Research

So yesterday was my big 'Research Seminar.' The students in the department have set up an ongoing series of faculty lectures each year that orients them with what we're doing in our research time. As I'm the new kid on the block, there was a lot of interest in what I was going to say. Not so much, I suspect, because of an interest in the topic so much as an interest in what kind of colleague I'm going to be and whether I'm going to fit into the various plans for development of the department that are ongoing. I felt a bit like an East Coast debutante at her coming-out ball.

The title of my paper was 'The Business of Fun: Globalization and Integration in the Entertainment Industry.' If I can figure out a way to post it on-line (it's about 17 pages), and if anybody actually cares, I'll post a link to it someday.

I've gathered from my colleagues that my position here was a contested one from its origins. As with academia around the world, funds are tight when it comes to hiring new, potentially permanent faculty. There were conflicting ideas about what kind of a posting would best suit the department, and after the battle of deciding what kind of scholar would be hired came the battle of whether the department would actually hire somebody who fit that profile. Evidently, I did. Which means that I feel even more like I'm under the microscope. Everybody has been perfectly nice and pleasant to me, so I don't really think there's any aftermath of that sort. But it did crank up the anxiety before my presentation, so much so that I got a migraine and thought I might have to cancel. The power of positive thought and a lot of caffeine saw me through.

Which brings me to the point of actually discussing my research project. Before I took a break to work in the private sector, my research was of a very heavily theoretical kind, and what's more, in an area of theoretical work that is highly disputed by many other theorists. However, after a year in the corporate world, I'm finding that my enthusiasm for that kind of work has pretty much dried up. So much so that my presentation yesterday contained little if any overt theoretical positioning. Instead what I offered was a pretty cut-and-dry assessment of the business and organizational challenges contained in the task of integrating the film and game industries in the age of globalization. It's a topic that's most certainly on the mind of a lot of studio executives on both sides of the equation, but for whatever reason, not many film or game scholars seem to be talking about it at all. Scholars seem to be mostly focusing on theoretical issues that, frankly, not many people working in either industry have a lot of time to worry about. Which leads me to wonder if game theory will end up the same way as film theory: completely detached from and often hostile toward the very industry that generates its texts. It seems unnecessary, and most likely, counterproductive.

However, the concern that keeps going through my head is that, by going down the road I'm on, whether I'm going to alienate my fellow department members by confirming their worst fears about hiring a scholar so far out of the normal domain of 'English.' The problem being, I can't really fake an interest in something else.

It's a conundrum.