a day of work

Last night's craziness meant absolutely no sleep - bright and early we fueled up on the hotel breakfast (this time with heavier food...eggs and cheese and, of course, bread) and a ton of coffee and trekked to the U with two from our research group who knew a prettier, more scenic route - through parks, behind schools...gorgeous (and one that we've been afraid to replicate for fear of getting lost again). Found an amazing café at the University where the double shot latte was made Guiness style - with a little creamy heart on top! Also learned why the lattes are so amazingly good here...they use whole milk only. Nothing even remotely resembling a 'skinny' hot beverage here! So nice!! Made it to the conference area with time to spare, so chatted with a bunch of people Claudia 'brought' from her South African research project on HIV/AIDS. One of them is a really interesting guy who does work with kids 10 years-old and under on sexuality and gender issues (wish I could bring him back to Canada to speak in my class this upcoming term!) 10:30am rolled around and we're off to present. Moderator is a wonderful woman named Mona who was adamant about the 15 minute time limit despite us having only three papers in two hours (so there was tons of time for discussion). Jacqui first (the Sims2 as an ironic take on Western consumer capitalism, parody of cultural practices, and virtual play space as heterotopia that mimics toy theatres from the 18th C), then me (it went well, but an older woman felt the need to pull rank on my speaking too fast - which, incidentally I wasn't), then Claudia (who did speak a mile a minute but wasn't chastized) who spoke on magazines - print and online - as "catalogues of desire" for girls and nodded to the question of what knowledge young people have a 'right' to - in terms of sexuality and HIV/AIDS info, for instance - and she very smoothly and generously nodded to my comment on "intended audience" in my paper... David Buckingham asked an interesting question of all of us..."How is anyone making money of this? (regarding the tween market as a very insecure market)." The discussion that followed went very well, and afterwards, a woman named Heidi asked for a copy of the paper and for an interview...very cool. Chastize woman asked another negative question of the entire panel in terms of 'the limits' of this kind of work (I've never understood that...why not focus on the possibilities? it seems so much more productive). Whoever put our panel together knew what they were doing - I can't say I've ever presented in a group whose papers worked so well with each other, and the ideas flowed from one to the next to the next. We couldn't have planned it better. Ann said over lunch that she's been to hundreds of conference presentations and that she'd never enjoyed one as much as she did ours. Compliment of the century. But, she also said to me: "I had no idea you were so smart!" (Yes, she did contextualize it - as we only know and interact with each other on a really casual level - but my immediate response was: "Amazing, isn't it? I'm not a dumbass." She particularly enjoyed my weaving of liminality into the paper and the intersectionality of discourses and links made of the not immediately-apparent. After the lunch break, Rebecca presented on Cyberfashion (and used modality as well as Pipher, Chernin and Wolf), then Brandi on blogs as spaces for writing via a blurred space of public and private (and wow was she a calm, cool and collected presenter - shifting seamlessly from talking to reading and back again), and then an Austrian woman named Natalia with fabulous blonde dreads who used "chatrooms" to talk about social construction and Turkle's "genderswapping"...Meh.

Thinking about the difference between mentoring and condescension. A lot.

And about the association with casual language and silliness and fun to intelligence and academic rigor. And class.

And of age. (and the assumptions that underscore perceptions and receptions of age).

Finished the day spent at the U with Buckingham's keynote "Selling Childhood": Children and Consumer Culture, where he outlined the current - polarized - debates around the courting of children and the paradoxes inherent in them (moral panic of critics and mainstream press v. marketer's messages of 'empowerment' v. academy's fixation on 'agency.') Seems he read Lindstrom's pulp too. Also made fleeting mention of the significance of context (although he himself slipped: "after two or more decades of 2nd wave feminism, I don't understand what's going on with femininities and Bratz dolls...I'm not going there!" (Yes, big laughs from audience.). And no mention of race (save one breezing referral to "ethnicity" during a longer list...).

The evening's event was quite amazing - took the first photos of the trip! We headed to City Hall for a private - invitation only (!) soiree, were greeted with champagne and strawberries and a toast from the city's mayor, then provided a tour of the great halls and the gorgeous painted mural walls and the tapestry lined ceilings...the murals are full of Norwegian history - one room in particular telling the story of prewar (children storybook style, pastel colours, lots of smiling faces) on one wall and postwar (old man in chair looking pensively up at a gnarled tree that morphs into concentration camps with barbed wire and large bumblebees representing the Nazis...dark and stark) on the other - joined by a bird of peace (swan, the bird of Oslo) and a ferriman who sweeps people to either heaven - on one end - or hell - on the other. Breathtaking and moving.

I can't remember ever feeling as exhausted as I did as we walked back to the hotel. 10:30, and I'm out like a light.