Two weeks ago, I attended the annual SWPACA (Southwest Popular/American Culture Association) Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The SWPACA Conference hosts scholarly research on popular and American culture from a number of disciplines. Personally I’m a bit out of touch with popular culture. I don’t watch a lot of TV shows or movies, and the conference program was full of media and cultural objects I’d never heard of. But in the end it didn’t matter too much—beyond the media/source material, what was most interesting about SWPACA was the variety of original ideas and theories from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. There was still plenty to appreciate about the presentations I saw, even when the source material was unfamiliar.
