Contextomy: a fallacy

This panel asks Francesca Coppa, Christina Xu, and Camila Mercado to consider what it means to exist subculturallly in the contemporary moment. It asks questions of where the lines between appropriation/knowledge sharing and history/memory begins and ends in the globalized world. The panel asks us to consider communities as living beings, in a global context, and reliant on a language that’s always in translation.

Francesca Coppa is a founder of Organization for Transformative Works and a professor of English at Muhlenberg College, where she teaches courses in dramatic literature, popular fiction, and mass media storytelling. She is the editor of a forthcoming Fanfiction Reader from the University of Michigan press and is writing a book about fan music video.

Camila Mercado is an independent researcher and co founder of Software Studios in Brooklyn, New York. She is an active programmer whose work investigates (or simply invents) relationships between contemporary computing and historical conditions, documents, and myths. She is an relentless supporter of technology and its inherent perversities. She will present about her work in uncovering the influence of the I Ching on forms of abstract mathematics, binary code and boolean logic.

Christina Xu is an independent ethnographer and writer who focuses on social technologies, online communities, and Chinese subculture. Her ongoing project is a decentralized collection of essays and media about the lives of young creatives in China called Multi Entry (http://www.multientry.com). Her past work includes being the global coordinator for the Awesome Foundation, a grassroots guerilla philanthropy movement, and co-founding ROFLCon, the US's first internet culture conference/convention.