Sunday, February 12, 2017

SWPACA Approaches!

Fun times coming! Roughly a thousand academics will converge at the Southwest Popular/American Cultural Association (SWPACA) Convention, to be held Feb. 15-18, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Albuquerque.

SWPACA is a nerd’s paradise. Four days of sophisticated academic talks (free, and open for anyone to attend) about a host of popular-culture subjects, including:

Women Beat hipsters; Cormac McCarthy; Grateful Dead; comedy and violence in music; Harry Potter, Science Fiction & Fantasy; Horror; Films; Comic books; Black identities; Alfred Hitchcock; Rap and Hip hop; Women in TV; Pokemon Go; Queers on TV; Witches on TV; Food; Apocalypses; Haunted houses, Native Americans; the politics of Middle Earth; Zombie culture; Margaret Atwood; Fashion trends in the Russian Arctic; Chicanos in the Trump era; Fairy tales; Advertising; Detective novels; Fangirls; Theater; Computer culture; On the road; War and culture, and many more.

Basically, there’s something for everyone! A nerd’s paradise! You can wander from room to room for hours, learn awesome things, and never be bored.

Wedged among these many subjects are two sessions, chaired by Nick Gerlich, on Breaking Bad (BrBa) and Better Call Saul (BCS). Nick is also leading a tour of filming locations on Saturday, Feb. 18th.

There are five speakers lined up. The room will be ‘Enchantment C’. Here is the schedule:

Morning session, Friday, February 17, 2017 - 11:30am - 1:00pm
Breaking Theoretical: Why People Watched "Breaking Bad" - Nick Gerlich (West Texas A&M University)
Streamline Moderne and Jimmy McGill - Marc Valdez (Independent Scholar)

Afternoon session, Friday, February 17, 2017 - 1:15pm - 2:45pm
"Caballo Sin Nombre": Spectral Violence in the (Post)Western Borderlands of "Breaking Bad" - Chris Muniz (University of Southern California)
Say My Name: Walter White as Rumpelstiltskin and Reading "Breaking Bad" as a Classic Fairy Tale—for Adults - Preston Wittwer (Brigham Young University)
Breaking Binaries: How "Breaking Bad" Challenges TV Paradigms - Hayley Wilson (Middle Tennessee State University)

Regarding my talk, I noticed Vince Gilligan and company have been using Albuquerque's architecture to tell separate (and sometimes tangential) stories in the backgrounds of "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul" scenes. Understanding and interpreting their code is my topic.
If you can, please attend!

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