I conduct an inquiry into my participation as an African American woman at two popular culture conventions, the 2017 Dragon Con (Atlanta) and the 2018 annual general meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America (Kansas City). Through a methodological approach to Con-ing—attending a popular culture convention—as arts-based inquiry and utilizing techniques of autoethnography, I inquire into my participation in spaces that, while intended to be havens of adult play, reproduce and reinforce discourses and material practices that can limit the play and participation of marginalized Others.
BaroneT. (2000). Aesthetics, politics, and educational inquiry: Essays and examples. P. Lang.
2.
BochnerA.EllisC. (2016). Evocative autoethnography: Writing lives and telling stories. Routledge.
3.
ChangH. (2016). Autoethnography as method. Routledge. (Original work published 2008)
4.
EllisC. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Rowman Altamira.
5.
EllisC.AdamsT. E.BochnerA. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 12(1), 273–290. https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589
6.
EllisC.BochnerA. P. (Eds.) (1996). Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing. Rowman Altamira.
7.
FaltisC. (2019). Arts-based pedagogy for teaching English learners. In de OliveiraL. C. (Ed.), The handbook of TESOL in K-12 (pp. 323–337). John Wiley.
8.
HeronJ. (1992). Feeling and personhood: Psychology in another key. Sage.
9.
NybergA. K. (1995). Comic books and women readers: Trespassers in masculine territory. In RollinsP. R.RollinsS. W. (Eds.), Gender in popular culture: Images of men and women in literature, visual media, and material culture (pp. 205–224). Ridgemont Press.
10.
OrmeS. (2016). Femininity and fandom: The dual-stigmatisation of female comic book fans. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 7(4), 403–416. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2016.1219958
11.
OrnerM. (1992). Interrupting the calls for student voice in “liberatory” education: A feminist poststructuralist perspective. In LukeC.GoreJ. (Eds.), Feminisms and critical pedagogy (pp. 74–89). Routledge.
12.
PeliasR. J. (2004). A methodology of the heart: Evoking academic and daily life. Rowman Altamira.
13.
RamirezM. (2017). From the panels to the margins: Identity, marginalization, and subversion in cosplay. [Unpublished Master’s thesis]. University of South Florida.
ScottS. (2013). Fangirls in refrigerators: The politics of (in)visibility in comic book culture. Transformative Works and Cultures, 13. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2013.0460
SeeleyC.ReasonP. (2008). Expressions of energy: An epistemology of presentational knowing. In LiamputtongP.RumboldJ. (Eds.), Knowing differently: Arts-based and collaborative research methods (pp. 25–46). Nova Science Publishers.
SnowberC. (2018). Living, moving, and dancing: Embodied ways of inquiry. In LeavyP. (Ed.), Handbook of arts-based research (pp. 247–262). The Guilford Press.
ThomasM. (2018a). The girl who lived: Exploring the liminal spaces of self-study research with textual critical partners. In GarbettD.OvensA. (Eds.), Pushing boundaries and crossing borders: Self-study as a means for knowing pedagogy (pp. 327–333). S-STEP.
22.
ThomasM. (2018b). Trauma, Harry Potter, and the Demented World of Academia. The Journal of Educational Thought, 51(2), 184–203. https://doi.org/10.11575/jet.v51i2.58452
23.
ThomasM. B.RussellA. L.WarrenH. V. (2018). The good, the bad, and the ugly of pedagogy in Harry Potter: An inquiry into the personal practical knowledge of Remus Lupin, Rubeus Hagrid, and Severus Snape. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 91(4–5), 186–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2018.1483152
WarnerK. J. (2015). ABC’s Scandal and Black women’s fandom. In LevineE. (Ed.), Cupcakes, Pinterest, and ladyporn: Feminized popular culture in the early twenty-first century (pp. 173–184). University of Illinois Press.
