*CFP* "ESPORTS IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC", PALGRAVE SERIES IN ASIA AND PACIFIC STUDIES VOLUME

Over the last two decades, the Asia-Pacific region has been central to the growth and development of esports. The establishment in 2000 of the Korean Esports Association placed competitive gaming within a government ministry at a time when it was still a niche hobby in other parts of the world (Jin, 2010). Three years later, the Chinese government also recognized esports, making it the country's 99th official sport, and broadcasting esports documentaries and tournaments on state-owned television stations (Lu, 2016).

Today, the region remains a major esports site, with Jakarta hosting an exhibition esports tournament as part of the 2018 Asian games (Etchells, 2018), and Hangzhou set to host the first medalling esports Olympic event as part of the 2022 Asian games (The 19th Asian Games, 2021).

Asia is also a huge esports market. It is the fastest growing esports sector in the world and in 2019 it “generated nearly half of total global esports revenue at $519 million” (Niko Partners, 2020). The size of the Asian population plays a key role in both the number of spectators and the number of esports athletes from the region: “According to Juniper, 50% of the over 1 billion esports and games viewers in 2025 will be from the Asia Pacific region” (Campe, 2021).

*CFP* "PLATFORMISATION AND ENTREPRENEURIAL LABOUR VIA CHINESE DIGITAL NETWORKS", SPECIAL ISSUE, GLOBAL MEDIA AND CHINA JOURNAL

This special issue, “Platformisation and entrepreneurial labour via Chinese digital networks,” examines entrepreneurial labour and its relationship with the platformisation of Chinese society and economy. As a key feature of our digital economy and lifestyle, powerful digital platforms have transformed how cultural production is carried forward, how services are delivered, how businesses are established, how talents are identified and developed, and how new forms of entrepreneurial activities are regulated and governed. While platformisation has technological, infrastructural, and economic dimensions, its human dimension highlights individual agency and limitations in the platformisation process. We call for papers that examine individuals and groups who have demonstrated the entrepreneurial spirit, skills, and thinking in taking advantage of Chinese digital networks, systems and platforms to reinvent themselves, change lives, and influence others and society.

The entrepreneurial individuals and groups include: new media professionals (e.g. wanghong and self-media content producers); platform managers, engineers, and programmers; e-commerce and social commerce operators, agents, and co-ops; product and service brokers, intermediaries, and consultants; government officials and agencies in managing digital and social media platforms, networks, and R&D.

*CFP* "ESPORTS IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC", PALGRAVE SERIES IN ASIA AND PACIFIC STUDIES VOLUME

Over the last two decades, the Asia-Pacific region has been central to the growth and development of esports. The establishment in 2000 of the Korean Esports Association placed competitive gaming within a government ministry at a time when it was still a niche hobby in other parts of the world (Jin, 2010). Three years later, the Chinese government also recognized esports, making it the country's 99th official sport, and broadcasting esports documentaries and tournaments on state-owned television stations (Lu, 2016).

Today, the region remains a major esports site, with Jakarta hosting an exhibition esports tournament as part of the 2018 Asian games (Etchells, 2018), and Hangzhou set to host the first medalling esports Olympic event as part of the 2022 Asian games (The 19th Asian Games, 2021).

Asia is also a huge esports market. It is the fastest growing esports sector in the world and in 2019 it “generated nearly half of total global esports revenue at $519 million” (Niko Partners, 2020). The size of the Asian population plays a key role in both the number of spectators and the number of esports athletes from the region: “According to Juniper, 50% of the over 1 billion esports and games viewers in 2025 will be from the Asia Pacific region” (Campe, 2021).

*CFP* "MEDIA BUILDING: ARCHITECTURE, COMMUNICATIONS AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT", VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Media Building: Architecture, Communications and the Built Environment

Virtual Conference, 7-10 July 2021

Hosted by the University of Salford and Northumbria University

 

Since the emergence of the first newspapers, the relationship between place and content has been central to the media’s development. The spatial politics of media production could fundamentally shape its reception and circulation. If ‘the medium is the message’, then this applied equally to where media artefacts were created as to what was contained within them. Publishers quickly understood that, from both a commercial and philosophical perspective, landmark headquarters or publishing plants could help enforce the legitimacy and significance of their enterprises. Thus, structures such as the striking neo-gothic spires of the Chicago Tribune tower or the sleek art-deco exteriors of the Daily Express building in London offered compelling expressions of media power, modernity, and the aesthetics of mass communication, providing what Aurora Wallace describes as a “definable shape…a hook on which to hang some news about the media itself.” At the same time, media buildings became key nodes in the urban geography of communications, complementing editorial efforts to make and remake the modern metropolis.

