[Commlist] Call for Papers: "Cross-border media infrastructures and imaginaries in a changing Asia-Pacific" // Media International Australia

CALL FOR PAPERS
Special issue of Media International Australia 
(https://journals.sagepub.com/home/mia)

"Cross-border media infrastructures and imaginaries in a changing 
Asia-Pacific"

Dr. Tom McDonald and Professor Heather A. Horst, Editors

Media of various forms, and the infrastructures and communities that are 
associated with them, have often been strongly determined by national 
boundaries. This is particularly the case in the Asia-Pacific region, 
where media organizations have traditionally been owned by government 
entities and/or large national conglomerates. At the same time, the 
movement of people, goods, capital, information and ideas are undergoing 
shifts and intensifications, owing to broader geopolitical changes, 
state-led infrastructure projects and the aspirations of individuals and 
communities shaped by such regional transformations.

Against this context, media flows are being created, worked and 
reworked, facilitated by new infrastructures, imaginaries and 
understandings. These flows frequently cross, circumvent or come up 
against borders, both domestic and international. Online shopping, 
logistics, blockchain and fin-tech are fostering new cross-border flows 
of goods and money. Media content is increasingly consumed 
internationally, posing new opportunities and challenges for media 
companies, regulators and governments. Users and consumers of the media 
are also witnessing the reworking of their media environments because of 
these changes, adopting inventive responses to and adaptations of the 
media in return.

While much attention has focused on how powerful states seek to exert 
influence beyond their borders through the promotion of platforms, 
technologies and services, this special issue challenges dominant 
narratives of the contemporary moment from the vantage point of the Asia 
Pacific region and the heterogeneity it embodies. Through attention to 
the changing circuits of media in the region, this special issue seeks 
to understand (and explore alternatives to) ‘great power struggle’ 
narratives by considering the role of local media forms, perspectives 
and practices in such processes of transformation. Specifically, we ask 
contributors to consider:
* How are media flows redefining understandings of borders? * What kinds 
of novel communities are being created by cross-border media flows? * 
What forms of social imaginaries accompany the emergence of new 
infrastructures from “outside”? * How are boundaries and borders being 
made, unmade or remade within and across the Asia-Pacific region?
We are particularly excited to include case studies that address 
imaginations and infrastructures of cross-border media from across the 
broader Asia-Pacific region. 

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

Tom McDonald is a media anthropologist dedicated to using ethnographic 
engagement to achieve a richer understanding of how digital 
technologies, media and material culture come to mediate ongoing 
transformations in the communicative practices, economic behaviours, 
social relationships and human subjectivities of people in China and 
beyond. Tom joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong 
Kong in August 2015. Prior to this, he was a Research Associate at the 
Department of Anthropology, University College London. Tom’s first 
monograph, Social Media in Rural China: Social Networks and Moral 
Frameworks (2016, UCL Press), details the findings of 15-months of 
ethnographic fieldwork in the Chinese countryside, examining how social 
media use reconfigures social relations and morality. A separate 
co-authored volume, How the World Changed Social Media (2016, UCL Press) 
expands on the wider findings of the larger comparative UCL Why We Post 
study, to which my ethnography formed a central contribution. Tom’s 
research increasingly focuses on economic concerns, reflecting the rapid 
convergence between digital money and media in China. His current 
project examines everyday cross-border money transactions between Hong 
Kong and Mainland China.

Heather A. Horst is the Director of the Institute for Culture and 
Society at Western Sydney University in Australia.  A sociocultural 
anthropologist, she researches material culture, mobility, and the 
mediation of social relations through digital media and technology. Her 
publications focusing upon these themes include The Cell Phone: An 
Anthropology of Communication (Horst and Miller, 2006); Hanging Around, 
Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media 
(Ito, et al 2010; 10th anniversary edition published in November 2019); 
Digital Anthropology (Horst and Miller, eds., 2012); Digital 
Ethnography: Principles and Practices (Pink, Horst, et al 2016); The 
Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (Horst, Hjorth, Galloway and 
Bell, eds. 2017); The Moral and Cultural Economy of Mobile Phones: 
Pacific Perspectives (Foster and Horst, eds 2018) and Location 
Technologies in International Context (Wilken, Goggin and Horst, ed. 
2019). She has also been the executive producer of two films focused 
upon mobile media, Mobail Goroka (2018) and Parenting in the Smart Age: 
Fijian Perspectives (2019), based upon research in Fiji and Papua New 
Guinea. Heather’s current research is focused upon the circulation of 
protest music in Melanesia through mobile technologies as part of an 
Australian Research Council Linkage project with the Wantok Foundation 
and Further Arts Vanuatu. She is also a Chief Investigator on a Centre 
of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society where she will 
be examining the role of automated decision in design, creativity and 
fashion as well as new forms of transport and mobility.
 
CONTACT:

* Tom McDonald ((mcdonald /at/ hku.hk))
* Heather Horst ((h.horst /at/ westernsydney.edu.au))

PROPOSED TIMELINE:

* 30 April 2020: Abstracts due for submission to guest editors
* 15 May 2020: Invite to submit full papers sent to selected authors
* 30 July 2020: Full papers due for submission to guest editors
* 30 August 2020: Feedback on full papers sent to selected authors
* 30 September 2020: Full papers due for submission to Media 
International Australia

[PDF version of CfP: 
https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/Cross%20Border%20media%20special%20issue%20CFP%20McDonald%20and%20Horst-20200218.pdf 
]


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