Will the geek inherit the earth? When you look around today's popular culture, where The Big Bang Theory gets higher TV ratings than American Idol; and the theatres are full of movies based on comic books, it certainly seems like a strong possibility.

Benjamin Woo, a PhD student in the School of Communication, is writing his dissertation on nerd culture. His origin story lies in his master's thesis, Red and white tights: representations of national identity in Canadian comic books, which explored narrative themes in Canadian comic books. While writing it, he says, "I had to put all my questions about the comics' producers and readers aside for later."

And later is now. "When I started my PhD and returned to those questions, I realised that my approach would have to be much more social-scientific and that I couldn't talk about comic books in isolation from the whole constellation of practices that make up nerd culture. The ability to switch between those two approaches more or less seamlessly—in the same department and even with the same supervisor—is something that's really great about communication studies as an interdisciplinary field."

He has now completed his fieldwork, and detailed much of it on his website. He emphasizes that there is a high level and variety of cultural activity taking place in the nerd-culture scene and the fact that these rely on a whole range of institutions: "When most people think of cultural institutions, they think of examples like television networks, museums, or theatre companies. But the kinds of cultural activities that I'm interested in—what some scholars call 'vernacular cultures'—also produce their own institutions: groups, conventions, events, retail stores, websites, and so on. I'm trying to understand how these institutions help sustain a subcultural scene like nerd culture."

His research had two main objectives: to examine how actual participants think and talk about nerd culture (what's in and what's out, for example) and to explore how cultural practices around media consumption may or may not enable the construction and maintenance of community.

He has received a SSHRC doctoral fellowship to support his research and has presented at national and international conferences. Some of his early research findings have recently been published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics: "The Android's Dungeon: comic-bookstores, cultural spaces, and the social practices of audiences".

• Benjamin Woo's personal website
• MA thesis: Red and white tights: representations of national identity in Canadian comic books
• Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics: "The Android's Dungeon: comic-bookstores, cultural spaces, and the social practices of audiences"
  
• Academia.edu: Benjamin Woo
• Twitter: Benjamin Woo
• Supervisor: Gary McCarron
• School of Communication; Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology
• Recipient, John A. Lent Scholarship in Comics Studies

Tags: student profiles; communication, art and technology; communication