*CFP* "CENTERING WOMEN ON POST-2010 CHINESE TV" AND "GLOBAL TV IMAGES OF FEMALE MASCULINITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, COMMUNICATION, CULTURE &

Since the beginning of China’s self-modernizing process and the birth of Chinese feminist movements in the first decade of 20th century, women’s bodies and desires have frequently been marshalled in service of male-dominated nationalistic and (post-)socialist discourses of China and Chineseness. The ideological-political mobilization of female gender, sexuality, and subjectivity has considerably transformed and complicated contemporary Chinese televisual representations of women. In the 21st century, Chinese cyberspace, along with its flourishing creative and media industries, has witnessed an unexpected “boom in women-oriented literature and culture” (Sun & Yang, 2019, p. 28). Notably, the rise of local media and literature produced by and/or for women, along with flows of feminist and LGBTQ movements within and beyond China in the new millennium, first nurtured the cyber literature genre of “matriarchal fiction.” Such fiction is often “set in a society ruled by women … [and] describes a woman’s ascent to power in the public arena, or her success at establishing and heading a happy domicile including one or more male sexual partners” (Feng, 2013, p. 85). This matriarchal narrative maneuver later led to the widely popular “big heroine dramas” of Chinese TV in the past decade, the narratives of which focus on the life trajectories, professional obstacles, familial relationships, and romantic lives of female protagonists living in either the contemporary era or a temporally and spatially remote world (Sun & Yang, 2019, pp. 26-28). At the same time, a growing number of reality shows, talk TV shows, dating programs, and lifestyle shows in the post-2010 years have addressed themes related to women’s sociocultural roles in both professional and private milieus, such as parenting skills, same-sex friendships and homosociality, and marital-familial issues in contemporary China characterized by cosmopolitanism, post-feminism, digitization, (post-)globalization, and deterritorialization.

*CFP* "DIGITAL JOURNALISM IN CHINA", EDITED VOLUME

As the title suggests, this edited volume focuses on developments within digital journalism in China. It explores the implications of digital media technologies for journalists’ professional practice, news users’ consumption of and engagement with news, as well as the shifting institutional, organizational and financial structures of news media within the particular context of mainland China.

This book will hopefully form part of the Routledge Disruptions: Studies in Digital Journalism series. Disruptions refers to the radical changes provoked by the affordances of digital technologies that trigger changes in the business models, professional practice, roles, ethics, products and even the accepted definitions and understandings of journalism. For Digital Journalism Studies, the field of scholarly inquiry focused on the academic study of digital journalism, disruption results in paradigmatic shifts in scholarly concerns and prompts reconsideration of research methods, theoretical considerations and responses (oppositional and consensual) to such changes.

The Editors are particularly concerned to address the following topics, but authors are welcome to focus on other relevant themes.

*CFP* "CHINA, MEDIA AND INTERNATIONAL CONFLICTS", EDITED VOLUME

This edited volume aims to contribute to the studies of complex, fluid and dynamic media-conflict relationship through the lens of China. Studies of mediatized conflict in the digital age is still very much a Eurocentric research area, which requires to be de-Westernized. As McQuail (2006) claims, ‘Western “communication science” does not offer any clear framework for collecting and interpreting observations and information about contemporary war situations’ and has ‘largely neglected were the colonial wars of post-Second World War and the many bitter conflicts that did not directly impinge on western interests or responsibilities’. In a sense, McQuail’s statement still stands today. The existing researches in media and conflict are mostly confined to the Western democracies and interests.

With China showing growing and controversial power and influence on the world’s stage, on the one hand, the East Asian power faces its own security issues due to crises in the Asia-Pacific region that have escalated and intensified such as Sino-Indian border crisis, South China Sea disputes, North Korea nuclear crisis and the Senkaku/Diaoyu-islands disputes. On the other hand, China as one of the five permanent members in the UN Security Council has more and more involvement and interests in the seemingly isolated international conflicts such as Afghanistan war, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Libyan and Syrian crisis.

*CFP* "CHINA, MEDIA AND INTERNATIONAL CONFLICTS", EDITED VOLUME

This edited volume aims to contribute to the studies of complex, fluid and dynamic media-conflict relationship through the lens of China. Studies of mediatized conflict in the digital age is still very much a Eurocentric research area, which requires to be de-Westernized. As McQuail (2006) claims, ‘Western “communication science” does not offer any clear framework for collecting and interpreting observations and information about contemporary war situations’ and has ‘largely neglected were the colonial wars of post-Second World War and the many bitter conflicts that did not directly impinge on western interests or responsibilities’. In a sense, McQuail’s statement still stands today.

