"As the Boom Goes Bust in Asia…" Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context International Conference
Friday November 3-Saturday November 4 2017
Jeju Island, South Korea
Globally, it is easy to see that we are witness to changing times. The astonishing vote of the British to leave the EU, the rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency, the signing of a peace deal to end the conflict in Syria without US participation…. Each of these events has sent shock waves through the world system.
In East Asia, these dramatic developments have been matched off against a more specific and regionally-defined set of concerns that appear to mark a genuine loss of confidence in the promise of a secure future. If we want to explain this loss, we might do well to link it to the gradual winding down of a 40-year cycle of prosperity that began for many East Asian countries in the late 1960s.
Already, this growing mood of uncertainty has given rise to street protests against political and economic elites that have been seen to be unaccountable. In Taiwan, between March-April 2010, protests erupted in opposition to the passage of the CrossStrait Service Trade Agreement by the ruling party. The demonstrations became known as the Sunflower Movement. From September to December 2014, Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement, a series of sit-in street protests initiated by the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to pre-screen Hong Kong’s leadership candidates, convulsed the island. And at the end of 2016, South Korea witnessed a sustained series of non-violent candlelit protests, demanding the immediate resignation of its scandal-plagued president.
Culture and cultural representations are also undergoing important shifts in the East Asian countries. In both popular and mass forms of representation, we are witness to a growing mood of social uncertainty, in premonitions of disaster, in fears of an aging demographic and the rise of untested forms of robotics and biotechnologies.
Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context calls for papers that will address themselves to the wide range of issues thrown up by this new conjuncture.
Topics that appear relevant include, but are certainly not confined to, the following themes:
Shifting Currents in Pop Music and Fan Cultures
The New Realities in TV Drama
The Aging Society and the Media
The Housing Crisis in East Asia
Political Protest and the End of the Asian Dream
East Asian Youth and the Crisis of Employment
Asian Disaster Cinema
Robotics and a World Without Work
Speculations on the Future
Artificial Intelligence
Debt and the Future of the State
Futures Beyond Democracy
The Demise of Westernization
New Gender Politics
Populism
The Power of the Premodern Past
Migrants and Borders
Capital Flows in the Age of Nationalism
Deadline for Paper Proposals: June 30 2017
Completed 6,000-word papers (in Chicago style): September 15 2017
*Inquiries, proposals and papers may be addressed to the Situations Editor, TerenceMurphy, at the following address tmurphy@yonsei.ac.kr
*Situations will help defray some of the costs of travel and accommodation for selected invitees who submit completed papers by the suggested deadline. In return, the invitee agrees that a properly referenced and formatted version of their conference paper will be considered for publication in a future number of the journal.