ConMunity Engagement: Indigenous Comic Con 2

Over the Veteran’s Day weekend the second Indigenous Comic Con took place here in New Mexico at the Isleta Resort and Casino on Isleta Pueblo. This awesome event was organized by the fantastic Lee Francis IV who has been doing superb work with the Indigenous comics community, founding Native Realities and the Red Planet comic book shop in Albuquerque.

What is Indigenous Comic con? Well it’s a con like GeekGirlCon or Blerd con, that is organized around particular community within comics rather than around a location like San Diego. In this case, it is centered on Indigenous creators and communities.

Although I am not Indigenous, the con is one of the most welcoming I've attended. I get to blend in as "an ambiguous brown person" (a quote from "Why can't you-" by Julie Fiveash one of the zines I bought) and listen to voices in comics/the greater nerd community that rarely get asked to speak. And if they do get asked to speak, it’s about diversity in the medium. It’s also a chance to put my money where my mouth is regarding diversity in comics, seeing and buying work by Indigenous people. Their work regularly blends nerd and Indigenous identities but also, like the zine I quoted, just uses of the medium to explore personal stories.

Seeing the amazing work that Indigenous creators produce is one of my favorite parts of the con and this year I bought a bunch of fun things. You check out the whole vendor and artist list here on their website but here's a list of some of the people I got a chance to buy stuff from:

Jeffrey Veregge: A great artist and writer who had shirts, comics, and prints available. I picked up his most recent Star Trek design on a black shirt

Weshoyot Alvitre: Another amazing comics artist whose work I had initially seen on Twitter. The first piece of hers that I saw was an amazing version of Dani Moonstar, which I bought the print of at ICC.

Lalo Alcaraz: Though primarily the cartoonist behind La Cucaracha, he recently consulted with Disney on Coco and had some awesome nerdy magnets, I grabbed a Star Wars one.

Kandi Quam: Is from Natachu INK and had some great small prints and art cards. I grabbed the cards but am torn between sending them to people and keeping them for myself.

Kurly Tlapoyawa: A former archaeology student of mine, who is now a full-fledged archaeologist and just started his own podcast, had book on Nawatl language influence in New Mexico and Southern Colorado that I picked up.

And last but not least were the artists I grabbed short zines from. These were: Tatum Bowie, Damon Begay, Julie Fiveash, and Willow Tomeo. They all had such cool stories to tell and it was great to hear all of their stories about getting to be at ICC.

You can support these artists (and the others from the vendors/artists lists) through their websites, patreons, or other ways to check out and buy their work to support them to do even more down the road.

After my extensive shopping adventures, I got to listen to a panel that on its own would have been worth the admission price. Entitled “Native Sci Fi and Indigenous Futurisms” the panel made me seriously consider a bunch of themes that I hope to credit them with inspiring and discuss at other panels or to see the panelists discuss in the future in other venues. The panelists were Daniel H. Wilson, PhD and sci-fi writer, Elizabeth LaPensee, PhD, artist and video game designer, and Johnnie Jae a writer and the founder of A Tribe Called Geek. The panel talked about everything from kinship to the apocalypse and demonstrated how many amazing things are happening in the Indigenous communities. I had a short live-tweet of the panel you can see here and if you ever get a chance to hear any of them speak I would recommend it. I was blown away by how much I didn't know and went to read more about Indigenous Futurisms, started listening to Wilson's Robopocalypse (finished this week and would 100% recommend), and went to check out the media being produced on a Tribe Called Geek. If you can't hear them speak I highly recommend looking into and supporting their content.

Even if you can't attend cons like ICC or Blerd con it's valuable to think of the other ways you can support such conventions. ICC has a program to sponsor the ticket of an Indigenous child and other cons use the Con or Bust service to reach out to underrepresented groups. These are important (as cons and as ways to support them) because often nerd communities are coded as white spaces and these cons demonstrate that the white nerd narrative is false and that there are many ways to be a nerd. My hope is that mainstream conventions start to take notice and invite more diverse creators to their own conventions. Specifically, I hope that they bring in more Indigenous voices because I was awe-inspired at this convention. In the meantime, talk up ICC, hope for ICC 3, and if there is and you are near New Mexico attend and support some IndigeNerds!

