Media Stream

Media Representations of Asia: Culture, Religion, Nation (Media)

Welcome to the Media stream. Here you will find the module syllabus, seminars and readings from previous years, and a smattering of student postings with media examples. Current students should click through the tab above to access the students only course blog.

Stream Director: Jessica L. Main

Overview: Representations of Asian cultures, religions, and nations are everywhere in traditional and new media, but they are not neutral; they serve political and strategic ends. Media representations are produced, disseminated, and consumed. They are the outcomes of complex socio-economic interactions, both describing and directing popular and public action. Recognizing how these representations are used is crucial to contemporary policy analysis: whether in a content analysis of Chinese new media, describing the political-economy of mainstream English media, or tracking representations of religious and ethnic violence. Students in this stream will learn to recognize and evaluate the impact of these visual, spatial, and textual representations and the particular character of media, old and new. This stream draws from media theory, cultural studies, and policy-relevant religious studies.

Media, broadly understood. This module will focus on how representations are transmitted via “old/traditional” (print, film, broadcast), “new/emerging” (online, networked, cellular) media, and the considerable crossover in content, production, and consumption between them. Media producers vary widely: from mainstream Western news outlets to independent film studios in Southeast Asia, from the Chinese state and their official television network, Xinhua, to Christian groups in Indonesia using text messages. Students will become familiar with how representation is affected by the concrete details of the media itself (production, dissemination, finance, control / censorship, audience, impact) and how representation, in turn, affects policy. Students are encouraged to pursue research targeting the Asia Pacific region that links media and its representational content to a specific policy issue.

Objectives: Familiarize students with key models of media from cultural studies and political science, with an eye towards the issues in understanding non-Western media. Students will engage in content analysis of media, participate in a course blog, locate and analyze video, image, and print media. Each year, the core module will focus on topics relevant to ongoing student research, which might include the following:

  • theory and approaches to media analysis
  • nationalism and identity
  • memorials and monuments
  • transnationalism and soft power/national branding
  • threat and terror, labeling danger
  • Asia in western media
  • diaspora
  • structure of new media and IT developments
  • effect of media: democratization or government control
  • stereotypes of Asian religions (Buddhism and Islam)
  • media as watchdog
  • audience reception, control and framing
  • censorship and weapons of the weak
  • minority identities

Preparation and Expectations

  • IAR 500 MAPPS Core Course
  • IAR 500 Media Module

Related Courses

  • IAR 506: Culture and Globalization in Asia Pacific (Lynn)
  • IAR 508: The City and the National Imagination (Kusno)
  • IAR 515A: Ways of Being / Ways of Seeing: Chinese Film and Identity (Bailey)
  • IAR 515B: Buddhism and Contemporary Society: “Buddhism, Violence, and the State in Modern and Contemporary Asia” (Main)
  • IAR 518 Media, Policy, and Society (Main, Cheek, Shakya)
  • IAR 515E: Contemporary Tibet: Identity, Development, and Conflict (Shakya)
  • IAR 515P: Religion and Public Policy (Shakya)
  • ANTH 551D: Cultural Studies in Communication and Interpretation
  • SOCI 562: Mass Media and Communications
  • WMST 506: Gender, Islam, Modernity, and the West
  • *CHIN 309: Media Chinese I (Non-Heritage) (requires Chinese language ability)

Selected readings:

  • Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso, 1999.
  • Bell, Daniel A. China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Princeton University Press, 2008.
  • Bräuchler, Birgit. Cyberidentities at War: Religion, Identity, and the Internet in the Moluccan Conflict. Indonesia 75 (2003): 123-151.
  • Dissanayake, Wimal, ed. Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.
  • Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner. Media and Cultural Studies. Revised. Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.
  • Flath, James A. Managing Historical Capital in Shandong: Museum, Monument, and Memory in Provincial China. The Public Historian 24. 2 (2002): 41–59.
  • Marsden, Lee, and Heather Savigny, eds. Media, Religion, and Conflict. Ashgate Publishing, 2009.
  • Maslog, Crispin C., Seow Ting Lee, and Hun Shik Kim. Framing Analysis of a Conflict: How Newspapers in Five Asian countries Covered the Iraq War. Asian Journal of Communication 16. 1 (2006): 19–39.
  • McCargo, Duncan. Media and Politics in Pacific Asia. Routledge, 2003.
  • Mitchell, Jolyon P., and Sophia Marriage, eds. Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion, and Culture. Continuum, 2003.
  • Ong, Aihwah. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.
  • Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. Vintage Books, 1997.
  • Tambiah, Stanley J. Buddhism Betrayed: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka. University of Chicago Press, 1992.
  • Tekwani, Shyam, ed. Media and Conflict Reporting in Asia. AMIC, 2008.
  • Thomas, Amos Owen. Imagi-Nations and Borderless Television: Media, Culture and Politics Across Asia. SAGE, 2005.
  • Wei-ming, Tu, ed. The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
  • White, J.D. Global Media: The Television Revolution in Asia. New York: Routledge, 2005.

 

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