Call for Papers: Histories of East Asian “Amateur” Media Practices Conference
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, 2024 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, the Korea Institute, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Harvard University Asia Center.