The existing researches in media and conflict are mostly confined to the Western democracies and interests. With China showing growing and controversial power and influence on the world’s stage, on the one hand, the East Asian power faces its own security issues due to crises in the Asia-Pacific region that have escalated and intensified such as Sino-Indian border crisis, South China Sea disputes, North Korea nuclear crisis and the Senkaku/Diaoyu-islands disputes.On the other hand, China as one of the five permanent members in the UN Security Council has more and more involvement and interests in the seemingly isolated international conflicts such as Afghanistan war, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Libyan and Syrian crisis.

*CFP* "CHEN QING LING/THE UNTAMED", BOOK CHAPTERS

We are soliciting book chapters for an edited scholarly collection on Chen Qing Ling/The Untamed, its contexts, and its audiences. This will be a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary collection that considers the show's popularity, influences, and effects from a variety of cultural and critical viewpoints.

After episodes began airing on Tencent in June 2019, Chen Qing Ling/The Untamed quickly became one of China's most widely-viewed and highest-earning dramas, attracting millions of views per episode and drawing a large international audience through streaming on additional platforms. Over a year later, the show continues to release new paratextual materials, support a vibrant transnational and transcultural fan base, and generate wider, ongoing interest in genres such as danmei, xianxia, and Cdramas. Given these effects, this collection aims to assemble a first compilation of interdisciplinary scholarship that begins to contextualize, explore, and evaluate Chen Qing Ling/The Untamed, the genres and works that inspired it, the contexts that impacted it, and the influences it continues to have.

We are interested in chapters that address topics such as:

*CFP* "CHENG QING LING: THE UNTAMED", CHAPTER BOOK

Thanks to an increasing range of streaming platforms, a greater general familiarity with adaptation-driven and transmedial storytelling, and faster rates of communication among invested viewers—among other factors! —audiences today have access to an increasingly transcultural range of popular culture content. The 2019 Chinese web series Chen Qing Ling (English translation: The Untamed) is one such example. While the show is not the first of its various genres or circumstances, it has generated and sustained a wide appeal that is worth exploring.

We are soliciting book chapters for an edited scholarly collection on Chen Qing Ling/The Untamed, its contexts, and its audiences. This will be a multi-disciplinary collection that considers the show's popularity, influences, and effects from a variety of cultural and critical viewpoints. After episodes began airing on Tencent in June 2019, Chen Qing Ling/The Untamed quickly became one of China's most widely-viewed and highest-earning dramas, attracting millions of views per episode and drawing a large international audience through streaming on additional platforms. Just over a year on, the show continues to release new paratextual materials, support a vibrant transnational and transcultural fan base, and generate wider, ongoing interest in genres such as danmei, xianxia, and Cdramas. Given these effects, this collection aims to assemble a first compilation of interdisciplinary scholarship that begins to contextualize, explore, and evaluate Chen Qing Ling/The Untamed, the works that inspired it, the contexts that impacted it, and the influences it continues to have.

*CFP* "CONFRONTING COVID-19: CONSTRUCTING AND CONTESTING LEGITIMACY THROUGH MEDIA IN CHINESE CONTEXTS", SPECIAL ISSUE, CHINESE JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION

Legitimacy justifies the acts and authority of social groups and organisations and makes them acceptable to other social members. As a global health crisis that sweeps the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a crisis of legitimacy that social actors and institutions face over their responses to or roles in the pandemic. Meanwhile, however, the pandemic may also open up opportunities for them to gain legitimacy. Naturally, social actors and institutions would endeavour to retain or gain legitimacy through many means, of which the media – including the news media and the Internet – is one of the most important instruments. This unprecedented scenario caused by the Covid-19 crisis thus raises many new (and old) questions for media and communication studies to address.

These questions concern, inter alia, the measures taken and the use of the media by governments, states, international organisations, science, and journalists to address the impact of the pandemic on their legitimacy; the changes of legitimacy-related social norms in the media, media discourses, and public perceptions and trust; and whether and to what extent the Covid-19 crisis enhances or endangers the legitimacy of presence and actions of diasporas in host countries and how these groups use the media to respond to this situation.

