Disney is a common shared cultural  experience.

In this episode we discuss how Disney’s pixie dust can hook students  and provide opportunities for critical examination in a variety of disciplines.

Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and  effective practices in teaching and learning.

This podcast series is hosted by  John Kane, an economist...

...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer...

...and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more  inclusive and supportive of all learners.

Our guest today Jill Peterfeso.

Jill is the  Eli Franklin Craven and Minnie Phipps Craven Professor of Religious Studies at Guilford  College.

She is the author of Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary  Roman Catholic Church and a co-editor of Why

the Magic Matters: Discovering Disney as a  Laboratory for Learning.

Welcome back, Jill.

hank you.

It's so good to be back.

I'm  really happy to see you guys again.

It's really nice to talk to  you.

It's been too long It has.

How are you, Rebecca?

I'm doing well.

It's been far too

long for sure.

Today's teas are:...

Jill,  are you drinking some tea with us today?

I am.

I just got it ready.

This is an apricot tea.

It is a light black tea by Harney and Sons.

It's really delicious.

What about you guys?

I'm drinking a black raspberry green tea today.

And I have English tea time today.

Very good… from England again?

No, it’s not my super fancy stuff, it's grocery store, too.

Sorry.

Recently she's been bringing you these tea she's picked up at Scotland or in England and  other places during her travels.

My travels are usually to Wegmans or to Amazon.

…those far, far away places.

…although very soon I will be stopping  at the Twinings Tea Caddy in Epcot.

I'm so excited.

…which brings us to the theme of today's podcast, which is your work on  Why the Magic Matters.

In an earlier podcast, you had described how you had incorporated Disney  into several of your classes, including a travel component, but this new book extends this  work in some new directions.

First, though, before we talk about the book, could you tell us  a little bit about how you developed an interest in Disney as an area of academic interest.

I came to Disney as an area of academic interest through teaching.

It was 2014-2015 and I  was asked to develop a first-year seminar, which is this class that all first- year students  take, introduces them to college, introduces them to the liberal arts.

But sort of the catch is,  we don't want it to be too clearly in your area of expertise.

So it couldn't be about American  religious history, which is my area of expertise.

It couldn't be about Catholicism and women, which  I've written a book on.

It needed to be something that was going to be an area of discovery for me,  as well as my students.

And as a lifelong Disney fan, I thought Disney would be a really fun class  to teach to first years, and I think it would be a good hook.

I think they’d want to take that class.

I developed that class.

I taught it for the first time in fall 2015, and it really was an amazing  opportunity to discover something in a back- door way.

It wasn't like, “Okay, I have this whole  huge foundation that I developed through grad school and years of research and training from  the experts.

This is really like me doing a deep dive into something that I've always been curious  about, and inviting students in on the journey.” That's how I came about it.

I taught that first  class, and I taught that FYS, gosh, I think four or five times since then, I've also gone on to  teach a couple other classes.

I taught a class on Disney narrative magic that was a cross-listed  English religion class.

And then I've taught two study away classes on Disney that involved a trip  component.

I've gotten to do a lot of things with Disney, which is really exciting.

What I didn't  expect when I first started teaching Disney was that it was going to turn into an area of academic  interest and research.

And I really happened, probably, I think about my second time teaching  that first-year seminar, I found that we were having conversations in the classroom about  these issues that I talk about in my American religious history classes and other things that  I research and study and share with students.

And so it was becoming clear to me that there was  an alignment of Disney with my other research on Americanness and what people believe and why  and how American history gives rise to culture.

And so really, since about 2019 as I was finishing  up Womanpriest, my first book, I've been thinking about ways to turn Disney into something academic.

Teaching blended in with a lot of my own personal biography, like I was one of those kids who had  The VHS tapes as a kid.

We had the records, the little mini records in the books, and they were  Disney stories.

And I got to go to Disney World when I was eight, and it changed my life, like  that that place existed was really mind blowing to me.

