Art School Janitor is an illustrator, printmaker, and silly gal who likes drawing silly gals! Their work focuses on anime and pop culture, adding a hyper-femme shellac to her art! Additionally, they also sell at anime conventions and comic cons across the country inside Artist Alleys!...
Susana Tosca is Full Professor of Media Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. Over the last twenty years, her research has combined aesthetic and media studies approaches to investigating the reception of digital media. She has published widely on the areas of hypertext, digital literature, computer games, transmediality and Japanese popular culture media. She is the author of the books Sameness and Repetition in Contemporary Media Culture, Transmedial Worlds in Everyday Life, Understanding Videogames and Literatura Digital. She is currently the PI of the projects Digital Entertainment Machine, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, Transmedial Travel Imaginaries funded by the Danish Agency for Higher Education and Science, and Pop Imaginaries in the Museum, funded by Augustinus Fund....
Dr. Sophia Staite is a Lecturer in Humanities (Philosophy & Gender Studies) at the University of Tasmania, Australia, a past fellow of the Global Sentimentality Project at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Germany, and the leading English-language scholar of influential Japanese superhero franchise Kamen Rider (1971 – ongoing). Sophia is the editor of Transformation and Metamorphosis in Popular Culture, and their work appears in The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies, Children's Literature in Education, The International Journal of Disney Studies, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, and Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific....
Kathryn Fedchun (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Carleton University in the School of Journalism and Communication. She has been a Fellow at the Research on Comics, Con Events, and Transmedia Laboratory (RoCCET Lab) since 2020. In this role, she has conducted fieldwork and co-presented a paper and zine on SDCC policies at the Comic Arts Conference at San Diego Comic Con in 2023, presented work from the lab at several academic conferences including the Canadian Communication Association conference (2023 & 2024) and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference (2025), and co-presented a workshop on convention policies in 2025 at the Music and Gaming Festival (MAGfest). She completed her undergraduate degree in sociology and philosophy at Queen’s University. She has a diploma...
The Cosplayer Survivor Support Network is a grassroots org started in 2016 and led by volunteers Feytaline (she/her), Fractali, CA (she/her), and Trickssi, CA (she/her) in an effort to draw attention to the lack of accountability for harassment, stalking, abuse, and assault in the convention community. Their current project is evaluating conventions’ harassment policies for 6 safety criteria through the Convention Harassment Policy Report Card. Together, they have over 40 years of experience attending, paneling, staffing, and running departments for conventions. Fractali’s contributions as Communications Director are informed by her degrees in Biology and Psychology, as well as her history of working with survivors of intimate partner abuse and foster children. Feytaline’s contributions as Operations Director are informed by her work with...
Henry Jenkins is the author or editor of 25 books on popular culture, including Textual Poachers, Convergence Culture, and the Frames of Fandom book series. He is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, Education, and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California....
Robert V. Kozinets is an award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in social media and branding. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. In 1998, he became one of the first published influencer marketing researchers in the world. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In both schools, he was repeatedly recognized with teaching awards, including taking the $15,000 top teaching award at Schulich as well as the $5,000 second place in other years. He has also been a visiting educator at global institutions like the University of Sydney, COPPEAD in Rio de Janeiro, Cattolica University in Milan, the Hanken (formerly Swedish) University of...
Bjorn-Ole Kamm gained his doctoral degree from Heidelberg University and today works as Junior Associate Professor in Transcultural Studies at Kyoto University, where he coordinates Japan’s first international joint degree program in the humanities. His previous research engaged stereotypes, media use, gender, and the border-crossing flows of nondigital gaming in and from Japan (Role-Playing Games of Japan: Transcultural Dynamics and Orderings, Palgrave, 2020). His work covers how live-action role-play was re-arranged for the Japanese environment and the role of the horror genre in Japanese analog gaming. He is editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed, diamond open-access, bilingual Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies, dealing with various forms of role-playing, including in educational and therapeutic contexts. Together with colleagues in special needs psychology,...
Nathaniel P. Candelaria is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy (CSSP), UP Diliman. He also serves as Assistant College Secretary of CSSP. He earned his Bachelor of Arts (Political Science) and Master of Arts (Political Science) degrees from the same institution. He previously worked as Teaching Associate at the UP Department of Political Science, as Senior Project Assistant at the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies (UP CIDS), and as Research Assistant at the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies (ISDS Philippines) and at the Foundation for Integrative and Development Studies (FIDS). While he primarily does research on non-traditional security issues in Southeast Asia, he also conducts research on soft...
Hope Wyatt is a current health care worker, former crime scene cleaner, and aspiring Death Doula, but nothing beats her being a mom to her fur babies. She started the Mind Brain Movies podcast because of her love of both mental health care and her love of movies and tv. It doesn't matter if it's nerd talk, pets, your mental health, or anything else, she's willing to jump into the topic and learn whatever she can and try to apply it to better helping the community. You can check out what she does on the Mind Brain Movies social media sites! https://youtube.com/@mindbrainmovies?si=DBh6M3WdbrIOZSEd https://www.instagram.com/mind_brain_movies...