ConMunity Engagement: Bringing science to the con

Science outreach is an important part of all cons, whether convention or a conference. There should be different goals at each but both should have it represented somewhere. Outreach is a common part of science and in many cases there are ‘tried and true’ methods for outreach, such as the public lecture or the museum demonstration day. Unfortunately, these events involve the same thing as teaching a class, with the academic deciding the agenda and the pupils, or public, looking at them in awe. With the plethora of platforms for scientists to take advantage of now and the attacks on science at the Federal level, these are not enough for sciences to stay engaged with the public.

Therefore, I encourage scientific conferences, or meetings, to have outreach as an regular,n ongoing, topic of discussion. At professional meetings, I suggest scientists discuss new methods for outreach, what ideas or topics should be the focus of outreach, and identify the importance and/or value of outreach to the academic and to the field. These are important to explore amongst other academics because it allows whole disciplines to consider what aspects are the most important to convey to the public. It also allows us to explore the pros and cons of different outreach methods as well as tailor certain platforms to particular types of outreach.

I’m pursuing this through a forum I organized that will be held at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in April. Another group that is doing something is the newly established and first #AnthropologyCon that will happen at the American Anthropological Association meeting this year. Forums and events like these provide platforms to explore innovative methods for other academics to figure out what methods will work for them and their work. These interactions between academics also allow us to create networks of professionals that, after the conference or meeting, will be able to help navigate bumps down the road with particular methods and help to provide a group to workshop ideas with at a distance.

Of course, the goal of meetings, forums, and events such as those mentioned previously would be to do the actual outreach. One place that I highly recommend doing this is at conventions, comics or just “geek” ones in general. These are places where you can have panels of scientists or scientists and creators open to the public; hands on activities relating to your science (or the rest of the TEAM); and demonstrate new teaching materials like board games or other outreach platforms like video game visualizations.

Come see me moderate @geniusbeee @backthatelfup @syrrann @sarahmiyoko @GeekGirlCon In fifteen in Furiosa talking about mixed race characters

— Paulina the PhD Candidate (now w/ more character) (@punuckish) October 1, 2017

This is something I have already started doing. While anthropology makes this pretty easy, because conventions are cultural events, blending the expertise of creators and scientists of all types hold great potential for outreach. At comics or science fiction conventions, panels can be organized by anyone and can include scientists, creators, critics, and anyone else who is interested in putting people together to talk about a topic. Conventions represent a unique place to bring scientific topics to a willing audience and we can do our best academic public outreach by involving a wide range of stakeholders. Additionally, almost all panels have a dedicated time set up for questions and answers so dialogue with the public is more open, rather than just having one person lecture. While the topic is often up to the organizer, that person is not always the scientist and panels allow for more discourse to flow between the panelists who may be from different backgrounds.

It is important to have dialogue about science outreach at both conventions and conferences because often as academics and as professionals we’re put on pedestals. Primarily, our work happens “under the hood” or behind a curtain because of academic publishing paywalls. So, unless people enroll in college classes or buy much to expensive access to academic databases, the dissemination of scientific knowledge is rather limited. Conventions allow us to go beyond the classroom to bring our knowledge to a wider audience because it brings us to the public and puts them, to a degree, in control over what gets discussed. It is important also for us to develop better teaching methods to cater to new generations and take advantage of many ways of learning and as temporary events, they allow us to see if certain methods work and which ones don't.

Lastly, it’s important in these discussions to be aware of the representation that your group is portraying. This means remembering diversity in regards to age, gender, race, and regional knowledge when organizing forums, meetings, or panels. This is because when it comes to outreach at public events that those we are trying to inspire physically see themselves represented. For example, it may be hard to convince the public that you are “de-colonizing” an issue if all of your presenters come from colonizing backgrounds or on cultural appropriation if a majority of you participants are white. Keeping this in mind will help to promote diversity in whatever field is being discussed and help make sense more accessible to all.