So it's been just like a really happy accident  of all these things coming together, and it really makes sense as an area of academic focus.

I don't  think many of us who do Disney studies do that in grad school.

I think a lot of our grad advisors  would be like, “Really?” but it's something that we find once we're a little more established  and trying to find cool things that grab student attention.

Disney works for that really well.

Can you talk a little bit about the origins of this particular book project,  Why the Magic Matters?

Credit goes to a podcast, actually.

I was  listening to a podcast I listen to religiously.

It's called the Disney Dish with Jim Hill and  Len Testa.

And I was driving home, I have quite a commute to and from school, and I was driving home  from school and listening to the weekly podcast.

And they were talking about this class at Elon  University on Te aching Disney, and it involved a trip to Walt Disney World.

The class was called,  like, The Science of Happiness.

And I'm like, That's Elon University.

I'm literally driving by  Elon University on my way back home.

So Elon is very close to Guilford College, where I teach.

I  did some research.

I'm like, I got to figure out who teaches this class.

I did some diving into  their website, and found that the teacher of this class is a sociologist at Elon named Alexis  Franzese.

I reached out to her over email.

We met up, and I was thinking at the time, this was early  2023 and I was prepping to teach a Disney away class later that spring.

And I was like, let's  team up.

We could write an article about teaching Disney, especially in difficult political times,  because this was when Disney was in a very public fight with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis about the  don't say gay bill, etc.

And Alexis said, well, let's do an edited volume.

And so that was sort of  the birth of the edited volume piece of this.

So how did you select the  contributors for this book?

Once we had agreed on a premise, which is like  educators of Disney courses and content sharing their research with a wider audience, we  wanted to be sure that we had a range of academic disciplines represented.

We wanted to  surprise and delight the reader, the reader of Disney fans and also students, to find how many  ways that Disney speaks to academic disciplines, and how many academic disciplines can speak  to Disney.

So early on, I will admit to some fan girling.

I'm like, okay, who's doing the  scholarship on Disney that I really love?

And I reached out to them.

Thankfully, they were in  agreement and they wanted to participate.

Alexis did some of the same.

We talked to people who we'd  gotten in and said, “Who else can you recommend?” So we really reached out to people, and then got  people sort of through that snowball approach.

We didn't do a call for papers.

We didn't  need to.

We were thinking we might need to, but it was exciting how quickly professors,  faculty, researchers doing this work, wanted to be involved.

And I think that speaks to the  energy and enthusiasm around Disney and teaching and sharing Disney.

I think for almost everyone…  I can't speak for everybody… but I think there's, like a passion piece to scholarship on Disney and  sharing that with students and wider audiences.

We really wanted it to be widely represented.

I  wish we had the hard sciences in the book.

It's one of the only areas that I feel is lacking.

But, I have a list, so if you'll allow me,

this is our very impressive array of disciplines:  we have curriculum studies, art history, business and marketing, data science, film history,  indigenous studies, Asian studies, literature, education studies, leadership studies, history,  media studies, religious studies, psychology, sociology and disability studies.

We're really  happy and really proud of that array of voices.

So one of the things that you mentioned earlier  was that Disney is a good hook to get students involved.

And in your first chapter, you  talk about how Disney can relate to any academic subject, and you've just outlined the  wide array of those that are in your book.

Can you talk about some examples of how Disney can  be relevant in these multiple disciplines?

There is this Disney+ show, and it is also a book  that is produced by like Disney Publishing.

It's called One Day at Disney, and it looks at a huge  range of careers that are available through the Disney company, like what is happening 24/7 around  the globe with Disney, and I talk about that a little bit in the introduction.

With that as an  example, it starts to open your eyes to all the ways Disney demands investment and involvement  from all these different… we could call them academic disciplines… but areas of expertise for  their cast members and their employees.

In the book, some examples like we have two people in  our book talking about data science.

