*CFP* "SOUTH KOREAN WOMEN'S CINEMA", ONLINE CONFERENCE

South Korean Women’s Cinema

Online conference 23-25 September 2021

Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom)

Funded by The Academy of Korean Studies

 

While the profile and popularity of Korean cinema abroad has peaked with the success of multi-Oscar award-winning film Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019), women’s cinema and women filmmakers’ wide-ranging contribution to Korean cinema have been consistently overlooked by film audiences and academics alike. Such neglect is evident in a dearth of English-language sources on women filmmakers in the Korean film studies scholarship. As the first major English-language conference focused solely on Korean women’s cinema, the conference aims first of all to celebrate Korean women filmmakers (from pioneers to new generation) and contributions they have made in the history of Korean cinema. The event also intends to provide a site that enables the feminist film scholars to explore a range of topics and issues that include what it means to do women’s cinema in Korea and the relationship between activism and cinema, as well as addressing gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and the #MeToo Movement within the Korean film industry and wider fields. In addition, the conference seeks to illuminate the current status of women’s cinema and to envisage future trends.

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, FAN STUDIES NETWORK NORTH AMERICA VIRTUAL CONFERENCE 2020

Fan Studies Network North America Virtual Conference 2020

October 13-17, 2020

For this year, we have decided to host the virtual-only Fan Studies Network North America over five days in October to encourage participation and access, and to limit Zoom mental overload. The conference will combine synchronous and asynchronous conversations. Rather than traditional papers, we will have virtual workshops, salons, and posters.

Please submit proposals using the submission form.

Workshops can be led by 2-4 attendees and will focus on the development of practical knowledge, sharing of experience, and hands-on practice.

Salons can be led by 1-2 attendees and will be discussions focused on a range of topics. Initial proposals for possible salon topics from leaders are due by July 25th, followed by open call for participants once topics have been chosen (200 word response due August 25th). 

*CFP* "REFOCUS: THE FILMS OF YIM SOON-RYE", UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH REFOCUS SERIES

Yim Soon-Rye is one of very few leading women filmmakers in Korea who has written, produced and directed over a dozen films since her debut in 1996. Her most renowned films including Waikiki Brothers (2001), Forever the Moment (2007), South Bound (2012) and The Whistleblower (2014), have been recognized for their explicit interrogation of gender, political and cultural norms. She is also known as an activist for animal rights and a founder of KARA, Korea Animal Rights Advocates, through which she dedicated herself as much as she did to cinema. Her activism is rooted in Little Forest (2018), Sorry, Thank you (Yim’s episode, 2011) and Rolling Home with a Bull (2010) with the thematic focus on the relationship of humanity and nature.  

With her directorial debut, Three Friends (1996), a coming-of-age drama/social satire, Yim quickly arose to become the prominent talent that signaled Korean New Wave Cinema during the 1990s. She was the 6th woman filmmaker in the history of Korean cinema and one of the only two female filmmakers when she started her career. Now, Yim stands as the most prolific woman director in Korea with ten feature films and one documentary.

*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* “GLOCALIZATION OF POPULAR CULTURE IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN MEDIA”, VOL.2, NO.3, SOUTHEAST ASIAN MEDIA STUDIES

Southeast Asians consume various traditional and new media content, which makes the region a big market for content distributors. In particular, drama series produced in China, Japan, Korea, India, and the United States have aired in Southeast Asian countries and were presented either through dubbed or subbed content. Music and fashion sense inspired by popular music groups in East Asia have also developed and gained a large fan following in the region.

This issue collates papers that analyze the various manifestations of glocalization in media content exhibited in Southeast Asia. Dreisbach (2018) defined glocalization as a wordplay of the terms global and local that means the accommodation of foreign cultural sensibilities by local actors. Robertson (2000) conceptualized glocalization as the accommodation and/or contextualization of foreign ideas which results in cultural diversity. In this case, we refer to the concept as the process in accommodating global media content and contextualizing it according to the tastes of local consumers. Due to the broad scope of the theme, the journal invites papers revolving around, but not limited to, the politics of global media content localization, translation studies on dubbed content or songs, and the sociology and economics of fan studies. As such, the issue is interdisciplinary, incorporating papers with a focus linguistics, history, politics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, visual art, culture, and economics relevant to Southeast Asian media studies.

*CFP* “SINO-KOREAN SCREEN RELATIONS”, UCLAN SYMPOSIUM 2020

Sino-Korean Screen Relations 

16-17 de Enero de 2020

UCLan, UK

We invite papers on the topic of Sino-Korean Screen Relations for a symposium on 16-17th January 2020. The symposium will bring together scholars of Film, TV and Screen Media Studies to explore diverse and intricate relations between Sinophone and Korean-language screen media. It will take place at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK, which is located with easy transport links to the scenic Lake District and the vibrant urban and cultural centres of Manchester and Liverpool. Accommodation, lunch and refreshments will be provided for presenters, and some travel assistance will be offered to post-grad researchers. We particularly welcome papers from scholars from across the Sinophone and Koran-language cultural centres and diasporas.  Selected papers will be offered publication opportunities in an edited collection on the symposium theme. 

Sino-Korean screen relations is a significant and under-studied research area. It includes relations between the two largest and most influential contemporary screen media spheres in the East Asian region. However, the emphasis on relations gestures beyond the concept of distinct Sinophone and Korean-language spheres of cultural (re)production, and beyond dominant national ideologies and nation-based media historiography. Instead, it re-conceptualises Sino-Korean screen media as intricately interlinked through diverse yet disjunctive webs of historical and contemporary relationships.

