Sometimes the most interesting pieces of writing are inspired by the most unassuming things. This is certainly true for Dr. Benjamin Woo, a recent graduate of the School of Communication, whose doctoral thesis was inspired by an NES belt buckle and the responses he got to wearing it.
On top of writing what his thesis supervisor, Dr. Gary McCarron, deemed “the best-written dissertation [he has] seen,” Dr. Woo also received the Governor General’s Gold Medal Award, officially recognizing him as the most outstanding graduate student in his area of research.
A self-described “meta-nerd,” Woo’s work focuses on nerd culture more broadly. When I asked him to define his thesis in five words (I’m a cruel interviewer), he whittled it down to “geeks already have a life.” Focusing on one unnamed city, Woo’s thesis, “Nerds!: Cultural Practices and Community-Making in a Subcultural Scene,” is almost an ethnography of nerd-dom. “I was trying to understand how people use consumption, culture, fandom . . . these sorts of things to carve out meaningful space in their life with other people.”
After graduating in October, he’s been doing the “Inde-pen-dent Scholar Shuf-fle, try-ing to keep body, soul, and research agenda together,” which means he’s been talking at a number of conferences and working on his own to get published as much as possible. When I met up with him, he was just returning from the Congress of the Federation of Social Sciences and Humanities in Victoria, where he presented two papers: one focusing on the consumption aspect covered in his thesis, the other a collaboration with a friend and colleague, Jamie Rennie, focusing on scenes (like a punk scene, not a movie scene) and using them as a means of organizing sociological-type research.
Dr. Woo is also the recipient of the 2013 John A. Lent Schol-ar-ship in Comics Stud-ies, sponsored by the Inter-na-tional Comic Arts Forum (ICAF). Beyond securing him major nerd-scene street cred, it also meant he gave the Lent Award lecture at the ICAF in Portland, titled “How to Think About Comics as Social Objects.”
Despite such an impressive rap sheet, Woo hasn’t let any of it go to his head. He shrugs off his achievements and awards, acknowledging how many other talented people there are. For himself: “I played RPG’s in high school, read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy novels, and generally I was the kind of kid that thought school was interesting, and that pretty much explains how I got where I am today.”
Woo’s humility transcends his accomplishments, manifesting as an approach to all things geek that’s definitely anti-elitist. He’s like a Leonard Hofstadter that works with culture instead of subatomic particles. “The more people who have a chance to enjoy comic books the better,” he quips, before explaining the positive benefits Dungeons & Dragons has on a variety of mental muscles.
An interest in the actual act of drawing comic books is the “biographical core” of his next project, a SSHRC-funded post-doc at the University of Calgary focusing on labour in the comic book industry.
It’s no surprise that Woo’s research took the direction it has though.“There was a time as a child when I entertained great hopes of someday becoming a comic book artist,” he explains. If the whole academic thing doesn’t pan out — although I’m sure it will — there’s still hope yet. When I suggested I might have our layout assistant Eleanor illustrate his grad photo, he offered to draw it himself.