So we have Len Testa, who wrote our forward, he of The Disney  Dish, and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan.

They talk about data science at Disney.

A day in a Disney park is  full of data, and what Lucy does in her chapter is to look at all this data for one ride at Epcot,  Spaceship Earth, and looks at what Disney can do with that data, and also what she does in the  classroom with that data and teaching her students how data analysis works, what Disney can do, this  is how Disney decides where to place cast members, how Disney obtains and posts these up to  minute wait times for rides and attractions, and then what guests can do with that data if  they use an app that sort of is tracking wait times and busyness et cetera.

Looking at data  helps to understand how one plans out a day at a Disney park.

That's one chapter, another chapter  that's rooted in American history and film studies is from historian Sarah Nilsen, and she looks at  Walt Disney's biography and focuses on his love for animals, and how his love for animals got  baked into what he was creating in his films, and the characters and the lives that film goers  were invited to see, and she makes an argument that Walt became one of America's first 20th  century environmentalists because his passion for animals was then put into films, and later  into parks, and that inspired Americans to think differently about the environment.

Then one other  example is my co-editor, Alexis, teamed up with one of her former students who had taken one  of her Disney travel courses, which I think is awesome that that partnership even exists in the  book, and they use sociology and psychology tools and frameworks to analyze what Disney expects  and demands from parkgoers to enjoy their time at Disney.

You don't just show up at Disney… anybody  who's gone to a Disney park knows you don't just show up and everything happens seamlessly.

You  have to do a lot of labor.

And in this chapter, where they're using psychology and sociology,  they look at concepts like emotional labor, emotion work, impression management to look at  how Disney recruits people, especially parents, to help create happiness, to make magic  happen on Disney trips.

As I think of it, all of our authors are peeling back the curtain  of how Disney works and inviting them to see what Disney is doing that is not just surface  fun entertainment, but there's a lot to it, and how that works, and how we can think  about it as critical educated thinkers.

One of the things that we've talked about quite a  bit in the past year or so on the podcast is that there's a lot of evidence that students feel  less connected than in past decades to what they're learning in college, that they feel that  it doesn't really connect to their own lives or their own experiences.

Given Disney's large  role and very long-term role in our culture, does that help provide that sort  of shared connection to students, getting them more engaged?

You've already alluded  to this a little bit, but how has this worked in terms of students making connections  and becoming engaged with the course.

Definitely Disney is a common shared cultural  experience.

And even international students know of Disney, and that is a great foundation for  students in a first-year seminar, for instance, because they're already going to be connected  in some personal way to the material.

We have a shared recognition, if not a shared love of  Disney, certainly not every student who takes the Disney class loves Disney.

Honestly, a lot  of them think this is going to be really easy, and that's why they take it.

I've had them  admit that to me, they're often surprised by how deeply you can go into Disney, but  they are hooked by the familiarity.

I'm a big believer in Disney content, especially  for early students, or discovering students, because Disney is something that they know  well enough that they can feel smart about it, like a lot of my students are first generation,  and Disney is not intimidating subject matter.

So I like to think that students comfort with knowing  some parts of Disney means that I can really push them on their critical thinking because they're  grounded, or they're rooted in something familiar: magic, happy endings, characters, positive  stories about the world, histories of America, like they're grounded in something.

Now, all of  this said, I have had a couple students who take my Disney classes who complain like, this doesn't  mean anything to my life, and that's where I really try to drive home the liberal arts-ness,  like, “Okay, but this is like a training ground for your academic and intellectual muscles.”  Like, when you read the introduction of Why the Magic Matters, you see a lot of my views on this  creeping into that introduction where I'm like, “Okay, it's not that you need to know how Disney  works.

Like, I think you should, because it's a huge cultural artifact, but you need to know how  to think deeply about these cultural artifacts.” The only other thing I'll say as I think about the  shared cultural understanding, I am going to be curious to see what happens with Disney and the  shared culture in the next 5 to 10 to 20 years, because Disney is becoming prohibitively  expensive… at least visits to the park are.