*CFP* “BTS (방탄소년단)”, MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS & MUSIC GLOBAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE PROJECT, AT KINGSTON UNIVERSITY

BTS (방탄소년단)

Global Interdisciplinary Conference Project

4-5 January 2020

Kingston University, Penryn Road, London

Keynote Speaker: Professor LEE Jiyoung (Sejong University) Author of BTS, Art Revolution

Korean boy group BTS are the first ever Korean act to perform at Wembley Stadium as part of their Love Yourself: Speak Yourself world tour. Debuting in 2013 under Big Hit Entertainment, BTS initially struggled to gain recognition in Korea as they didn’t come from one of the big three Korean entertainment companies. However, the last few years have seen BTS become the most internationally successful Korean act of all time, amassing not only domestic awards but prestigious US awards including The Best Duo/Group at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards. Their recent sold-out concerts at Wembley clearly delineate BTS as a dominant force in global music and within popular culture.This inclusive inter- and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to examine the success and popularity of BTS from a variety of academic, practice, and fan-based perspectives.

*CFP* “MEDIATING THE SOUTH KOREAN OTHER: REPRESENTATIONS AND DISCOURSES OF DIFFERENCE IN THE POST/NEOCOLONIAL NATION STATE”, BOOK CHAPTER

South Korea’s ethnoscape has undergone dynamic change. It is peculiar as it has both a postcolonial history with Japan and a neocolonial relationship with the United States. These histories shape complex views of who belongs and who is valued vis-a-vis racial, ethnic, and national others. One major site of the construction of difference is popular culture. Popular and online media in South Korea construct difference through the celebration of the desirable otherness of Whites and biracial White-Koreans (Ahn, 2015), the joining of Southeast Asian women and their multi-ethnic children in the paternal nation-state through the loss of their difference (Oh & Oh, 2016), and marginalized, outcast others, who are rendered irredeemably different. With this in mind, the purpose of the book is to animate postcolonial impulses by drawing together local theories developed in the South Korean context that focuses on the construction of ethnicized, racialized, and nationalized difference in the local cultural terrain.

Previous literature on ethnoracial differences in Korea explains that differences are due to (1) Korea’s myth of ethnic homogeneity (2) Confucian preferences for “civilized” societies, (3) internalization of the racial logics of the US, and (4) a lack of distinction between race, ethnicity, and nation. While each is informative and useful, they are partial explanations and do not adequately explain the ways difference is mediated and discursively constructed, e.g., Western racial hierarchies are not merely mapped onto Korean cultural logics of difference nor are there simple binaries of Koreans versus others.

*CFP* “THE IMPACT OF JAPANESE AND SOUTH KOREAN AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTION ON THE SPANISH-SPEAKING WORLD”, ATALANTE - Nº29

We are pleased to announce the call for papers of the next issue of L’Atalante. Revista de Estudios Cinematográficos which, under the title of “The impact of Japanese and South Korean audiovisual production on the Spanish-speaking world”, is open to contributions. You can find detailed information here.

In recent years, even while interest has been growing in China’s increasing influence as the dominant power in East Asia, the global presence of different expressions of contemporary Japanese and South Korean culture has been constantly on the rise. The interest in literature, graphic products, pop music, video games, cuisine, and especially audiovisual productions from Japan and South Korea has turned these two countries into cultural superpowers with a prominent place in an increasingly fragmented global entertainment industry (Lie, 2014; Kuwahara, 2014; Otmazgin & Lyan, 2013).

*CFP* "EL IMPACTO DEL AUDIOVISUAL JAPONÉS Y SURCOREANO CONTEMPORÁNEO EN EL ÁMBITO HISPANOHABLANTE", REVISTA L'ATALANTE

En los últimos años se ha consolidado el incremento acelerado de la presencia global de expresiones diversas de las culturas populares japonesa y surcoreana contemporánea, pese al creciente interés por el aumento de la influencia de China como potencia dominante en Asia oriental. El interés por la literatura, los productos gráficos, la música pop, los videojuegos, la gastronomía y, sobre todo, las producciones audiovisuales procedentes de Japón y Corea del Sur, ha convertido así a estos dos países en auténticas superpotencias culturales que ocupan un lugar destacado en la fragmentada oferta del entretenimiento a escala mundial (Lie, 2014; Kuwahara, 2014; Otmazgin y Lyan, 2013).

Al habitual protagonismo de filmes japoneses y surcoreanos en los circuitos internacionales de festivales –ya estén especializados en los géneros de terror y fantástico (Brown, 2018; Tezuka, 2012) o de cine de arte y ensayo (Martinez, 2009; Chung y Diffrient, 2015)– se suma cada vez más su presencia en los catálogos de las plataformas de subscription video on demand (Lobato, 2018) con formatos de gran popularidad como los K-drama, los doramas japoneses y el anime (Hernandez Hernandez & Hirai, 2015; Kirsch, 2015; Wada Marciano, 2010), que en algunos casos se insertan en potentes narrativas crossmedia y transmedia de alcance transnacional. 

6ª SESIÓN SEMINARIO DOIMECO, "PLANET HALLYUWOOD: LA INDUSTRIA CINEMATOGRÁFICA DE COREA DEL SUR EN LA ERA DE LA GLOBALIZACIÓN"