ConMunity Engagement: Feminist Fandoms p3, Bringing Feminism to Mainstream conventions

Women, people of color, trans, queer, and the rest of us folx (aka anyone who is not a straight-white-cis-het-white-male) are changing the landscape of nerd spaces. Besides bringing new markets, or increasing holds in those markets, we are critiquing the ways that nerd-culture is unhealthy. Specifically, these audiences are not interested in the white nerd boy club that was the standard in comics, and other nerd communities. Instead, we seek to change the behaviors that have made these cis-het-white-male-centric spaces unhealthy. This means not being “one of the guys” but changing fandoms and fan spaces to be explicitly feminist, and I mean intersectional feminist, and respectful of all people. While using the term “feminist” to refer to fan communities is in some ways oxymoronic, as they act a microcosm for the rampant misogyny in society, it is that sort of reform that is needed to re-forge them into healthy places.

As comics became blockbuster films, and as more people have grown up with access to manga, establishing feminism in fandoms is one part of the swing back to a more inclusive market in comics. One of these expanding comics-related markets is clothing and cosplay, full costumes or the “undercover” variety. Because costuming, and the skills required for costuming, is/are still coded as feminine and this work has brought many more women into these spaces.

However, cosplay is not inherently feminist. There is still an association between the term ‘cosplay’ and sexy because it revealed how impractical and bizarre costuming choices for women characters in comics are. This mean that cosplay can embody the same misogyny that exists in the comics that they draw from and that was inherent to the nerd community.

So cosplay brings in more women, as do many other factors, but how do we bring feminism to mainstream conventions when women just as capable of supporting the patriarchy as men? I’ve touched on this in my previous blogs but it involves supporting feminist programming, artists, sellers, and bringing feminism into whatever fandoms you participate in. For me this starts at home. Am I being a feminist consumer? I try to be and you can read my rule about buying floppy comics to see what I mean. Some people argue that the idea of a “feminist consumer” is problematic because of the rise of “capitalist feminism,” which some people see as antithetical to the goals of feminism . However, conventions are essentially small open markets where the consumer has a lot of power. It’s also the age old claim of the anti-diversity folks that we “diverse consumers” just aren’t driving the market. So it’s paper paper paper to support the diverse work I love.

Sometimes you love what you love, and sometimes that thing is not easy to reconcile with feminism. My example is Star Trek: The Original Series, I love so much of what it brought to the small screen, but its approach to women and culture is still deeply rooted in the 1960s (for an example revisit The Paradise Syndrome). If the fandom you love has problems that deal with culture, gender, sexuality, or race, consider bringing programming to conventions that addresses those issues. We are at conventions because of our love for the medium, genre, or specific work so if you feel like it needs to be critiqued, you are probably not alone. There will be other fans interested in having a meaningful discussion about intersectional issues, if you didn’t enjoy it so much, you probably wouldn’t be annoyed enough to want to critique it.

My last suggestion is to wear your feminist properties on your sleeve. Be open about it, take up space and be seen supporting properties like Feminist Frequency, Black Girl Nerds, and InSEXts. Encourage your friends to support new feminist properties or bring them to panels that support those creators. Wear your Bitch Planet pins to the con, out in the world, and talk-that-shit-up. One of the biggest comments I’ve gotten after talking to people about Bitch Planet, is “I didn’t know that existed in comics” WELL NOW YOU KNOW. Go do the thing. Also, where possible, don’t take shit from people trying to gatekeep you. Assert yourself, ask questions like “why does that matter?” and interrogate them about their knowledge. I have had to explain my “Feminism is my Fandom” pin more than once but that meant that the other person actually had to engage with what that meant. Part of the patriarchy is controlling knowledge, power, and knowledge as power. We can do it too, it's just a matter of using those tools to our advance our agendas.

These are just a few suggestions but it’s clear from the existence of sites such as themarysue, youtube series like Feminist Frequency, comics like Bitch Planet, and films like She Makes Comics (PS don't believe the IMDB ratings, they're heavily gendered) that feminism exists in nerd spaces. Each of these celebrate women’s long history of participation in the nerd community and demonstrates how feminism benefits both women and men and conventions. It means that people, regardless of gender will have respect and be able to participate in the things that they love without fear of bullying or discomfort. We all attend conventions because they should be safe spaces and to make that true requires feminism and feminist fandoms.