This has been well tracked.

Disney seems to  aim for an income bracket of like in the top 10, top 5% and most of us are not in that.

So I  increasingly now see students who have never been to Disney parks, like that middle class pilgrimage  idea that I know I grew up with is increasingly unreachable.

So I'm going to be curious to see  what that does to those of us who try to teach this content in a range of different academic  settings.

Some people teach Disney classes in very affluent schools with very affluent  students, and then some of us don't.

I wonder what Disney's shifting economics are going to mean  for lower SES students.

Yes, shared culture now, I don't know if that's always going to be the  case, so that's something for us to watch.

You mentioned earlier that Disney's biography  kind of finds its way in your book.

Can you talk a little bit about how Disney argued that animation  and film would be useful for educational tools, and there's certainly evidence of this in  the theme parks and other things.

However, it's a very curated approach.

How does  that impact our understanding of history, or the way that we might continue to perpetuate  a version of history in our culture?

This is where I get really excited as a cultural  historian.

This is where I really like to hang out with my students, because culture, as we know ,is  not just a mirror that we hold up to ourselves, and it reflects our values and our interests  and our history.

Culture is an actor.

Culture creates and upholds and strengthens those values  and histories and interests.

A challenge I really have in teaching Disney classes… it's a challenge  I embrace… is to help students see that Disney is not just something they consume.

It's not just  fun, simple entertainment for kids.

Rather, Disney is doing consumptive work on us.

Disney  is commanding our attention.

It is directing our attention towards certain narratives and stories  while obscuring others.

Disney's upholding certain norms about gender and sexuality and body size and  attractiveness and ethnohistories and race-based stories, et cetera.

And of course, Disney loves  to gobble up all our money while doing that.

Any college-level exploration of Disney must look  critically at all of that.

And this is not to say that Disney is bad.

I don't subscribe to any  simple villainization of Disney, any more than I subscribe to a simple villainization of religion  and religious systems as a religious study scholar.

Nothing is all bad and just brainwashing.

When we learn about humans and human culture and relationships, what can we learn about the appeal  of Disney or the appeal of religion?

There's something there that's worth looking at.

We  shouldn't just dismiss it.

I was teaching this FYS first-year seminar on Disney in 2016 when Trump's  Make America Great again slogan was becoming ubiquitous, and I remember talking to students at  that time like, what does MAGA mean?

What time and place does it refer to, do you think?

And wasn't  hard for them to connect what they thought MAGA meant to some of the simple and sanitized and  incomplete histories that Disney puts forward, that you might find walking down Disney's Main  Street USA, or in Frontierland, or in some of Disney films.

Walt Disney was a patriot, no  question.

He loved America.

He was desperate to serve in World War One, and he lied about his  age in order to do so.

He was fixated on Abraham Lincoln.

The studio made anti-Nazi, pro-allies  propaganda during World War Two.

So he was really very much a patriot, and he was really concerned  about telling an American story, but as scholars and as students, we get to question those stories  as perhaps being more complicated than what's been presented to us.

And so the book, Why the Magic  Matters, looks at this very question.

So we have a couple of chapters that explore this.

We have  a historian named Alex Hoffman in the book.

He's out of U of Chicago.

He teaches a course and his  chapter, they're both titled “Theme Park America,” and in Why the Magic Matters, he sort of takes  readers on a walking tour of 1955 Disneyland, when Disneyland first opened.

And he looks at  some of these historical sections of the park, Main Street, Adventure Land, Frontier land, and  he explains the choices Disney made in designing those lands, as Disney did.

But he also looks at  the American history beneath Disney's depiction, and in so doing, he unearths racism, the Cold War,  and like anti communist anxieties in the country in the 1950s the impact of settler-colonialism,  and all of this as he helps us to read Disneyland in a historically authentic way, as opposed to the  Disney sanitized way.

