[Commlist] Call for Papers - Streaming Southeast Asia Workshop 3-4 July 2022

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 
(emma.baulch /at/ monash.edu)

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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