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Hi, everyone. You might remember that a couple weeks ago, we pursued a thread about where Star Trek fits in the "popular" / "academic" continuum. I wrote out this response, but then our server went down, and until today I forgot that I hadn't actually mailed my comment. So I am sending it along now, not so much to continue the discussion of Star Trek, but because I'm also interested in the larger question how we can keep "popular culture" from becoming its own tradition-bound, no-longer-flexible-or-innovative little niche of academia. For the 1991 PCA/ACA Conference, my brother (a philosophy professor) submitted a paper to the "Philosophy" area titled "Logic and Star Trek's= Mr. Spock," in which he examined Spock's logic as a way of getting at the differences between the popular and philosophical understandings of "logic" in general. When his conference program arrived, my brother found that he had been included in a session called "Popular Culture and the Culture of Academe," in which the other papers focused on Leftist ideology in the British and American academy. My brother's paper had nothing remotely to= do with the two others on the panel. We in the audience (a mixed bag of Trekkies and Leftists) were baffled; the whole session was about the most surreal I have ever attended at PCA (and that's saying something.) Later, my brother submitted this paper to a journal that often included academic articles on science fiction; he was told that the paper had too much philosophy and not enough Star Trek. So he then submitted it to a proposed anthology on philosophy and popular culture. You guessed it--he was told that it had too much Star Trek and not enough philosophy. What's my point? Just that apparently even we involved in popular culture can't always figure out where to place scholarship that combines the= popular with the traditionally academic if that combination is unusual. Difficult though it can be to articulate, our definition of popular culture studies seems to have become entrenched in its own traditions, which sometimes even we who consider ourselves part of the popular culture vanguard can't look beyond. So I wonder if anyone has suggestions about how (if at all) we can continue to give popular culture topics the serious intellectual consideration they deserve without replicating the narrow perspectives and rigidity that so often characterizes the traditional academy. Kathleen Chamberlain Emory & Henry College krchambe@ehc.edu
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