A couple other chapters deal with this, but another one that springs to mind  is one by Lucy Buck, who is an indigenous man.

And in his chapter, which is called “Urban Indians  in the House of Mouse,” he walks readers through his emotional development and his intellectual  awakening as an indigenous person who grew up in Southern California, really close to Disneyland.

And he talks about how his time in college, studying ethnomusicology and indigenous studies  led him to see Disney's films really differently, and more optimistically, it allowed him  to try to envision a world where native creativity and culture could be represented and  celebrated.

iI my classes, there's always a point where students are like, “You are ruining  our childhood.” I have heard that so many times in so many forms, but thankfully, it's  a whole semester, and not just like a lecture, which would leave them kind of defeated, but they  have a whole semester to gnaw on this material.

And my goal is really to help them feel  empowered in developing richer analyses of the world around them, because I really believe  that once you can critically examine something, we can enjoy it without guilt or without fear  of manipulation or without threat of loss of critical thought.

I really hope that the class  is an invitation to see Disney differently, but in so doing, these things in the world that  we take for granted as being one way but can actually be something else, and the book tries  to model that in a number of its chapters.

So the version of the world that Disney  was creating was one that was very similar to the type of world that was presented in  other forms of media in the 1950s and 60s, but it's been moving towards a much more  inclusive depiction of the world in recent years, but that's led to quite a bit of controversy, as  you mentioned, with the governor and also with our President.

Was this type of culture war,  perhaps inevitable for Disney to go through as we move towards a more diverse population and  moving towards a white minority population?

This is such an important question.

We talk  about this in my classes.

Here's a mess of thoughts.

I don't think that conflict was  inevitable because of changing demographics.

I think Disney was always going to, of course,  try to include more types of people as the American demographic shifted because, well, the  money motive is obvious.

It's somewhat cynical, but it's obvious.

If Disney can create more  fans and more people invested in its stories, that's great for Disney as a company.

But another  thing that I like to think about is who creates Disney films and characters and rides and  attractions and merchandise, like complex, interesting, rich identity, human people.

Many of  these creative types have a really wide range of identities.

So it goes beyond this Disney's bottom  line to include consideration of the artists, the animators, the Imagineers who want to see  themselves and their loved ones in Disney stories.

So I think that was going to happen.

Was the  conflict inevitable?

And perhaps I'm too naive, but I don't think including more people in the  story is going to lead to automatic resentment without certain cultural forces and political  forces stoking those fires.

The anger directed at Disney has to be put into a context of social  media algorithms and exploiting politicians.

As soon as anyone with any sort of power and  authority start to draw lines in the sand, companies like Disney are going to fall on one  part of that line or the other, and whoever's not on the side with Disney is going to be angry  at Disney.

They're going to take it really personally.

An obvious recent example is ABC  Disney's indefinite cancelation of Jimmy Kimmel Live, which at the time of taping, because we're  taping this, it is back on, It has been on back on for a few weeks, but Disney was in a damned if you  do and damned if you don't situation there.

I'm in no way defending what Disney did, but in the  minds of the public, Disney was going to infuriate huge groups of people no matter what they did.

I don't know, as a Disney scholar and professor, I'm always more interested in thinking about what  the fights that Disney get embroiled in say about Disney as a cultural powerhouse, because Disney  is shared American culture.

Americans do believe they have some sort of stake in the ownership  of Disney, even if they're not really fans or consumers.

They think that Disney is American,  and thus Disney is theirs, because Disney is so intertwined with American culture and American  values and American’s perception of history, if Disney does something somebody doesn't like,  many critics aren't going to just see that as this huge corporation making a business decision.

They're going to be like, “this is an assault on my values and America's story.” It's going to hit  emotionally, because Disney is all about emotion.

It generates emotion.

We do have some chapters  in the book that try to look at this complicated question.

