Global studies of digital media are often caught in a tricky double bind, where attempts to decenter dominant Western paradigms of knowledge about the internet can risk sliding into planetary scales that once again elude the particularity of non-Western contexts. This difficulty becomes particularly challenging for scholars of the internet, where the United States, with its web protocols and app ecology, is often taken as an implicit benchmark for digital life worldwide. But the conceptual framework of the world wide web, which privileges computer and browser-based forms of internet access, does not well account for societies in which the primary forms of internet use are through mobile phones. Furthermore, the entire digital ecology dominated by Google, Facebook (Meta), and other US-based companies has little relevance in contexts such as China, where everything from search engines to games and social media is organized according to fundamentally different logics, architectures, and platforms. This paper asks how the Chinese internet ecology can be used as a case study to elucidate a comparative method for global digital studies that accounts for the local contingencies of digital worlds while also attempting to address global developments in the age of the internet. I begin with an analysis of the interfaces of some of that ecology’s most widely used apps, focusing especially on the versatile “superapp” WeChat, and then use my description of these interfaces to argue that the Chinese internet ecology and the practices it enables give rise to a fundamentally different notion of what digital life entails—a notion that, paradoxically, is more intimately connected with the physical environment and with face-to-face communication traditions, such as word-of-mouth information flow. Ultimately, my paper pushes back against both narratives of the internet as essentially a uniform replication of US-based models, and against the conceptualization of

         The lack of accessibility to broadband connections in Iraqi rural areas has been a policy problem for over a decade. Unlike urban cities that are provided with a reliable connection, rural communities have had over 11 million Iraqi residents waiting for wireline broadband connections and the necessary steps from policymakers and government officials for many years; despite billions of dollars spent to fix the issue, nothing has changed (Haddad & Rossotto, 2017). The problem was compounded because of COVID-19, as the lockdown made it necessary for Iraqis to study and work online from home. Unfortunately, there is a lack of scholarly research on the inability of Iraqi telecommunications to address such a critical problem.

This paper uses a qualitative research method and theories of policy failure and technology maintenance and conducts thematic coding analysis to answer the research question concerned with the policy failure and the waiting experience of rural Iraqis for fixed broadband. To address this question, I rely on two methods: analysis of secondary documents of Iraqi telecommunications and in-depth interviews with members of five different communities in rural Iraq that lack fixed broadband connectivity. Both the documents and the interviews will be analyzed using thematic coding analysis, which is predicated on the identification of patterns and themes (Herzog et al., 2019).

Due to the paucity of published material related to Iraqi telecommunications, this manuscript conducts exploratory research examining the intersection between the policy failure of the Iraqi rural–urban digital divide and the waiting experience of rural Iraqis for fixed broadband. Further, this paper highlights the global implications for the telecommunications sector represented by a crisis of public financing.

The expected findings are the following: Waiting for a fixed broadband connection is an irksome experience that might affect the rural communities’ residents’ lives, including aspects like education, work, and health. Further, the end of the Iraqi rural residents’ experience of waiting for fixed broadband is fully controlled by government officials and policymakers. Lastly, a crisis regarding the telecom finance budget might exist due to the inappropriate allocation of funds for rural broadband projects.

         In the late 19th century, the global textile trade dominated major economies and dictated international politics. Widely traded fabrics were produced from exploitative labor practices. At the end of that century, Britain was the world’s largest empire. This empire had its origins in a corporation, the East India Company, that exported fine silks and cotton from India to Europe. During the colonial period, the textile design expertise of certain South Asian communities, such as Kashmiri Muslims, became very popular in Britain, where designs such as chintz and paisley flourished. Colonized Indians led an enormous economic protest against clothing manufactured in Britain using Indian raw materials, subsequently sold back to Indians at a premium. This protest encouraged Indians to loom their own fabrics. Now, the late-capitalist textile trade has led to the dominance of mass-produced Western clothing in the Indian market, with handmade textiles reserved for special sociocultural occasions. Yet they can be widely seen in the costume design of British period pieces such as Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010-2015), which prize historical authenticity in their mise-en-scène. Conversely, revisionist dramas such as Bridgerton (Netflix, 2020-) endeavour to insert non-white figures into historical positions of power, while glossing over real histories of intersection and exchange, with a preference for contemporary signifiers of globalization. In these productions, the textiles, interior objects, and other commodities have what Arjun Appadurai has called a “social life,” which is engendered by how they are exchanged. A materialist reading, which recognizes both the past and present of objects, provides a media historiographical intervention into studies of the period drama. I argue that these fabricated surfaces provide both aesthetic pleasures and historical legitimation for postcolonial spectators. This approach provides an alternative to national cinema and media frameworks, arguing instead for a novel transnational and historical approach to popular media.

         My paper examines John Akomfrah’s two multi-channel video installations, Vertigo Sea (2015) and Purple (2017). Akomfrah characterizes his work as an “oceanic ontology,” through which he questions the dominance of “man” and “human” in Western thought. I argue that Akomfrah’s practice highlights cinema’s capacity to move from Western onto-epistemology of the subject to a decolonial and de-anthropocentric mode of thinking, and that it is expressed most prominently through the texts’ images of water and their montage form. Both Vertigo Sea and Purple employ the form of multi-channel montage with archival and filmed footage, fluidly connected by images of the still and flowing waters. I suggest the two texts not only reflect the relational epistemology that characterizes those of Black, Pacific, and indigenous peoples, but also offers an invaluable approach to the question of the “planetary” by incorporating the global with the decolonial and the ecological. Vertigo Sea features images of slavery and anti-black racism, industrial fishing, migrant crossings across the seas, and other archival and reenacted footage that construct the cultural history of the Earth as a sublime tapestry of the ocean. Images of Olaudah Equiano forms a main narrative of Vertigo Sea, offering an alternative conceptualization of subjectivity that does not necessitate the exclusion of Black peoples and the history of the Middle Passage. Purple continues the oceanic motif but expands its scope to include the natural world further, highlighting the interrelationship of global climate change and abolitionist thought. In particular, Purple features images of the Pacific Islanders, focusing on the environmental destruction brought on by Western warfare and industrialization. Considering two works together, the paper characterizes Akomfrah’s cinema as oceanic and aqueous and argues that it expresses a planetary cinema and an alternative mode of thought.