*CFP* "THE TRINARY ENIGMA OF EAST-WEST EXCHANGE: A CULTURAL DIALOGUE", EDITED BOOK

Chapter proposals are invited for the edited book The Trinary Enigma of East-West Exchange: A Cultural Dialogue. This volume examines the trinary relationships of East-West exchange and cultural dialogue. The assessment of cultural exchange in the East-West context involves the original source, the adapted text (medium) and other enigmatic extras incurred during the process. For instance, various texts could be analyzed and juxtaposed from any underlying contexts (subtexts) in relation to literary and aesthetic aspects. It aims to evaluate the threefold linkage among, but not limited to, literature, film, music, art, performance, etc.

With the motive of enriching intellectual resources for academics, researchers and students who are enthusiastic in the adaptation and transformation process of different genres and masterpieces, the volume includes discussions on the long-lasting debates and controversies of Chinese literature as world literature; reconciliations of cultural identity under the contemporary waves of globalization and glocalization; Chinese-Western film adaptations and their impacts upon cinematic experiences; novel understanding towards gendered roles and voices under social gaze; and translation of texts from intertextual angles.

*CFP* "IDOLS: POP CULTURE ICONS AS BRAND AMBASSADORS FOR FASHION AND COSMETICS IN CHINA", EDITED COLLECTION

Call for Papers for a proposed edited collection tentatively titled “Idols: Pop Culture Icons as Brand Ambassadors for Fashion and Cosmetics in China” to be edited by Amanda Sikarskie, Ph.D., University of Michigan.

In China, popular culture idols are vital to the luxury fashion and cosmetics industry as brand ambassadors. This volume hopes to fill a critical gap in the English-language literature on this subject, bringing together authors from China, the United States, and around the world.

Essays for this volume can focus on any pop idols in China that serve as brand ambassadors in fashion, jewelry, or cosmetics. A few questions that the essays might pose include: Why are idols so important as brand ambassadors in China? What is the role of male idols in marketing cosmetics and skincare? What is the relationship of Chinese idols to fans and consumers in other Asian countries? What is the future for virtual reality idols as brand ambassadors, especially in the era of COVID-19?

*CFP* "QUEER TV CHINA", EDITED COLLECTION

Contemporary China largely remains a hetero-patriarchal-structured society. Nevertheless, certain media and public spaces—though limited and compromised—are available for the negotiated survival and expressions of its gender, sexual, and sociocultural minorities (Bao 2018, 2020; Engebretsen 2014; Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015; Ho 2010; Kam 2013; Rofel 2007). This is especially evident in today’s Chinese televisual world and its related fannish space (Bai and Song 2015; Gong and Yang 2017; Yang and Bao 2012; Lavin, Yang, and Zhao 2017). Since the beginning of the 2010s, diverse communities, creative practices, and digital tools have flourished in both the mainstream media and online spaces of the Sinosphere. These have worked together to facilitate trans-geocultural and cross-linguistic flows of TV information and local TV production and adaptation (Yang 2009, 2014; Zhao 2018b). Today’s Chinese TV screens are replete with images of norm-defying gendered, sexualized, and/or eroticized performances, sentiments, and embodiments. For example, over the past two decades, there has been a surge in the number of tomboyish female and effeminate male TV stars. Meanwhile, many popular Chinese TV shows have featured cross-gender performances, homosociality, LGBTQ-identified personalities and participants, and even have explicitly addressed topics, such as gay marriage and queer rights.

*CFP* "ASIAN TIGERS IN THE DIGITAL JUNGLES", SPECIAL ISSUE, GALACTICA MEDIA: JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES

Southeast Asia is the most densely populated region in the world, where neighboring states are political and economic heavyweights, leading players in a globalized world, and small countries that retain their distinctive appearance and style. It is a cauldron of ethnic groups, religions, worldviews, which has given rise to many alternative ways of integrating traditions and modernity.

In particular, Asian media, especially electronic ones, and social networks such as Chinese Weibo, WeiChat, Tencent and Qzone, South Korean Naver, and Japanese Line can serve as an example of such integration.

East Asian cinema and TV-show production display clear influence of Western, primarily Hollywood, standards. Yet they have many original characteristics, some of which are due to national historical experience and mentality, while others are dictated by state censorship and political agenda.

No less interesting is the representation that Asian peoples and cultures receive in Western cinema and commercials, and the recent growing protest of East and Southeast Asian natives against discrimination and stereotyping of their image.

*CFP* "WIRED CHINA: DIGITAL MEDIA AND ONLINE CULTURE", WORKSHOP

Wired China: Digital Media and Online Culture

27th-28th November 2020

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Digital technologies have in the last decade profoundly changed China’s cultural landscape. Messaging apps such as WeChat and Chinese-language podcasts have become important platforms for critical debate, whilst the rising popularity of online platforms for fiction writing, video sharing, shopping, movie ratings and gaming reflect new practices of media consumption and reception. State surveillance and censorship play an important role in China’s wired culture, but web-based cultural activities do not only take place in the shadows of a repressive state but also reflect profound social and cultural transformations, technological developments as well as innovative engagements with traditional aesthetics.

