Hi, this is Katharine Kittredge again.

I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between fandom and academia in the last few days--the class had two students who didn't present at Pippi to Ripley because they were presenting at the Boston Anime Con the same weekend. We'll be discussing cons vs. conferences and fans vs scholars tomorrow in class.

I have been wondering if the relationship between fan and scholar for people who work in Contemporary Popular Culture could evolve into something similar to the relationship between archivists and scholars for those of us who work in the past. We NEED the extensive knowledge that the archivists have about source materials and rely on them for guidance; the archivists need scholars to promote their sources to a wider audience and also to make a case for the significance of those materials in terms of contemporary cultural discussions.

If I am presenting on the comic Kick-Ass, I WANT a comic fan to be there in the audience using his/her extensive knowledge of the superhero genre (or Mark Millar's work) to either show me the week points in my argument, or the way it can be extended to other texts.