*Apologies for cross-posting*
CALL FOR PAPERS
Streaming Southeast Asia
A workshop: 3-4 July 2022
Abstract deadline: 31 January 2022
In the 2010s, the landscape for streaming audio and video content in Southeast Asia flourished considerably. Spotify launched in the region in 2013, and Netflix in 2016, and over that time Southeast Asia has become host to scores of streaming platforms, giving rise to an intricate and diverse political economy, new kinds of streaming publics, a spaghetti junction circuitry channelling various kinds of content locally, regionally and globally in different ways, and new transactional cultures affording large numbers of un-banked Asian consumers access to streaming content via informally traded memory cards and USB sticks.
This workshop seeks to map the streaming platform landscape in Southeast Asia and to understand the plurality of its disruptive force. In the media and communications field, discussion of how streaming disrupts the production, circulation and consumption of audio and video content has very much been shaped by studies of Netflix, Spotify, and Apple ITunes. This means our understanding of streaming and what it changes is limited to the affordances and business models of a few well-known platforms. In Southeast Asia, these well-known platforms have a strong presence, but recent reports show that Joox and Viu, about which there is very little English language scholarship, lead the Southeast Asian market for audio and video streaming respectively. Platform landscapes also vary from country to country as Chinese and North American platforms compete with local start-ups, and this means that streaming publics are being differentiated in distinct ways in different sites.
The workshop applies a Southeast Asian lens to address some of the stock questions elicited by the streaming phenomenon worldwide. What is the relationship between the rise of streaming and the spread of smartphones in the region, and how is it implicated in shifting practices of tv, film and music consumption? How does the turn to smartphones as a prime mediating technology for consuming music, film and tv change the meanings of such? What is included and excluded from streaming platform catalogues and how does such curation affect longstanding taste regimes or genre categories? How does it affect the visibility of independent productions, folk traditions, or the aesthetic diversity with which consumers are presented? How does the streaming phenomenon help forge new circulatory routes for content to/ from Southeast Asia, fostering minor transnationalism? How can we account for enduring currency of streaming publics, members of which act collectively, against a background of the discourse of ‘on demand’ that algorithmically forges each streaming consumer as a unique individual?
We are especially keen to invite papers that look beyond global giants Netflix and Spotify. Possible topics for contributions include, but are not limited to:
• Political economies: business models, ownership, regulation, media industries
• Archives: genre categories, catalogue curation, playlists, the play of algorithms, exclusions
• Technologies: mobile streaming, informal streaming ecologies, gift cards
• Circuits: intended and unintended distribution paths, networked distribution
• Subjects and the social: the algorithmic self, fandom, personal archiving practices
Organisers
• Ana Grgic Babes Bolyai University
• Ting Fai Yu Monash University Malaysia
• Ng Hock Soon Monash University Malaysia
• Emma Baulch Monash University Malaysia
Please send 250 word abstracts by 31 Jan 2022 to Emma Baulch at [log in to unmask]
The Streaming Southeast Asia workshop is a pre-conference event that takes place ahead of the Asian Studies Association of Australia Conference, which will take place at Monash University Malaysia and Monash University Australia on 5-7 July 2022.
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