So there's one chapter called “Only  Correct,” which is a play on Ian Forrester's line, “Only Connect.” This is by Bonnie Rudner, who  teaches literature up in Boston, and she's looking at what she calls the corrections that  Disney makes to its popular IP to its popular intellectual property.

So specifically,  she's looking at Disney Renaissance films: Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast,  Aladdin, Pocahontas.

And she looks at first, how did Disney change it from its original form of  a folk tale or a historic story to put it on the screen?

But then, how is Disney changing it again,  as it becomes live action or staged on Broadway?

And she's offering us a way to think about these  corrections that goes beyond like a knee jerk “I don't like the black mermaid because the mermaid  should be white.” We know that that's simplistic.

What other opportunities are there for analysis  that are rich but not just reactive.

So we have other chapters like that.

We have a chapter  by a museum specialist, Bethanee Bemis, who is looking at Main Street, just an experience  walking down Main Street USA as something that is deeply rooted to our senses and to embodiment.

And what does that bake into us, in some ways about the American experience, even though it's  completely ahistorical like the actual Main Street USA, would probably have been filthy and a little  bit scary, stinky, what would have actually been in the street of a Main Street USA.

Also, some of  main streets by the turn of the 20th century were struggling economically.

But what she looks at is  how Disney's creation of this main street imprints on us sensorily.

And then she starts to look at  some of the changes Disney has made to add more inclusion into its parks, and the implications  of that, both in shifting our histories, but also inviting more people into the American  story.

You all are asking really good questions, and it's things that our experts in  the book are thinking about as well.

Giroux’s book, The Mouse that Roared:  Disney and the End of Innocence, argues that Disney's influence on the  culture was dangerous.

Do the authors of Why the Magic Matters share this concern.

The contributors don't speak with one voice.

There are 22 contributors in the book, but  I think some of our contributors would say that there are elements of Disney that could  be considered, quote, unquote, dangerous.

Some of Disney's stories, its depictions of  race or ethnicity or body type, just capitalism, like all of these could be read as dangerous  or potentially dangerous if misused.

But we also have contributors who, I think, kind  of unabashedly love Disney, and in fact, their careers have centered around celebrating  the company and its history for what it can offer.

Two chapters that come to mind here: we have this  delightful chapter by Christopher Tremblay.

Was a scholar and a teacher, and every summer, he takes  students on this experiential travel course called “Walt's pilgrimage.” He takes students basically  along Walt Disney's biography.

So like Chicago, Illinois to Marceline, Missouri to Kansas City,  out to California, ending at Disneyland and Forest Lawn Cemetery, where Walt is interred.

They learn  Walt's life story as well as all these inevitable lessons about business and pushing through  hardship, about hope in the face of adversity, and also about placed-based learning and ethnographic  discovery.

And so that chapter treats some of Walt's complexity, but it's more like, what can  Walt teach us?

Another chapter that's like that is Jeff Barnes has a chapter, a class that he teaches  at Disneyland.

So in the chapter, he's like walking us through Disneyland, and stops at these  landmarks to talk about what students can learn, about leadership, about how to treat people in a  working environment, about collaboration, all of that.

So there are really a range of perspectives  in the book, some that are more critical and sort of begging Disney to do and be better.

And then  we have some chapters that are like, Disney is what it is.

It's hugely influential.

This is how  it can make sense for you, and how you can sort of deploy some of its techniques.

Like Disney's  been a remarkably successful company for much of its 100 years.

What are they doing well, and what  can we learn?

So there's a real range of voices in the book, and this is a nice moment to be doing  Disney studies.

I would say Disney studies, like when I was first reading it, like Disney studies  in the 1990s and the early 2000s tended to be more critical and even angry.

It was sort of fun to  tear down Disney, and not entirely difficult to do if you came at it from a certain perspective.

But  I have never found like a complete dangerous tear down as something that students respond well to.

It also lacks the kind of nuanced thinking that I want students to practice directed at any subject.

