Arisia 2017: On Shaming, Bullying, and Public Humiliation

TheoNerd Podcast

Andrew and Ben were both on panels at Arisia: New England's Largest, Most Diverse Sci-Fi & Fantasy Convention! This episode is from the panel Andrew was on: On Shaming, Bullying, and Public Humiliation. Thank you to everyone on the panel for letting us record. Find their awesome work (other than Andrew - you know him by now) and the description of the panel below.

"SF/F fans are no stranger to bullying—many of us who were picked on for being different at a young age found refuge and escape in the other worldliness of fantastical books, movies, and newer media. The internet age of un-moderated twitter, 4chan, and Gawker has made bullying and harassment easier. The behavior surrounding GamerGate has practically normalized it. What can this teach us about forms of public humiliation and bullying, and what we can do to push back against it?"

Andy Hicks is, or has been: a writer, producer and occasional voice-over guy for WGBH radio and television, a musician, a sound designer, an actor, a cat owner, a husband, an author, an ADHD advocate, a human being, an odd duck, a host for storytelling nights and pub trivia, an angry liberal, a Time Lord, a test subject, an early-childhood PCE exposure survivor, a late night rock DJ, a writer of post-apocalyptic musicals, robot, a rocketship, a jet fighter, a paper airplane, and for a brief and glorious week, an escaped capybara. Oh, and he's writing a thing for a Star Trek essay compilation called Outside In Boldly Goes 2, and is dragging old media kicking and screaming into the digital age. Probably.

Inanna Arthen is an artist, speaker and author of The Vampires of New England Series: Mortal Touch, The Longer the Fall, and All the Shadows of the Rainbow. Inanna is a lifelong scholar of vampire folklore, fiction and fact, and runs By Light Unseen Media, an independent press dedicated to publishing vampire fiction and nonfiction. She is a member of Broad Universe, New England Horror Writers, Horror Writers Association, Independent Book Publishers Association, and Independent Publishers of New England. She holds an M.Div degree from Harvard and is an outspoken advocate for the Pagan and LGBTQI communities. She is the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Winchendon, MA.

Heather Urbanski holds a Master of Arts in Writing and a Ph.D. in English, specializing in Composition and Rhetoric. Her first book, Plagues, Apocalypses, and Bug-Eyed Monsters: How Speculative Fiction Shows Us Our Nightmares, a bibliographic survey of the genre, combines her passion for SF as a fan with her academic career. Her second book, the edited collection Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric, focuses on the intersections of rhetoric, popular culture, fandom, and digital media. Her third book, The Science Fiction Reboot, a narrative analysis of reimagined works such as Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, was released in early 2013. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University.

Mark Oshiro did not fill out another lengthy profile for the Arisia program. But he is the author of http://MarkReads.net and http://MarkWatches.net . He is also awesome, and you should check out his work.