Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Miller, Laura
• McLelland, Mark

Titel

Scholar girl meets manga maniac, media specialist, and cultural gatekeeper

Ist Teil von

• The End of Cool Japan, 2017, p.51-69

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• It may seem an odd career trajectory that someone trained as a linguistic anthropologist who collected the empirical evidence of recorded conversations (used as a corrective to folk theories about language), eventually began using material from the fascinating realm of manga and anime for research purposes. Over the years my interests have greatly diversified, and increasingly, I find that insights gained from popular culture help me understand current issues of language commodification, language and gender ideology, and language and youth cultures. In other words, I was not trained as a scholar of popular culture and did not use material from popular culture in my research for many years. As I began gradually to include examples from popular culture to illustrate key points in the course of doing research, teaching and presenting talks on social, cultural and linguistic issues, I found that it was not all smooth sailing. There have been many rocky storms to deal with. Despite the attraction, ubiquity and consequential nature of Japanese manga, for instance, using them for research and teaching introduced me to a new set of unexpected difficulties and considerations. This volume asks for an explicit discussion of problems, so although my comments may appear to be one long rant, the negative experiences I relate are overshadowed by predominantly positive ones.