Black Cap: Notes on the 2013 AAR Annual Meeting
I'm pleased with how everything came together for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion this week. I presented in the Religion and Science Fiction section last Saturday alongside some really fascinating papers. I used the lens of trauma to think about the journey of moral discernment in the 2003 version of Captain America's origins, linked tightly to fictional (but entirely plausible) experiments on black soldiers.
On Friday I tweeted out this photo of my handout with a joke I am pretty proud of:
Tomorrow I attempt the impossible: getting people to use QR codes pic.twitter.com/mkbnzk6i70
— Chris Dowdy (@jehiahdowdy)
November 23, 2013
The idea was to let people easily access the slideshow on their phones if they wanted. It was basically well received and at least few people used it in the way it was intended. It also ended up being a way to start conversations with people leading up the presentation, which was a bonus I didn't anticipate.
It was easily the best-attended session I have been a part of; there were at least 75 people there, standing room only, etc., etc. I got some interesting feedback, and at least one person had a note about continuity and character development in the past ten years of Cap stories. If you told my ten year old self that such a moment was possible in the context of serious professional discourse, I would have...believed you, and taken heart.
