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A conversation with @marijel_melo confirmed a suspicion I had that to a non-cosplayer, saying you were a “closet cosplayer” sounded like you were saying you were a cosplayer on the DL, “in the closet” about your cosplaying, as it were.

Closet cosplay is, rather, a term of art referring to “using what you have from your closet, with maybe a couple cheap store-bought items put together” according to Asta Young in this PopSugar piece. I use it to mean that I’m wearing things that weren’t built explicitly for cosplay, like the Coldwater Creek dress I used for River tam, the thrifted top I used to be Mrs. Lovett, the Old Navy dress I used to be the Fruity Oaty Bar Octopus Lady, the LL Bean pajamas I used to be Jess Day, or the Victorian Gothic getup from Retroscope Fashions (RIP but still on Etsy I guess?) that, yes, I just had hanging in my closet, and also used to be Shojo Loki.

I’m still working out what cosplay-related content will go here at kimberlyhirsh.com vs what belongs to Luna Wednesday, obviously.

 

A chronic illness comedy! Where do I send my spec script? ❤️️ @emilyvgordon & @Sarah_Hyland

On digital hiatus through August 26th. See y’all later!

Is metascholarship a thing? Like, a field of study? Sometimes (often) I find myself more interested in research design and writing processes than in, y’know, research itself.

I can cook all manner of foods, fashion clothing from yarn or fabric and thread, build furniture, and make props, but I can’t for the life of me make anything recognizable using a 3Doodler.

I ran across Dr. Naomi Civins’s dissertation while citation chaining works about connective ethnography, via Google Scholar. I read the title and thought, “Wait, that’s me! I’m a Domain Grrl!” Then I checked the text for a definition to be sure:

“Domain Grrls were girls who created personal homepages during the late 1990s and early 2000s and built meaningful social relationships in the process.”

Yes, that’s me!

Based on some quick research, Dr. Civins’s coined term “Domain Grrl” hasn’t had broad reach, which kind of makes sense because Domain Grrls aren’t really a thing anymore and she didn’t coin it until 2016. But I’m excited to read her dissertation later.

 

Jargon in Academia

I’m having a little brainstorm over here about my frustration with jargon in academia and the way disciplines borrow from each other and then deposit that jargon on students as though they already know what these things mean, and it’s not all coming together yet so I thought I’d just throw some words out here and some of them will have notes on my understanding but others won’t yet.

space and place - this is what launched this brainstorm, because I was reading about bringing a spatial perspective to the internet and because I’m doing work on affinity spaces. A quick Google tells me that this comes from geography, from the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, and I have heard people throw this around so much in educational research and to a lesser extent in information science research, and I think it’s probably a really useful concept but at no point did anyone offer me an introduction to it as though it were a new thing.

Paulo Freire - I really ought to have read this guy’s stuff. I haven’t yet. Maybe I’ll get there one day.

Habitus (Pierre Bourdieu) - SAME. In my second semester of my doc program, John Martin was all “Bourdieu’s habitus” and, like, I know, he was right, this is a thing I should know, because I’m researching practices, and practice theory is a thing, and this is another one where it’s like, okay, I’ll get there someday I hope.

Bakhtinian carnivalesque - I ran across this because of cosplay but I first came across Mikhail Bakhtin’s work when I was doing a paper on expansive learning, and guess what, I could probably stand to read some more Bakhtin.

semiotics - this comes up a lot for me right now because Gee’s work is all over semiotics and Discourse/discourse and blah blah discursive practices blah.

hermeneutics - Ran across this one in an English class that I thought was about Digital Editing, which it technically was, I just didn’t know that editing has a different meaning in academic English circles than it does in the circles where I ran prior to starting a PhD.

I’m a fourth-gen postgrad and I struggle with this jargon. I don’t know how anyone makes time to deeply understand theory, especially theory translated into English from other languages, and I’ve taken two theory classes and three qual methods classes.

All of this language, in my experience, serves the purpose of gatekeeping and alienating people who could be doing phenomenal work. (Epiphenomenal?) How do we fix it? Can we fix it?

I kind of want to make it my job to fix it.