Join Weird Fictions Research Group for the first Weird Medicine meeting this semester.

Joanna Kaniewska

Weird Halloween: Normal Again? The Portrayal of Mental Health(Care) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Monday, October 30, 2023
 4.45PM

You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.

Where?

Dobra 55, room 1.271 
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)

Register at: jkaniewska1991@gmail.com
Registration deadline: October 29 (Sunday), 2023 10PM
Limit: 15 people

Snacks and drinks: are welcome!
Cosplays: are very welcome! We especially encourage you to embrace the fashion of the early 2000s, but any spooky outfit will be appropriate, too!

FACEBOOK EVENT

What?

The Weird Fiction Research Group would like to invite you to a Halloween workshop! Together, we will watch and discuss an episode of the classic 90s TV show, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. In this episode, titled “Normal Again,” Buffy suddenly wakes up in a psychiatric hospital, without her Vampire Slayer powers… And everyone around her claims her life in Sunnydale was a delusion. What happened? Was her journey all an illusion? Or is there some other explanation of her current state?

We hope that “Normal Again” will spark an exciting discussion about the portrayal of mental illnesses and mental health institutions in this episode, as well as in other texts of American pop culture. We will talk about spooky psychiatrists, creepy nurses, toxic stereotypes, and many other things!

NOTE: You DO NOT have to know Buffy The Vampire Slayer in order to join the workshop! The screening part will be preceded by a very short introduction to the characters and the general lore of the show, so you won’t feel confused. Also, the episode works reasonably well as a stand alone contact with the franchise.

Who?

Asia Kaniewska is a translator and a PhD Student at the Doctoral School of Humanities of the University of Warsaw, Poland. Her current research focuses on the literature of American witches. Her academic interests include popular music, Japanese and American popular culture, science fiction, and weird studies. Sometimes, she writes about them on her blog “dziewiętnaście czwartych” (“nineteen fourths”) or talks about them in her radio show “dancing in dystopia” on Radio Kapitał.

American Studies Colloquium Series

January 16: Painting in Total Darkness: Blindness as the Medium for Vision

January 4, 2025

We are delighted to invite you to the last lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! Touching on various processes, materials, histories, and methodologies of making, Stephen Proski’s lecture will show how blindness can function as a unique lens of perception, particularly as it relates to the expanded field of painting.

Year 2024/2025

January 9: It’s a True Story – It Happened to a Friend of a Friend (online)’: Urban Legends and Television in the Contemporary Era

December 31, 2024

Join us for the first Weird TV lecture in 2025! Whether centering talk programming, news television, or fictionalised accounts, urban legends nest themselves in the minds of viewers, propagating, and ultimately regressively metamorphosing & returning to oral tradition, shared from viewer to non-viewer to non-viewer, so on and so forth. The oral links which are core to the Urban Legend are recreated anew. While found near universally across televisual programming, our interest rests in the anthology format television has adopted. The stories told are familiar, but not entirely static. The narrative transaction shifts and subsumes itself to the socio-cultural changes. Each technological revolution in communication ripples and renders the narrativization of urban legends transposed onto television. It is in this vein that we will discuss the conceptualisation of the Urban Legend, the televisual forms it has taken, and its existence within the internet era.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 19: Between The Mundane and the Heroic: Vietnamese Presence in State Socialist Poland

December 19, 2024

We are delighted to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! This talk will examine the depictions of the (North) Vietnamese as freedom fighters within the context of the state socialist public sphere and the everyday life of Vietnamese students in Poland across generations. From idealized wartime reportages to mixed-race couples, the Vietnamese presence was marked by a multifaceted experience of adaptation, challenges, opportunities, and dynamic, interactive bonds with Polish society. This history continues to exert a profound influence on the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora and Polish-Vietnamese relationships.

Year 2024/2025

December 18: The Trump Transition – What is New and What is Not

December 18, 2024

Leadership Research Groupis inviting all those who would like to put the Trump transition to a presidential scholarship context and better understand the Trump transition decisions, the prospects for the future in domestic and foreign policy areas they bring, and the impact that Trump leadership may have on the political scene in Washington to a talk followed by a Q&A session by Professor Stephen Farnsworth.

Year 2024/2025

December 17: We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice

December 17, 2024

During the workshop “We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice”, Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw,will delve into the history of feminist manifestos and their pivotal role in the women’s movement in the United States. We’ll explore how activists of the second wave of feminism used grassroots publications to raise awareness, voice the demands of emerging women’s groups, and build communication networks between organizations spread across the country. Together, we’ll analyze the literary techniques that make the manifesto genre a powerful tool for inspiring activist mobilization beyond the pages of the text.