3:00-4:00: “Reading, Writing, Wrestling: Popular Scholarship and Disciplinary Boundaries”:

Eero Laine considers the field of professional wrestling studies as a longstanding project that has been both at times self-contained and deeply imbricated with a number of academic disciplines. This trajectory is also necessarily interwoven with the expertise and commentary from a broad spectrum of participants, spectators, and critics. Laine examines popular scholarship in light of the ways that professional wrestling has often functioned along shifting lines of insider and outsider status. Disciplinary boundaries are taken up as generative sites for the future of the field of professional wrestling studies.