Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

consumption, engage in self-education on tech blogs and company Twitter feeds, and access services, the
more they enmesh themselves in the expanding digital systems of commercial and state surveillance.
Kiheung Kim* & Jongmi Kim*
Technological imagination of mobile phone in Japanese culture
During the course of developing mobile technology in Japan in the early 2010s, Japanese users tended to
have a different pathway of using smart phones. This different pathway of using mobile phone in Japanese
demonstrates its derailment from globalization of smart mobile phone which has been led by iphone and
Samsung galaxy phones. The majority of Japanese users still stick to old fashioned folder phones and this
extraordinary tendency is called as Gara-Keitai, which is mixture of words Galapagos and Keitai (mobile
phone). The word, gara-keitai refers to the intentionally isolated development of mobile technology from
global trends. This paper is to examine how Japanese consumers have construct their own technological
imagination of mobile phones in popular culture including films and dramas. Also, the paper provides sociocultural
explanation of why the Japanese has built up their own way of using mobile technologies through
the popular culture.
Emma Baulch
Bali
Cultures of circulation and provincial cosmopolitanism: pop music, mobile phones and motorbikes in
Through an examination of the Balinese pop idol Nanoe Biroe and his fans the Baduda, the paper considers
the complex cultures of circulation that are “producing locality” in Indonesia. In it, I discuss how new
technologies of public form are working to refashion the ways people move and gather, speak and connect.
Digital technologies, motorbikes, and the social and historical narratives generated by certain kinds of
Indonesian pop enable Nanoe Biroe and the Baduda to “produce locality” by concurrently constructing
themselves as members of a global “the people” and provincializing this category through a combination of
language play and new and old forms of public assembly. The paper investigates how this mooring
exemplifies an “infrastructural”, as opposed to a “territorial”, mode of locality production that involves the
transfiguration of various kinds of textual and cultural forms, and affective encounters with the surfaces,
edges and borders of urban space.
PARALLEL SESSIONS 2
2A
Theorising mobilities in the Korean diasporas (Chair, Audrey Yue)
Jane Chi Hyun Park
Imagining Koreatown: Space and Identity in Korean American Film and Media
Alongside the popularity of Hallyu, American Koreatowns have become more visible onscreen. This paper
considers how Korean diasporic spaces and communities appear in films and web series directed, produced
and starring Koreans and Korean Americans. These include films, West 32d Street (2007) and Never Forever
(2007), reality TV series, K-Town (2012-2013), and web-series, Ktown Cowboys (2010-present). In particular,
it attempts to identify recent shifts in the articulation of Korean/American identity. These narratives seem to
look as much to South Korea, as to the US, for economic opportunities, social validation, and intimacy. At the
same time, they continue to question notions of legal and cultural citizenship, especially through depictions
of relationships between recent, undocumented Korean migrants and Americanized Koreans.
Gaik Cheng Khoo
Of Economies and Sites: Theorising Korean migration in Malaysia
59