This panel seeks to investigate a particular casualty of the move away from brick-and-morter storefronts as distributors of media objects towards online vending (and piracy): the staff picks shelf. Whether the media in question is music, video, comics, print, how does the taste community generated around the curation of the staff within the local and particular physical and commercial space of the shop compare to the disembodied, dispersed access model of online reviews and "Best of" lists? How does the locality, particularity, and face-to-faceness of encountering register differences in the relations between curator, media object, and auditor in these situations?
Topics for papers include but are not limited to:

In "Reflections on Exile", Edward Said writes that theoretical interventions need to engage with the "worldly situation", the messy, unstable mosaic through which the long history of colonialism affects a diverse set of political affiliations, global disparities, international divisions of labor, regional rivalries, national identities, cosmopolitan ideologies, green, queer, and leftist movements. Science fiction, likewise, has seen a recent surge in interest and scrutiny devoted to postcolonial and global problematics including works by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. (2003), John Reider (2008), and Patricia Kerslake (2011).

Religion and Pop Culture

At the close of the twentieth century, the proliferation of networked digital technologies has led a number of critics to call into question the future of reading. However, in the last several years it has become increasingly clear that reading continues to be an important aspect of our cultural practice, even as it manifests itself in multiple forms. This panel invites papers that concern themselves with both the history and the future of reading. Paper submitted to this panel may address the following questions: How have reading practices changed over time in a given historical period? What kinds of reading practices are specific to print culture and/or networked digital culture and what practices span both?

The horror genre is structured around encounters with the unknown. Yet the meaning of these encounters (narratively, as well as in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality) remains in flux, even within overarching myths such as that of the vampire. One example is the Swedish novel Let the Right One In, which centers around a boy's encounter with a MTF transgender vampire. This text simultaneously employs the threat of Cold War ideologies, with the possible invasion into Sweden by Soviet missiles triangulated around the drama of "encountering," and befriending, the vampire. This panel invites papers that analyze such complex modern encounters within horror, and how the genre stages encounters with social, political, and economic concerns.

Video games are a space in which encounters are enacted on many different levels. There are encounters within the game's narrative space; encounters at the interface of player and narrative; and encounters within the external gaming space (think two-player games). These encounters can also be broken down into player-computer and player-player encounters. This panel invites papers that explore these different spaces of encounter in video games. How do these spaces disrupt normative discourses on sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and social class? How do these encounters disrupt or challenge the player's identity? What are some implications of network-mediated encounters in massively multiplayer online games?

When we encounter dolls as grown-ups, what is it that we are encountering? What might personal and cultural doll-identifications betray about relationships with the past, with gender and sexuality, with play, with tenderness and with terror? This panel invites submissions which reflect upon the sociocultural meaning of the doll as text, as artifact, or, more traditionally, as an enduring literary and filmic obsession. In psychoanalysis as well as in the popular imagination, dolls have long played the role of uncanny object. This panel is particularly interested in the way in which new technologies, products and markets have uncannily reproduced, intensified and responded to anxieties and hauntings from the past.