Paul Ocone

Hello! My name is Paul Ocone, and I am an anthropologist and anime/manga studies scholar. I was the recipient of a 2023-2024 Fulbright scholarship for Japan, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork on amateur manga events as well as anime pilgrimage. I am also a musician, composer, and filmmaker/videographer.

Although I have many research interests, my current research largely centers on four broad areas:

• The negotiation of cultural identities and values, especially in fan subcultures;

• Space and place, both in terms of the online and offline spaces where people meet and in terms of the meanings people attribute to physical spaces;

• The political economy of anime and manga, such as the media mix;

• And aesthetics, especially the aesthetics of anime and manga. 

My undergraduate thesis project was about how desire is expressed, experienced, and politicized in anime fan conventions. The argument I arrived at centers around complex relationships between media, desire, affect, cultural capital, sociality, physical space, movement, and social acceptability. You can watch a presentation I gave summarizing this research here.

Another ethnographic project of mine centered around Bobaboard, a fandom-centric social media platform that strives to create a space for the free expression of fan sexualities. I am interested in how fan spaces can remain inclusive and open while not losing their subcultural identity to mainstream or dominant cultures, which my BobaBoard research connects to.

My research has recently evolved to focus on anime pilgrimage subcultures: I am interested in the ways that fans engage with space, as well as the tensions that have been created by the commodification of anime pilgrimage by Japanese media industries. My recent fieldwork in Japan was centered around pilgrimage for the series Sound! Euphonium and the relationships between official promotions and grassroots fan activities. 

You can contact me at ocone1 [at] umbc [dot] edu.