2009 ASTR Conference

Kimi Johnson
University of Minnesota
World of Warcraft, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), is a highly interactive fantasy world visited by over eleven million people around the globe.  Children and adults alike engage in a highly social environment playing high-powered characters hailed as heroes.  Players invest months into leveling and arming their creations by completing [...]

Oona Kersey Hatton
Northwestern University
Recent scholarship on the popular brand American Girl (owned by Mattel) has taken producers to task for historical inaccuracies, troubling representations of race and class, and promoting ardent consumerism among the largely upper middle class girls who accumulate the dolls, outfits, books, and videos. A large portion of this skepticism is directed [...]

Megan Sanborn Jones
Brigham Young University
Today, the Mormon Church is the largest producer of pageants in USAmerica, with seven pageants running throughout the year at various Mormon heritage sites.  These performances are based on the historical pageant model of the early 20th century, using large casts to stage episodic historical moments through song, dance, and spectacle.  [...]

Dani Snyder
Illinois Wesleyan University
Wizard: A hero whose power comes from intelligence, willpower, and strength of personality; wizards cast spells. Warrior: A hero whose power comes from physical strength, agility, and athletic prowess; warriors bash heads. Cleric: A hero whose power comes from moral strength, verbal aptitude, and generosity; clerics heal the sick [...]

Michael Schwartz
Widener University
One of the most popular tourist attractions in South Africa is shark-cage diving—a carefully orchestrated event that transforms tourists into movie stars and heroes. As the tourists are taken out into open water by small boat, they put on diving suits to prepare for the dive. The dive itself consists of a [...]

John Moss
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
While the Japanese love hotel is marketed to heterosexual couples as a no-questions-asked space complete with Hello Kitty bondage gear, carousels, subway cars and gas chambers; the fantasy suite caters primarily to couples seeking the milder allure of lagoon-style whirlpool tubs and beds made up as space capsules. [...]

Jeff List
University of Kansas
Abstract: This paper is an ethnographic reading of fan behavior during the 2009 NCAA men’s basketball Final Four® in Detroit, Michigan which analyzes interviews with fans, documentation of displays from the various student sections during the games, and descriptions of my encounters with fans during the weekend. Fandom is an emerging [...]

Kristin Leahey
Wooly Mammoth Theatre
In 1931, children’s theatre playwright and artistic director of Chicago’s Children’s Theatre Charlotte Chorpenning began incorporating child audiences’ feedback into the development of her work.  She listened to audiences’ responses (e.g., laughing, wiggling, and in-awe stillness) throughout performances and interviewed children during intermissions to improve her plays and the productions.  Employing [...]

Ana Paula Höfling
University of California at Los Angeles

The concept of play is central to capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian movement practice that combines elements of martial arts and music.  The capoeira “match” is called a game (jogo), and capoeira is played, not danced or fought.  The verb to play (jogar) refers to capoeira’s ludic call-and-response improvised movements [...]

Natalie Harrower
Queen’s University

The island of Doagh, on the northernmost tip of Ireland, boasts a curious attraction for tourists and locals alike: The Doagh Famine Village, whose website sports the tagline “Looking Forward to the Past”  http://www.doaghfaminevillage.com/). Visitors to the village are meant to experience what life would have been like during the Great Potato Famine [...]

Stephen Harrick
Bowling Green State University

During the spring and summer months of 2008 and 2009, I attended vintage base ball games in Ohio. In vintage base ball, the players must abide by rules that date back to the nineteenth century, as well as wear vintage uniforms, use vintage equipment and speak in nineteenth century lingo–“well struck” [...]

Jennifer Goodlander
Ohio University
Plaza Indonesia is Indonesia’s first and biggest shopping mall.  This mulit-level complex contains local and international shops, restaurants, and entertainment.  Plaza Indonesia does not attempt bring the world to the consumer; rather its allure is that it allows the shopper to “act” out a fantasy of modernity that connects him/her with a global [...]

Dena Davis Freed
Glendale Community College
Build-A-Bear, a company leading the “retail-entertainment experience,” encourages consumers take on the role of “builders” as they “create furry friends,” outfit their “furry friends” in a variety of clothing and accessory pieces, and subsequently play with their newly “made” “friends.” Additionally, the company’s website offers in a virtual space (Build-A-Bearville) games [...]

Lindsay Adamson Livingston
City University of New York
In this paper, I propose to explore the carefully constructed role-play undertaken by those who participate in guided hunting expeditions in the western United States and Alaska.  I argue that, during these excursions, participants are constructed as frontiersmen (and, more rarely, frontierswomen) conquering a real and possibly treacherous [...]