[KineJapan] Call for Papers: East Asian Amateur Media Practices Conference (May 10/11, Harvard University)

Thu Sep 19 01:37:03 EDT 2024

Hello Alex,

What an interesting conference. Is the proposal deadline this year (2024)
if the conference is to be held in May next year?

Many thanks.

eva

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蔡如音，台師大大傳所教授
Eva Tsai, Ph.D.
Professor
Graduate Institute of Mass Communication
National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU)

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On Thu, Sep 19, 2024 at 00:31 Zahlten, Alexander via KineJapan <
kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:

> Dear All,
>
>
>
> Please find below the Call for Papers for a conference on (Histories of)
> East Asian Amateur Media Practices, to be held at Harvard on May 10/11 next
> year. The conference will also be used to launch the Japanese Amateur Film
> Archive at Harvard.
>
>
>
> Feel to write to me with any questions you might have!
>
>
>
> All best wishes,
>
>
>
> Alex
>
>
>
> *Histories of East Asian “Amateur” Media Practices Conference*
>
>
>
> May 10/11, 2025
>
> Harvard University
>
>
>
> *Keynote Sessions Featuring:*
>
> Susan Aasman, University of Groningen
>
> Jamie Zhao, City University of Hong Kong
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> We invite proposals to the East Asian “Amateur” Media Practices conference
> at Harvard University. The conference aims to provide a venue for
> presenting research on historical and contemporary amateur media practices
> in East Asia and for discussing the current state and possible futures of
> this rapidly expanding field of inquiry.
>
>
>
> The production and distribution of media content is now a part of everyday
> life - from social media posts to livestreams or fan-produced media based
> on popular characters. This ubiquity of popular media production and
> distribution has often implicitly been ascribed to digital culture and the
> resulting emergence of the “produser” or of “playbor”, destabilizing a term
> such as amateur.
>
>
>
> But the production and distribution of media content outside of the
> commercial media industries has a long history. Be it amateur radio
> broadcasting in 1920s Japan, amateur film from the 1930s across East Asia,
> print publications made and circulated by groups and individuals from the
> 19th century, or “grassroots painting” in the PRC, East Asia has an
> exceptionally long and deep history of what might be called amateur media
> practices in the (broadly speaking) modern context- and many different
> terms besides “amateur” to describe it.
>
>
>
> So far, many of the questions around “amateur” media production in
> English-language research have been posed primarily in the North American
> or Western European context. But their extent and impact in East Asia has
> been particularly striking, transforming politics, consumption, and
> economics, built urban environments, discourses of sexuality and gender,
> and rhythms of everyday life. Such massive shifts raise important questions
> about the nature of amateur media practices and about its past and future
> in East Asia and the world, questions for which much remains to explore
> from the vantage points of both media studies and area studies.
>
>
>
> They also raise the question of what the category of amateur practices
> means means differently over time, and when it is useful – or not. The term
> amateur already situates these practices in very specific ways. What other
> terms might be more appropriate for similar phenomena across time, or do we
> need a different terminology depending on the temporal, regional, or
> media-technological context? How do “amateur” media practices often connect
> to one another and form an extensive network? How do they align with, cause
> friction with, or complexly negotiate a co-existence  with, site-specific
> economic or political systems?
>
>
>
> The East Asian Amateur Media Practices conference aims to foster
> interdisciplinary, intermedial, and transhistorical conversations. With a
> significant amount of research on amateur media practices being conducted
> across very different fields and disciplines, we hope to generate a
> conversation across these approaches, and the often very different time
> zones they address.
>
>
>
> Contemporary fan studies, film studies focused on the 1930s,
> communications-type work on community broadband in the 1970s and many other
> approaches will hopefully enter in a fruitful dialogue. Broadly, we hope to
> collectively address questions such as the following:
>
>
>
>    - How do differing media situations require different theorization of
>    “amateur” practices - or make other terms and frameworks more productive?
>
>
>
>    - As “amateur” media practices take place across media forms / genres
>    / channels, which methodologies are useful to map them and their
>    significance - and which specific questions are they geared to address?
>
>
>
>    - Do amateur media practices - past and present - present useful
>    different models of economy, sociality, politics, or topography (i.e.
>    planetary, global, transnational etc.) that can be made productive today?
>
>
>
>    - What kind of larger historical trajectories come into view once one
>    takes more than one amateur media form into account? Does the significance
>    of amateur media practice change with their relationship to specific media
>    forms and expressions?
>
>
>
>    - Not only recent amateur practices are networked well beyond national
>    contexts; how do amateur media practices and their networks help us track
>    an interaction with imaginaries of nation, or of geopolitics?
>
>
>
>    - How do we think beyond what is the focus of much work on amateur
>    media practices: production? How would that history look different if we
>    additionally focused on distribution?
>
>
>
>
>
> We invite proposals on all topics related to “amateur” media practices in
> East Asia and are open to a broad span of topics and approaches. Proposals
> from graduate students are also very welcome. Proposals should be up to 200
> words in length and include a list of three keywords and include a few
> sentences on how the paper contributes to an emergent field of “amateur”
> media practices across media forms.
>
>
>
> We plan to cover two nights of accommodation for all conference
> participants.
>
>
>
> *Please send proposals in pdf form by October 31, 2025 to:*
>
> *ea.amateurmediaconference at gmail.com <ea.amateurmediaconference at gmail.com>*
>
>
>
> The conference is organized by Alexander Zahlten and conference assistant
> Ami Tanahashi. It is made possible with the kind support of the Reischauer
> Institute of Japanese Studies, the Korea Institute, and the Fairbank Center
> for Chinese Studies.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ……………………
>
> Alexander Zahlten
>
> Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
>
> Chair, Regional Studies East Asia (RSEA) Masters Degree Program
>
> Harvard University
>
> (He / him / his)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> KineJapan at mailman.yale.edu
> https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan
>
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