl Utena

1:00 p.m.
Music of Studio Ghibli
David Lopez, Elliott Jones, John Marr (Santa Ana College)

Friday, July 4

10:00 a.m.
Family Bonds and Queer Community: Finding Acceptance, and Oneself, in Anime

  • Ace in Practice: Uta Isaki’s Manga and the Production of Asexual Identity
  • Can I Get An Amen?: Teaching English and Queer Acceptance in Japan via RuPaul’s Drag Race in Until We’re Together
  • Henshin Dekinai: The Doomed Queen is Doomed No More
  • Beyond School Walls: Queer Families and Self-Acceptance in Hinowa Kozuki’s Elegant Yokai Apartment Life

11:30 a.m.
Monstrous Lessons: Teaching Horror Anime

  • Horror and Transformation: A Curriculum Exploring Junji Ito
  • Designing an Anime Studies Syllabus: Teaching Monstrosity and Tolerance
  • Cataloguing the Creepy: Japanese Anthology Horror and Its Connection to Literary History

1:00 p.m. – Educator Roundtable

Saturday, July 5

10:00 a.m.
Worlds of Knowledge: Anime’s Keepers of Discovery

  • Frieren and the Value of Inquiry
  • The Guardians of the Louvre: How Manga Mythologizes Museums
  • Anime as Information: Mapping the Resources of Anime and Manga Studies
  • Anime Music Academia: Reborn as a music theory student with unlimited potential

11:30 a.m.
Pirates, Ecology, and K-Pop – How Anime Explores Worlds and Cultures

  • Teaching Culture Analysis and Anthropological Research through One Piece and the Fantasy-Journey Setting in Anime/Manga
  • Wagyu with a Fenrir: The Instructive Evasion of Ecology in Campfire Cooking in Another World
  • Anime’s Korean Wave: The Rise of South Korean IP in Japanese Animation

1:00 p.m.
Physics of Anime

All of the Academic Program sessions will be held in Los Angeles Convention Center Room 411.

You can view an archive of previous years’ schedules and speaker biographies on the AX website.


Feb
2025

Call for Papers – AX 2025 Academic Symposium: Academics

categories: Anime and Manga Studies Symposium, Anime Expo, Announcements, Call for Papers

Anime Expo, the largest anime convention in the U.S., scheduled to run July 3-6 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, will again feature an Academic Program track of presentations and panel discussions, and the Call for Papers for it is now open.

Anime Expo 2025 “will be showcasing an Academia theme” – and although submissions for the Academic Program can address any topic or perspective, some particular angle to consider can include ways that anime and manga present or interpret knowledge and education, as well as classroom settings, specific educational/instructional uses of anime and manga, and tools, techniques, methodologies, and trends in anime/manga research.

For consideration, please submit the title of your paper, an abstract (150 words), and a short biographical statement to https://forms.gle/xeheZc48SfUmr2Sa8

Submission deadline: April 7.

All speakers will be offered complimentary registration to Anime Expo 2025.

Additional Details

The organizer of the 2025 Symposium is once again Billy Tringali, the editor of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies.

[ed. note: I first proposed the Academic Program track and managed the program from 2012 through 2017. I am not otherwise involved in this year’s event.]


Apr
2024

Call for Papers – AX 2024 Academic Symposium: Edo Japan

categories: Anime and Manga Studies Symposium, Anime Expo, Call for Papers

Usually – and by their nature – academic conferences are not open to general, non-academic audiences, and for that matter, not really intended for them. But at the same time, nothing requires academic discussions to exclude the public, especially when members of the public may be interested in the same themes and topics that scholars are. And it is this understanding that lies at the heart of the Academic Program track at the Anime Expo convention, the largest in the U.S. I first proposed this track in 2011, and was its Executive Producer through 2017. And now, for 2024, the Academic Symposium is once again accepting submissions for papers with a “scholarly perspective on anime, manga, cosplay, and their fandoms”.

The theme of AX 2024 is Edo Japan, and authors are encouraged – but not required – to consider it. Proposals can address topics and subjects such as:

  • Japanese culture, past and present
  • Japanese festivals and holidays
  • Japan as Place, modern or historical
  • Performing artists like geisha
  • Histories of Japan, real or imagined

So, if you are studying a topic related to anime/manga, and want to share your research with a general, non-academic audience, here is your chance!

For consideration, submit a title, 150-word abstract, and short bio by the April 19 abstract submission deadline. All selected participants will be offered complimentary admission to AX.

Additional details (H-Net Network on Japanese History and Culture)


Feb
2019

Call for Papers – AX 2019 Academic Symposium: Anime Chronotopes

categories: Anime and Manga Studies Symposium, Anime Expo, Call for Papers
AX 2019

After a one-year hiatus, Anime Expo®, the largest anime convention in the U.S., will once again feature a dedicated track of academic panel programming, including lectures, presentations, and roundtable discussions. The goal of the Anime Expo Academic Symposium (AXAS) is to give scholars working in the field of anime and manga studies to to share their work with a diverse popular audience, to offer fans and scholars an opportunity to share their enthusiasm with one another, and to provide a site for for all involved to delve deeper into the world of Japanese pop culture. The theme for the 2019 Symposium is “Anime Chronotopes: Nostalgia in Japanese Animation and Comics”, and the Call for Papers for it is now open, with a deadline of May 5.

For consideration, please send the title of your paper or proposed panel, and an abstract of 250-400 words to animeexpo.academic@gmail.com. The full Call for Papers for AXAS 2019 is available below, and as a stand-alone page on H-Announce.

[Note: I organized/produced the Anime Expo Academic Program from 2011 to 2017. However, I am not directly involved in this year’s event.]

—

Call for Papers
Anime Expo Academic Symposium
“Anime Chronotopes: Nostalgia in Japanese Animation and Comics”
Anime Expo 2019
July 4-7 | Los Angeles, CA
www.anime-expo.org
www.anime-expo.org/academic-program

Recent anime and manga evince a pronounced fascination with both the history of Japanese animation and comics and the specific resonances of past texts in the present, a consideration marked not only by genre-savviness and the contemporary tendency towards citation across all media, but also a profound sense of nostalgia for its predecessors. This extends beyond the common association of the term with rose-tinted sentimentality towards the past, reflecting not only this intimacy but also its origins as a medical diagnosis, characterized by an intense sense of dislocation in the experience of the present. Both senses of nostalgia have produced opportunities to establish a ‘leaping chronology’ of the medium, charging the past with a radical sense of contemporaneity. The rediscovery of the radical promises of previous works of anime and manga, and in the process ‘repeating’ their animating concerns and questions, testifies to the possibility of reinventing and reestablishing the unfulfilled potentials of their projects. At a moment when the future itself seems to be foreclosed, such repetitions become one of the few mechanisms by which the glimmer of the radically new may become discernible.

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