Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, popular culture increasingly served as an intermediary to present and, in some cases, reimagine academia and the academy for mass audiences. This mediation results from an assembly of narratives from various media forms and contexts, both by those inside and outside the academy. The result is a vision of the academy in Western popular culture that is exciting and inviting at turns, but is more frequently shark-like, insular, and intimidating. 

From works of literary fiction in novels like The Secret History and Bunny to more comedic takes such as in the film Legally Blonde and the television series Community, to more complex musings on issues of politics, class, gender, and race in works like The Chair or How to Get Away With Murder, popular culture can serve as the dark mirror for the academy to view itself and make changes for the future.

This call for papers seeks articles that examine the academy’s myriad representations across pop culture and media. We hope to present an interdisciplinary exploration of how the academy has been represented across disciplinary and cultural lines and throughout recent history, including its narratives across media forms and beyond media.

Possible topics for exploration include but are not limited to:

• Academy of Horror: depictions of academia that focus on depicting it as scary or unnerving, including Ninth House, Bunny, or the Secret History
• Academy of Comedy: depictions of academia within the comedy or absurdist genre, including Community and Slackers
• Depictions and analysis of literature set in schools for children, from Charlie Bone to a Deadly Education
• Differences in various cultural depictions of the academy, including Japanese anime, K-Dramas, and JRPG video games
• The role of higher learning as represented in popular culture
• Analyses of alternate forms or critiques of pedagogy from within popular culture
• Issues of class, gender, or race within academia as depicted in pop culture such as The Chair, Legally Blonde, or The Social Network
• Growing up: exploring the transition from high school to university in popular culture
• The Academy in popular non-fiction media forms - social media, cable news, or reality television programs which take place in or construct a particular representation of the profession, student experience, etc.
• Transmedia accounts of academia - exploring representations of academic spaces across print, visual, and other media cultures; differences in the academy’s depiction between genres, mediums (literature vs. television vs. film vs. video games) and cultural or geographic contexts 

We seek articles of 5000-7000 words for publication in the next issue of Scaffold: the Journal for the Institute of Comparative Studies of Literature, Art, and Culture, an open-access graduate student journal. Articles will be double-blind, peer-reviewed, and published digitally through OJS. More information can be found here: https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.php/J-ICSLAC/index 

Please email proposals of approximately 300-500 words to scaffoldjournal@gmail.com, including a brief author bio, by May 5th 2025. Accepted authors will be informed by end of May, with full articles due for review by end of July 2025.