For instance, online fiction and poetry often follow the same formal conventions and linear structure of printed publications, whereas digitally born narrative formats are more adapted towards online consumption. Examples are microfiction (weixiaoshuo), which is circulated on Weibo and has 140 Chinese characters or less and, most recently, microdrama (duanju) on Douyin.

*CFP* "THE DARK SOCIAL: ONLINE PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE, MOTILITY AND POWER", SPECIAL EDITION, CONTINUUM JOURNAL

The intention of this special edition is to provoke critical examination of dark social spaces that are characterised by privacy enhancing technologies that might give rise to acts of resistance, division and evasion. Frequently, the actors using these technological affordances are commonly identified as subcultural groups, activists, marginalised cultures and communities, trolls and socially divisive actors who seek to evade, refuse or disrupt institutional power. We want to suggest, however, that this interpretation creates an artificial binary positioning a fringe of radical actors against institutions of governance, regulation and control. Similarly, approaches that distinguish between social agency and technological affordances protecting privacy, on the one hand, and institutional regulation and centralised surveillance on the other, do not acknowledge how powerful institutional actors use these decentralised technologies to reinforce their authority and control.

This special edition seeks to draw on, but push past these binaries to create new approaches to darknet and dark social studies. What is dark online often connotes moral registers toward what society hides or fears. Yet social spaces that are ‘dark’ offer autonomy and relief from the ever-lasting digital light in current iterations of capitalisms, authoritarianisms and surveillance cultures. A technical rather than moral definition of darkness (Gehl 2018) critiques moral determinism and opens for exploration those dark social spaces that seek legitimacy by offering linked anonymities for reader and publisher, against structural surveillance.

*CFP* "FROM #DIGITALREVOLUTION TO THE #NEWSILKROAD", 25TH DISCOURSENET CONFERENCE ON GLOBAL DISPOSITIVES

25th DiscourseNet Conference on Global Dispositives

From #DigitalRevolution to the #NewSilkRoad

12-15.11.2020

University of Tyumen

25th DiscourseNet Conference on Global Dispositives (#DN25, November 12-15 2020) deals with the processes of social change that are discursively driven and supported by technological infrastructures and new cultural, economic and political relations. In the context of globalization, they affect transformations in all social domains – from economy to culture, including media and education, (digital) technology, industry and environment, politics and governance.

Global Dispositives can be recognised in popular examples of social change. First of all, the global political and economic projects, i.e. the discourses evolving around the Belt and Road Initiative, new infrastructural development of the Arctic region, Eurasian Economic Union but also on small-scale and in semi-official or informal organisations such as the Three Seas Initiative, Visegrad Group or countries within the mini-Schengen integration project. Secondly, global dispositives can be tied to discourses of technology, security and warfare. Examples are not only projects such as the Internet itself (or rather the entire World Wide Web), but also discourses bound up to its structural changes like the implementation of 5G internet technology, balkanization of the internet, various concepts of IoT or surveillance etc. 

*CFP* CALL FOR BOOK REVIEWS, GLOBAL MEDIA AND CHINA JOURNAL

Global Media and China (GMAC) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal, which provides a dedicated, interdisciplinary forum for international research on communication and media with a focus on China. It is also a journal of the International Communication Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). 

GMAC has been accepted for inclusion in Web of Science’s Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in October 2019.

The journal now is seeking reviewers for the following books:

*CFP* CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS, CULTURE IN QUARANTINE JOURNAL

With approximately one-fifth of the world’s population currently in lockdown, the novel coronavirus (COVID–19) pandemic has drastically changed many of our lives. According to official statistics, the virus has now infected over one million individuals across 209 countries and territories, and such draconian measures are likely to have saved countless lives. But, the effects of the virus reach far beyond its biological capacity to cause illness. Originating in Wuhan, China, its rapid spread across national boundaries has drawn attention to the porous and interconnected world that we live in. The resulting economic consequences of the lockdown measures highlight the volatility of the global economy and the precarity of those whose labour sustains it. At the same time, it has transformed the way we interact with one another and understand ourselves, as new forms of creativity and solidarity emerge. In the time of coronavirus, both critical cultural analysis and sustained personal reflection are needed more than ever to put these emerging new realities into perspective.