CALL FOR PAPERS
Korea has grown into a veritable cultural powerhouse over the past two decades. Riding the tides of the digital era, Korean content has drawn in the global audience across television drama, film, and popular music, also fueling interest in the varied aspects of Korean culture along the way. Studies have found Korea to be the only country in the world where the number of international students steadily increased (from 85.000 in 2014 to 160.000 in 2019: Statista), barring the slight decline during the pandemic. Persevering over a series of iterations since its inception in the late 1990s, the Korean Wave (Hallyu) is currently enjoying an unprecedented degree of interest and appreciation.
Breakthrough icons and contents that swept up the globe of late, such as BTS, and Netflix’s original films and series like Okja, Space Sweepers, Squid Game, My Name, or We Are All Dead effectively show how Hallyu has come to cultivate rich modalities of transnational appreciation beyond or perhaps even against existent metrics of cultural in habitation including age, race, gender, genre, media, language, and even lifestyle.
What the resurgence of Hallyu today but also its shifting tides that lead up to the present demonstrates is, then, that the very concept of “culture” is fluid by nature; allowing for reconfiguration and intervention beyond its conventional delineations, not as a proprietary habitus for preordained citizenry but an open experience and process that at once represents, reflects on, and inspires. While “hybridity” has always been credited as Hallyu’s key attraction, recent productions are further exemplary of the manner in which its aesthetic instantiation actively nuance the socio-political sphere.
In light of these new momentums that power the present state of Hallyu, the 9th Hallyu International Conference invites scholars, professionals in the cultural industry, public officials, and graduate students around the world to share their opinions about the past, present, and future of Hallyu 5.0. The program aims to place academic investigations in dialogue with praxis-based engagement by placing together speakers from not only different disciplines but also sectors in the hope that the conference may enact the fluidity with which Hallyu has come to position itself across and beyond cultural boundaries.
We also believe that the conference may serve as an exciting opportunity to interrogate the discursive frameworks that essentialize and thereby deter sustainable inquiries into Hallyu studies. Noting that Hallyu has long been, and is currently being explored in so many pockets of the academia without commensurate degrees of exchange among their constituents across the globe, we wish to establish the Hallyu International Conference as a foundation on which to build a sustainable network across theory and praxis.
