Source: Wikimedia
Introduction
Greetings! I am traveling for a conference and workshop where I will attempt to convince a group of political scientists that they should pay attention to Martial Arts Studies. (If you would like to see my presentation click here). As such, I have arranged something special for Kung Fu Tea in my absence. The Martial Arts Studies Research Network just wrapped up a small conference in Bath that focused on the Japanese martial arts. While this is a very interesting subject I suspect that most of us were not able to attend. So, after talking it over with the conference organizer, it was decided to share some of the presentations here in an attempt to bring a larger number of people into this conversation. The video quality is not fantastic as everything was shot from a static camera angle. But some of this material is really great, so feel free to just let the audio play in the background.
The conference featured several papers and I will only be able to share a handful of them here. I decided that it might also make things more interesting to pick a small subset of presentations, all of which addressed similar themes. Over the next week we will be looking at a group of papers each of which examines the global spread of the Japanese martial arts into a different area of the world, and from a slightly different theoretical perspective.
Our first paper was presented by Dr. Emelyne Godfrey. She tackles a number of topics including the early 20th century popularization of Japanese martial arts in the United Kingdom and Suffragette jujitsu.
Dr Godfrey is a writer and researcher specialising in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and has been interviewed by the BBC on numerous occasions. Author of Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (2010), and Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society (2012), her latest work Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H.G. Wells and William Morris will be available in September 2016. Dr Godfrey is currently working on a book on the suffragettes.
Click here, or on the image below, to see the presentation!
