Call for Papers: The East Asian “Amateur” Media Practices Conference
May 10/11, 2025
Harvard University
Keynote Sessions Featuring: Susan Aasman (University of Groningen) and 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.
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@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 and the Korea Institute.
Contact Information:
Alexander Zahlten
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harvard University
Contact Email: ea.amateurmediaconference@gmail.com
Posted by: Lila Yang thelandfilled@gmail.com
Research Assistant
School of Creative Media
CityU HK