[Commlist] cfp - Asian Audiovisualities: Regimes of Visuality in Technocultural Contexts

Call For Papers

Asian Audiovisualities: Regimes of Visuality in Technocultural Contexts

(Chamada para Dossiê (v. 7, n. 13) Audiovisualidades Asiáticas: 
Estéticas do Olhar em Regimes Tecnoculturais)

Editors: Aline Corso (Ewha Womans University) and Camila de Ávila (UNISINOS)

Journal:Prajna: Journal of Oriental Cultures (Prajna: Revista de 
Culturas Orientais)

Submission deadline: August 18, 2026

Submission 
link:<https://revistaprajna.com/ojs3/index.php/prajna>https://revistaprajna.com/ojs3/index.php/prajna/announcement/view/5 


Languages: The dossier accepts submissions in Portuguese and English. 
Articles submitted in English must include an abstract in Portuguese.

For inquiries, please contact Aline Corso at (aline.corso /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(aline.corso /at/ gmail.com)>. Submission does not require any payment 
from the authors.


This dossier proposes a critical and transdisciplinary investigation 
into emergent audiovisualities in contemporary Asian cultures, 
understood as dynamic forms of producing and circulating visuality 
through articulations among image, technology, and subjectivity. In an 
increasingly mediated landscape shaped by sophisticated technical 
devices and algorithmic regimes of visibility, we seek to examine 
transformations in modes of seeing - and being seen - through the 
aesthetic, sociotechnical, and cultural specificities of the Asian 
continent.


More than an analysis of images, this proposal is oriented toward a 
reflection on modes of production, mediation, and reception of the 
sensible, interrogating the visual technologies that traverse Asian 
cultural practices. Among the guiding questions of this dossier are:

  * How are regimes of visuality reconfigured by digital platforms,
    algorithmic surveillance, and technological aesthetics in Asian
    contexts?
  * What do images produced between spirituality, tradition, and
    technoculture demand from us when they call forth other forms of
    sensibility?
  * What visualities emerge from Asian pop cultures - such as K-pop,
    BLs, dramas, anime, webtoons, and local cinemas - and what modes of
    existence do they produce?
  * How are bodies and identities performed, filtered, and rescaled in
    Asian visual media, and what desires or dissidences traverse these
    representations?
  * What is lost - and what resists - in digital archives, in the noise
    and silences that mark the continent’s visual narratives?
  * How do spiritual knowledges, cosmologies, and philosophies influence
    the creation of images and articulate with contemporary technologies?
  * In what ways does the global circulation of Asian audiovisualities
    reconfigure imaginaries of time, body, modernity, and the future?
  * What counter-images emerge from Asia in response to Western visual
    hegemonies?
  *


We adopt the expression “Asian audiovisualities” because we understand 
that the technocultural dynamics emerging in regions such as East Asia 
are not limited to fixed geographic borders. These practices reverberate 
through and intertwine with productions from other parts of the 
continent - such as Southeast Asia, South Asia, and West Asia - through 
shared cultural circuits, digital platforms, and transversal aesthetics.


Examples include the consumption of K-pop in Thailand, the adaptation of 
Korean webtoons in Indonesia, the popularity of Thai BLs in countries 
such as the Philippines and Japan, and the growing presence of Indian 
cinema on digital platforms across Southeast Asia. These phenomena 
illustrate movements of hybridization and cultural recombination that 
challenge rigid national, linguistic, and identitarian boundaries. The 
intensification of these connections is driven by digital technologies - 
such as social networks, curation algorithms, artificial intelligence, 
and streaming services - which create zones of contact between local 
aesthetics and global dynamics. The designation “Asian” thus seeks to 
acknowledge the plurality of visual regimes, media practices, and visual 
imaginaries that traverse the continent, valuing both their 
singularities and their interrelations, as well as their potential for 
aesthetic and cultural reinvention.