I think there are things about Disney that could be dangerous, like if speaking for myself,  anything that is as culturally prominent as Disney must be critically examined and understood.

We can't just take it at face value, because doing so, that could become dangerous, in a way  that ignorance in the face of power is always dangerous.

So I wouldn't say Disney's dangerous.

I'd say ignorance and uncritical reflection about Disney can be dangerous.

So that's one of  my big motives in teaching the class.

Speaking of a nuanced approach, the book  is organized into sections that represent dialectical pairs.

Can you explain this approach  and describe the sections that you've included in the book?

I thought that was a really interesting  way of organizing the structure of this.

Yeah, thanks.

So the book is organized into  these four sections with a pairing of terms that may seem contradictory, but in fact,  like when we look deeply at Disney, we see that these ideas that seem contradictory actually  go hand in hand.

I describe it this way, like the book is organized around tensions, and thinking  about Disney holding in tension a range of ideas, helps to negate any sort of black and white  thinking about Disney, it's not pure celebration, it's not pure criticism.

It's about this nuance.

For instance, one of these dialectical pairings in the first section is magic and strategy.

I wrote the intro to that first section, and in that introduction, I lay out how magic is  like one of those go to buzzwords that everybody associates with Disney nowadays, Disney equals  magic, and yet, so much of what Disney does is meant to look magical and feel magical, but it  is, in fact, deeply strategic.

It is done by very talented artists and business people and  cast members who are creating magic.

Disney's a multi-billion dollar company that knows how to  press on your motions and win your brand loyalty.

The chapters in that magic and strategy section  look at how Disney does both things.

It creates magic and operates strategically to create magic.

The dialectic approaches, it's a great one for teaching.

I love to use dialectic in the theory  portions of my courses, because they really push students out of black and white thinking.

When I  teach, for instance, African American religion, there's this great book that explores the  dialectical model of the black church, that's Lincoln and Mamiya have developed that  theory, and it's great, because it's like nothing is just one thing.

It is a mess, a beautiful mess  of contradictory things.

My first book was called

Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression in the  Contemporary Roman Catholic Church.

So even there, I was playing with tension with these two concepts  that seem contradictory, but are, in fact, essential to the thing itself.

I know Alexis has  experience with dialectics in a therapeutic form, because she also has a background in psychology,  and I use them in some of my teaching as well.

And so the humanities professor in me and the social  scientist and her like, both resonated with this dialectic approach, this theory of tensions.

So  we have magic and strategy.

We have leisure and labor.

We have authenticity and simulation, and we  have nostalgia and innovation.

Those are our four sets of pairs, and each of those words seems like  that they want to fight each other, but in Disney, they coexist and create what Disney is.

Who is the intended audience of your book?

You've kind of hinted at some potential  audiences.

Can you talk a little bit about who your intended audience is and maybe  who might also benefit from your book?

We would love the book to find wide readership  among Disney fans who are interested in a more academic, dare I say, nerdy, take on Disney.

And we also envision this as a book for college students taking college courses on Disney.

We learned in the process of doing this book that there are a whole lot of Disney courses  out there taught from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

It was one of the things that  got the publisher’s attention that this book, targeted at undergrads, could actually find a  home in courses.

xc, who I mentioned earlier, has written an academic article… it was probably  like seven or eight years ago now… but he looked at all of these Disney courses that he could find,  like on college websites and things, and he found 70 happening in various colleges and universities.

And I know there are more.

So we definitely think the book could be for college students, but I've  been recommending the book to like friends who have teenagers who love Disney, like, “hey, if  they love this, they're going to love getting to learn about this, and they may actually find some  interesting academic disciplines that they hadn't thought about via Disney.” I think the book could  be really for a wide range of people.

We made sure that it was accessible, that the language was not  something that would be too intimidating.

This is not like just aimed at a very small number of  academics.

We want this to be something that people might pick up and read a chapter here and  there.

