Rethinking Media History in East Asia

East Asian Media Studies Forum at the University of Texas, Austin
Becoming-media: Rethinking Media History in East Asia and Beyond
April 26-27, 2018
The Department of Asian Studies & The Center for East Asian Studies, The University of Texas, Austin
Organizers and Conveners:  Xuefeng Feng, Jia Liu, and Caitlin McClune

The theme “becoming-media,” borrowed from Joseph Vogl, 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.

We have long been perplexed by the overwhelming dominance of textual analysis in East Asian media studies. For this reason, the forum intends to recuperate part of the intellectual energy, curiosity, and intelligence from “the all-too-quick reduction of ‘media’ to texts or meanings.” The message the forum wants to deliver is this: “media studies should be media studies.”

Forum Schedule:

Thursday, April 26 (SAC 1.118)
9:30- 9:40 Opening remarks
9:40- 11:00
Speaker: Briankle G. Chang (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Title: Untimely Media
Moderator: Jia Liu

11:20- 12:40
Speaker: Xiao Liu (McGill University)
Title: There Are No Media
Moderator: Xuefeng Feng

12:40- 2:00 Lunch break

2:00- 3:20
Speakers: Thomas Looser (New York University)
Title: Digital Liquidity and the Signs of Empire
Moderator: Yunfei Shang

3:40- 5:00
Speakers: Yongwoo Lee (New York University)
Title: Taxidermy of Time: Tigers as the Chronotope of Continual Coloniality in Korea
Moderator: Caitlin McClune

Friday, April 27 (GAR 1.102)
9:30- 12:00
We will hold the roundtable “Reclaiming media and media studies” with invited speakers, faculty members, and graduate students at UT, Austin.

The conference is free and open to the public. A light lunch will be provided on both days.

For more information on the speakers and presentations, please visit: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/asianstudies/events/event.php?id=47033

*Sponsors: the Julian Suez Endowment in Chinese Studies, POSCO Chair in Korean Studies, Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America Inc. Endowment, Endowment for Chinese Studies, Taiwan Studies Program, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Department of Asian Studies.

Posted by: XuefengFeng <fengxf@utexas.edu>

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