Thematic Axes

We invite submissions of articles that explore, though are not limited 
to, the following axes:

  * Regimes of visuality: visibility, opacity, and power: reflections on
    what becomes visible or invisible in Asian audiovisual productions.
    This axis examines how technical, aesthetic, and political devices
    regulate visuality, including censorship, surveillance, selective
    representation, or the erasure of subjects and narratives;
  * Technoculture and digital subjectivity: investigates how visual
    technologies - such as cameras, filters, apps, and social networks -
    shape modes of subjectivation. It includes themes such as digital
    performativity, identity construction, self-curation, and
    technologically mediated affects;
  * Algorithmic aesthetics and Asian social media: explores the
    influence of algorithms, platforms, and interfaces (such as
    TikTok/Douyin, Bilibili, and WeChat) on the aesthetics of images and
    videos. It also addresses forms of virality, consumption, and
    circulation of content in Asia’s digital media environments;
  * Hybrid audiovisualities and cultural translation: focuses on
    adaptations, remakes, appropriations, and reinventions of Asian
    audiovisual products in global contexts. It also examines flows
    between local and international cultures, as well as the ways Asian
    works are reinterpreted in diasporas or Westernized markets;
  * Image, affection, and interpellation: addresses the power of images
    to affect, provoking emotional, cognitive, or ethical responses. It
    investigates the image as an interpellative force - something that
    touches us, calls upon us, or destabilizes us;
  * Media art, experimentation, and visual technopoetics: analyzes
    experimental visual practices that employ emergent technologies such
    as augmented reality, artificial intelligence, immersive
    installations, and generative art. It includes research on video
    art, expanded cinema, and new forms of aesthetic creation in Asia;
  * Aesthetics of time: excess, silence, and repetition: explores how
    Asian audiovisualities construct alternative temporalities,
    fragmented narratives, contemplative rhythms, or intensive
    repetition. It proposes thinking of time as a sensitive aesthetic
    experience that is historically situated;
  * Technologies of memory: archive, noise, and erasure: investigates
    how the audiovisual contributes to the construction - or destruction
    - of collective and individual memory. It addresses digital
    archives, historical erasures, noise in the transmission of memory,
    and disputes over the right to remember;
  * Body, desire, and gender in Asian aesthetics: discusses how bodies
    are represented in Asian visual media, with a focus on sexuality,
    gender identity, desire, normativity, and dissidence. It includes
    queer, feminist, and decolonial analyses of the body;
  * Technique, spirituality, and transcultural visualities: explores
    relationships between Asian spiritualities (Buddhism, Taoism,
    Hinduism, animisms, among others) and contemporary visual
    technologies. It questions how the audiovisual may express
    non-Western cosmologies and experiences of the sacred;
  * Geopolitics of images and narrative disputes: analyzes how Asian
    images and audiovisual products challenge global narratives
    dominated by the West. It includes representations of Asia in
    cultural conflicts, media nationalisms, symbolic disputes, and the
    construction of imaginaries;
  * Ethics of the image: surveillance, control, and resistance: reflects
    on the uses of the image in contexts of social control, state
    surveillance, facial recognition, and algorithmic monitoring. It
    also investigates visual strategies of resistance, anonymity, and
    critique of visual power;
  * Audiovisualities in the Asian diaspora: focuses on visual
    productions by Asian communities outside the continent - such as in
    Latin America, Europe, and the United States - exploring questions
    of identity, belonging, cultural translation, and aesthetic hybridity.
  *

This dossier seeks to deepen reflections on the articulations among 
technology, image, and culture in Asian societies, offering innovative 
theoretical and methodological contributions to the fields of visual, 
media, and cultural studies. Our aim is to decentralize hegemonic 
analytical frameworks by positioning Asian audiovisualities as powerful 
epistemic territories capable of challenging and enriching traditional 
categories of analysis. In doing so, we hope to consolidate Prajna: 
Journal of Oriental Cultures (Prajna: Revista de Culturas Orientais) as 
a critical reference space for debates on Asian cultures and their 
global projections in the field of contemporary audiovisual studies.


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