It should be something that is Invitational to educated readers who are curious.

So given all those courses out there, have you considered coming up with a second  edition or an expanded edition of this?

We were told by the publisher, it depends how  well this one does.

So if you all like this book, buy it for your friends.

It's great for  Christmas gifts.

Yeah, they said there's, I forget the number, but there's a number of  books that they like to see published before they talk about another edition.

That's what they  told us.

Hopefully it will go over really well, and that there will be a demand for more,  because I know there are many more scholars out there doing really awesome things in the classroom  around Disney, and I think the more we share that, the more we can think about Disney in fun ways,  and also the more we can make a case for higher ed and education being something that really  can operate in one sort of day to day life, or one's experience of life, if Disney is just  entertainment, we can think about those things richly.

We'll see John, hopefully.

So we always wrap up by asking, as you know, what's next?

So research wise, I'm hoping to get back to my solo Disney book project.

I sort of tabled  that when Why the Magic Matters started to take off about two and a half, three years ago.

So I'm  hoping to get back to it.

That project is called

Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust: Enchanting and  Evangelizing America.

That's currently the title, and it looks at Disney alongside American  religious history.

I don't want to say it's Disney is a religion, but how the ways we can  analyze Disney can intertwine with the ways we can understand religion, and in so doing, understand  religion more richly and how it operates in the world, and understand Disney more richly and  how it operates in the world.

So I'm eager to get back to that.

In addition, even though my  Womanpriest book came out five years ago, now I'm still writing and talking a lot about women's  ordination and the Catholic Church.

I'm, in fact, headed to Venice, Italy in a couple of weeks for  a conference at the end of October where I'm going to talk about women's ordination and different  types of Catholic feminisms, like comparing North American Catholic feminisms in European.

So  I'm grateful that there's still a lot for me to talk about with that.

In terms of teaching.

I'm  not sure when I'm going to teach Disney again, maybe next fall.

We'll see how scheduling works  out, but I would love to use this book in the classroom to see how that works.

I am designing  currently a new course for spring 2026 which is called The Holocaust and Contemporary Issues.

It  was Holocaust studies that got me into academia, that got me into religious studies in the first  place.

It was transformative to me as a 19-year old to understand the magnitude of what happened  with the Holocaust and the implications of that.

I've often taught an upper-level Holocaust course,  but I'm developing a class that's for first years or sophomore, students who haven't a lot of  experience in religious studies.

And we're going to spend about a month on Holocaust history, and  then we're going to look at what's emerged since that's related.

So we're going to do a unit on the  Rwandan genocide.

We're going to look at some of Timothy Snyder's work on rising authoritarianism  in the 21st Century.

We're going to look at the situation in Gaza, nothing controversial at all.

So basically, we're going to ask what faith-filled resistance looks like.

What does it mean to stand  up against oppression and injustice in today's world?

I don't know what will happen with that,  but I'm really excited.

I feel a call.

I feel an obligation to dive into those hard issues.

So  that's what I'm working on in the classroom.

Well, those are challenging issues, but very much  needed, I think, in terms of education today, but it's kind of nice also to take a break  and reflect on magic and bringing some magic into lives where so much of the news that  we see is much less magical right now.

I've had students joke that I'm the Holocaust  professor and the Disney professor and like that… I don't know… is that a dialectic tension?

Is that a way to balance it all out?

Exactly.

So I'm like, “Yeah, you're right, those  seem antithetical, and yet they coexist in my teaching and my research interest.” Super comfortable in that gray zone, that's for sure.

Yes.

Well, thank you so much for joining us,  and we look forward to talking to you in the future about some of your other  projects that you're working on.

Thank you both so much.

You all  do so much good work with this podcast.

I'm happy to be part of it.

Well, thanks, Jill, and I hope I'll see you one of these days back in Durham, I'm  still coming down there in the summers, or at least I have been so far.

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Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Editing Assistance provided by Ryan Metzler.