Becoming-media: Rethinking Media History in East Asia and Beyond

Media Studies Forum 2018

Becoming-media: Rethinking Media History in East Asia and Beyond

The Department of Asian Studies and The Center for East Asian Studies

Forum introduction

The theme “becoming-media” indicates our hope to initiate a conversation among a variety of theories and approaches in media studies, and by doing so to combine analysis of media content, representation, and semantics with an investigation into the techno-discursive, or material-discursive, aspects of media. In this light, the theme “becoming-media,” on the one hand, embraces historical, contingent, and local events that transform mundane objects into forms of media starting to select, store, and process relevant data and to generating meanings. On the other hand, it pays considerable attention to the epistemological structure of media that enables conditions of meanings and representations in the first place.

Thanks to emerging technologies and innovations in media and communication industries the field of media studies is now being overwhelmed by scholarship featured with the keywords “new media.” However, numerous so-called "old" media and their specific histories have been kept largely in obscurity. Moreover, the “abyss of nonmeaning in and from which media operate” (Bernhard Siegert, 2015), in contrast to the enormous investment in textual and cultural analysis, has barely registered with scholars in East Asia media studies. Responding to the peculiar indifference expressed in the dominant approaches of East Asia media studies in the English-speaking world, this forum hopes to direct attention to some underexplored questions concerning the event-character of media, its epistemological structure, and potential world-making effects emanating from the events of becoming-media. This last point should be read in light of a McLuhanesque understanding of media, that any mediatization, or becoming-media, “entails a change not only inthe world but of the world.”(Matthew Engelke, 2010)

* The “Becoming-media” forum is organized and convened by Xuefeng Feng, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Asian Studies, Jia Liu, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Asian Studies, and Caitlin McClune, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University Writing Center. The media studies forum is made possible with the generous support of the Julian Suez Fellowship, the Mitsubishi Fellowship, the POSCO Fellowship, China Endowment, Taiwan Studies Program, the Center of East Asian Studies, and the Department of Asian Studies.

Forum Schedule

Thursday, April 26 (SAC 1.118)

9:30- 9:40 Opening remarks

9:40- 11:00

Speaker: Briankle G. Chang

Title: Untimely Media

Moderator: Jia Liu

 

11:20- 12:40

Speaker: Xiao Liu

Title: There Are No Media

Moderator: Xuefeng Feng

 

12:40- 2:00 Lunch break

 

2:00- 3:20

Speakers: Thomas Looser

Title: Digital Liquidity and the Signs of Empire

Moderator: Yunfei Shang

 

3:40- 5:00

Speakers: Yongwoo Lee

Title: Imaginary Cartography of the Colonized Mind

Moderator: Caitlin McClune

 

Friday, April 27 (GAR 1.102)

9:30- 12:00

A roundtable with invited speakers, UT faculty members, and graduate students

Speakers

Briankle G. Chang is an Associate Professor in the Communication Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Deconstructing Communication: Subject, Representation, and Economies of Exchange (Minnesota 1996), and the co-editor of Philosophy of Communication (MIT 2010) and Thinking Media and Beyond: Perspectives from German Media Theory (Routledge 2018). His recent publications include "Benjamin's Travel" in a special issue on Walter Benjamin in Positions (2018).

Xiao Liu is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at McGill University. Her articles have appeared in venues such as Grey RoomDifferences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural StudiesSocial Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and CultureJournal of Chinese Cinemas, and Frontier of Literary Studies in China. Her book, Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation and Postsocialist Imaginations in China is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

Thomas Looser is an Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at New York University. His areas of research include cultural anthropology and Japanese studies; cultural, economic, social and aesthetic geographies of early and late modern capitalism; art, architecture and urban form; new media studies and animation; and critical theory. He has served on the editorial boards of journals such as MechademiaDigital Asia, and Asian Diasporic Visual Arts, and has published in a variety of venues.

Yongwoo Lee is an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of East Asian Studies at New York University. His primary research interests focus on media and cultural studies of modern Korea, critical theory, popular culture in East Asia, film studies, critical musicology, the intellectual history of wartime Japan and postwar Korea, contemporary art and post/colonial historiography.

Friday, April 27, 2018 at 9:30am to 12:00pm

Garrison Hall, GAR 1.102 128 INNER CAMPUS DR , Austin, Texas 78705

Event Type

Academics, Arts & Humanities, Business & Economy, Policy & Law, World & Culture

Departments

All Departments

Target Audience

Students, Staff, Faculty, Alumni

Cost

free

Hashtag

#UT Asian Studies

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