Call for papers: Complex Evolution - Media and communication in contemporary Asia

MedieKultur vol. 33, no. 62 

Guest editors:

Jun Liu, Assistant Professor, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen (liujun@hum.ku.dk)

Emilie Tinne Lehmann-Jacobsen, PhD fellow, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen (lkq332@hum.ku.dk)

Deadline for Submissions: September 1st, 2016

Publication of the Special Issue: Spring 2017

Asia has some of the largest, most dynamic, diversified, and complicated media industries in the world. Entering the 21st century, the rapid economic and political developments of Asia have further energized the growth of media locally and globally. But it is not just legacy media that has seen drastic transformation over the course of the last decade. The rapid spread of information and communication technologies in the region has within very few years opened up a new media environment causing changes for the entire industry with new tools for media professionals, shifts in consumption patterns, and unfamiliar competition from different digital media. Media and communication in Asia have thereby continuously attracted the attention of not only academia, but also governments, corporations, media, and the general public.

 

This special issue of MedieKultur asks what are the latest statuses of media in Asian countries? For instance, will greater access to information for journalists, including independent journalists, the professionalization of media, and the emergence of civil society change the media ecology in the region’s transitional societies such as Vietnam and Myanmar? Will the proliferation of new information and communication technologies advance the process of democratization in authoritarian regimes such as China?

 

The special issue invites submissions regarding the theme broadly conceived, the complex evolution – including continuities, challenges, and changes – in media and communication systems in Asian countries. Potential papers, with quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods approaches, may focus on topics such as:

- the ways in which evolving forms and practices of news media industries and practice lead to institutional change;

- the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in regime change;

- the impact of digital media on media consumption and practices;

- the control and enforcement mechanisms by governments, media institutions and the like as well as the struggles against them;

- comparative studies of media systems;

- comparative studies of Easterns and Western media cultures

 

Theoretically, this special issue contributes to the scholarship on political control on media and communication as well as journalistic practices and news production in non-Western and non-democratic settings.