From Panel to Archive, and from Atlantic Canada to the World

Reciprocity in the Superman’s Children Project

Abstract

The rewards and challenges of experiential learning have long been acknowledged. In this paper, I discuss my teaching, training, and mentorship of RAs for a study of Superman’s son Jon Kent. This monograph project advances scholarship on popular culture, cultural studies, and immigration studies. That my RAs belong to Jon’s generation and that they face so many of the pressing issues that Jon does make our collaborations especially fruitful and insightful. My RAs’ responsibilities involve contributing to the identification and cataloguing of Jon’s and his siblings’ appearances. In the first half of this paper, I canvas what I’ve learned while working in the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University, and how I draw on this experience to teach my RAs about researching such a universally beloved character, via comics, and at archives internationally. And in the second half, I attend to how my RAs’ readings and activism revitalize this research project. My central argument is for the value of intergenerational and international collaboration for a project that’s inherently intergenerational and international.