AAS/SCMS

[Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano]

Replying to Stephanie's comment on the AAS and SCMS panels, I have a few
questions on that matter.

I wonder whether those in charge of the selection process of panels and
individual papers for the AAS conference are aware of "the question of
theory or methodology" or even pay attention to differences of
approaches that Stephanie pointed out.  From what I've seen, many of the
AAS organizers specialize in literature, history, and infrequently
political science or anthropology, but not in any of the disciplines of
film, television, communication and media studies.  This is especially
the case in Japanese studies.

I second Stephanie's point that the organizational preference seems to
go for the term "popular culture" over "film" or "television."  In the
climate described above, "popular culture" has not been associated with
a specific discipline, and is the catch-all term for locating panels and
papers on non-canonical subjects as "something else."

Then, what should we make of the decrease of film/media panels at AAS?
Are there any years in the last three decades or so, when the AAS
conference has had a significant number of film/TV/other media related
panels?  My impression is that there has been little support in this
area.

One could say that these relatively new disciplines have their own
conferences, SCMS for example, and therefore scholars so interested can
pursue their academic performance somewhere else.  Yet this begs the
question of why the same logic does not apply to history and literature
as well.

The point, after all, is not only the lack of film/media panels and
papers, but the lack of adjustment or transformation of the organization
itself.  I wonder as well if AAS, which was itself organized from a
disparate collection of area studies and different disciplines under the
umbrella of Asian studies, equipped to address the increasingly elusive
boundaries of academic disciplines, especially given their current
strategy of retrenchment.

Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano