From Maine to Japan

Next week I head to Chicago for the annual National Communication Association convention--my chance to catch up with old mentors, fellow students, and co-workers, and attend a few academic panels in the process. To give some indication of the range of topics and approaches available at this convention, I've culled a few titles here and there. Some I can understand, some I can not. :)

--Gossipy Talk in Organizations: When the Water Cooler is Virtual
--Hip Hop Goes to Washington: Boundary Work and Symbolic Capital in the Congressional Hearing on Hip Hop
--Let’s Talk About Sex: Methodological and Theoretical Issues in the Field of Family Sexual Communication
--Resuming a telling: well-prefaced turns after a parenthetical sequence
--HooCooks for HappyFeet: Discourses of stable and changing selves on the Appalachian Trail
--The Angst of Ambivalence, Child-like Dependence and Phallic Weakness in the Songs of Kris Kristofferson
--The Public and Scary Science: Biotechnology to Synthetic Biology

And my personal favorite, which I would go to if I weren't having to catch a plane at the time:

--I Can has Community: Translating and Writing about Norms and Language in a LOLcat Fan Group