WAHS 10th Anniversary Congress

Paris (26^th-27^th October 2023)

Venue: Millennium Hotel

https://www.millenniumhotels.com/en/meetings-events/europe/france/paris/m-social-hotel-paris-opera/

Here, There and Everywhere:

Hallyu Made for and in the World

 

Aim and scope

Since its initial rise in the late 1990s and throughout its following iterations, Hallyu has pioneered new movements that ceaselessly challenged the analysis of culture, customs, genre, and media. Hybridizing diverse practices through uniquely calibrated textures of aesthetic innovations, Hallyu has become a veritable wave that not only reflects localized taste but also powers new affective modalities beyond the entertainment sector. With the active participation of its global audience as distributors and producers, Hallyu is now produced and inhabited everywhere.

Netflix’s megahit original show Squid Game (2021), for instance, not only became a worldwide syndrome to catalyze interest in Korean games, new and old, language, and other aspects of culture; more significantly, the show powered the production and enjoyment of countless parodies and memes to flood social media platforms, positioning Hallyu as an act of participatory play rather than an experience of passive spectatorship. K-pop also serves as a key momentum of this phenomenon, driven and disseminated by cover dances and reaction videos. Hallyu fandom is known for its proactive stance, creating and sharing community values as an autonomous initiative of enjoyment. As such, the multivalence of Hallyu in its current form instantiates the possibility of reappropriation ownership that forges new paths away from the long-standing cultural model of centrifugal diffusion.

The year 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of the Word Association of Hallyu Studies, which aims to promote this field by bringing together researchers from all disciplinary and geographical backgrounds. This anniversary is a unique opportunity for the annual meeting of the Association not to take stock of its activities, which are too numerous to summarize, but to open up new perspectives and explore new avenues of investigation.

In this vein, the 10th Congress invites scholars, cultural industry professionals, public officials, and students from around the world to share their analyses of Hallyu's current status, significance, and impact as a ubiquitous phenomenon. Moving away from the analysis that too often pigeonholes Hallyu as a manifestation of Korea's soft power, the 10th Congress aims to cultivate an open space for discussion where overseas Hallyu productions take center stage. The program aims to bring academic inquiry into dialogue with practice-based engagement by bringing together speakers from not only different disciplines, but also different sectors, in the hope that the conference will enact the fluidity with which Hallyu has come to position itself across and beyond cultural boundaries. Considering that Hallyu has long been and is currently being researched in so many areas of the academy without a corresponding degree of exchange between its members around the world, we aim to establish the Hallyu International Conference as a foundation upon which to build a sustainable network between theory and practice.

Topics

This international meeting aims to comprehensively explore the following topics:

- What theoretical, methodological, and epistemological tools should be mobilized in a new way to identify local trends and global changes through Hallyu? Concepts such as industrial concentration, soft power and public diplomacy, cultural intermediaries, glocalization, aesthetic capitalism, cosmopolitanism, anesthetization of everyday life, etc. come to mind. The meeting welcomes theoretical and methodological contributions renewing Hallyu studies' conceptual tools.

- What are the commonalities in the diffusion of the various South Korean cultural industries (K-pop, K-dramas, video games, manhwas, webtoons, metaverse, etc.), and how has their success transformed the global and local markets of these various industries? As such, the symposium will welcome comparative contributions to the study of Hallyu.

- How do the modus operandi and effects of Hallyu change when fashion and cosmetics are added to the dematerialized cultural industries? The symposium, therefore, welcomes contributions to K-fashion and K-food, which are part of the "third" circle of Hallyu products.

- How can concerns of inclusiveness, sustainable development, and solidarity economy be integrated into Hallyu research (methodologically, thematically, etc.)? The symposium will therefore welcome contributions about the changes in Korean people’s relationship to their native culture and country, implemented by the success of Hallyu, as well as contributions on integrating environmental and human protection concerns into Hallyu industries (through labor laws, taxation, etc.).

Timeline

Proposals (500 words maximum, specifying the theoretical framework and the materials used)
should be sent - before the 30^th of April 2023 - to:

wahsofficial@gmail.com

Vincenzo CICCHELLI: vincenzo.cicchelli@ceped.org

Siyeun MOON: sissi65@sookmyung.ac.kr

Sylvie OCTOBRE: sylvie.octobre@culture.gouv.fr

Acceptance notifications will be sent to the Authors by 1^st June 2023.