         Over a century passes by as foreign military bases persist over the Korean landscape emerging from the Japanese occupation of 1910 continued by the US military occupation from 1945 onwards as the result of Cold War geopolitics. While South Korea is often celebrated as a free democracy, the continued presence of US military bases exemplifies how the state remains tethered to US militarism. In this paper I explore the permanence of militarized spaces in spite of their abandonment via the decommissioning process of US military bases stationed in South Korea. I argue that these sites of abandonment and the enduring military waste become a fundamental temporal exception in building territorial power in the Korean peninsula.

     The coupling of the South Korean state and US military is well documented and theorized by various critical scholars engaged with transpacific studies. Scholars such as Jodi Kim (2022), Simeon Man (2018), David Vine (2015) speak to the racialized and gendered imperial violence that occur as a result of US military base presence1. Left understudied is the aftermath of bases themselves in the ongoing process of decommissioning - beginning in 2002 as part of President Roh-Moo Hyun’s Sunshine Policy. Often celebrated, decommissioning in reality has foreclosed opportunities of legal redress for harms incited by the toxic environmental waste that remains around former bases in the cruel and slow transfer of land ownership from the US back to South Korea.

      I investigate this process of decommissioning by engaging with Korean newspaper trails, local activist archives, and available US military documents from 2002-2020 of two bases (Camp Page, Yongsan Garrison) currently being decommissioned to call attention to the double management of both imagination and environment in state sponsored visions of healing, entrepreneurial class initiatives for development, and citizens movements to resist reconstructing the landscape before accountability is met.

         On July 16, 1945, the US government used the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico as a laboratory and detonated the world’s first atomic bomb. Before the blast, Manhattan Project scientists mailed 142 Kodak film strips throughout the region. They then used the post-blast irradiated film strips to “objectively” sense and measure the gamma radiation levels. Despite their deployment of sensing media, technocrats did not inform locals about the atomic blast codenamed Trinity or its radioactivity—directly affecting communities composed of majority Indigenous and Chicanx peoples. To be clear, this “test” occurred in a desert, borderland region with lengthy histories of colonialism, the largest percentage of Latinx populations, and the second-largest percentage of Indigenous peoples amongst US states. While scholars in the humanities have explored the planet’s first atomic blast as an epochal moment of the Anthropocene, and a moment of energy transformation around the globe, it is surprising that, outside of a few exceptions, the early history of atomic media and atomic infrastructures in New Mexico remain largely unexamined through the lens of coloniality (Borunda 2022; Gómez 2022). Coloniality as a framework of analysis considers the reverberations of colonialism after its formal conclusion through the resulting hierarchies of race and rationality; coloniality also underscores how Eurocentric modernity requires particular spaces—from the Americas themselves to deserts across the Americas—to become its “testing grounds” (Quijano, Wallerstein 1992).

         In this presentation, I argue that modernity (as understood via the framework of coloniality) and the required “testing grounds” for its energy and media infrastructures lead us to consider the history of Trinity through the framework of the media laboratory. Drawing on Natalie Koch’s scholarship on desert laboratories (2020), I contend that media laboratories, like the Chihuahuan Desert, are sites that have and continue to operate at the intersection of media technologies of representation and extraction. Scientists used film strips as environmental sensors to covertly and “objectively” understand the radiation that was emitted from the blast. Alternatively, in the present, local survivors or their families in the Tularosa Basin Downwinders have used intermedial approaches to activist media—from annual vigils to digital testimonial archives to a developing documentary to their own bodies—to assert the still-ignored community epistemologies about the impacts of the slow violence of the radiation from Trinity. These multivalent deployments of film and media convey that the media laboratory continues to be a contested terrain, entangling those I) aesthetic and indexical technologies like film strips and activist documentaries and II) material practices of extraction. Through this exchange, this desert region and its inhabitants are relegated to the realm of the nonliving and sacrificial (Povinelli 2017). In other words, the desert as a media laboratory names and materializes the politics of nonlife itself that undergird modernity’s nuclear energy infrastructures.

         When media scholars Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau ask, “where the Internet lives,” they point out that the hypervisibility of certain parts of the media infrastructure serves to obscure not merely the other parts of the system but also the problem of invisibility of them. Following Holt and Vonderau, I employ the methodology of “seeing” the hidden structure in this paper to examine not merely the material configuration of Apple’s new data center in Gui’An (a state-sanctioned/supported investment after the passage of the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2016) but also the geological and political context in which this critical information infrastructure is imagined, designed, and built. Not content with only asking “where the Internet lives,” I’m instead wondering where the Internet in China is allowed to live. Reading across national policies and corporate strategies, I argue that landing the cloud in local places like Gui’An is a collusion project of two expansion forces: the expansion of the economic nationalist control from the political center of the nation-state to its periphery and the expansion of the big tech colonialism into the hidden land of the global media economy.

         This paper will also attend to the dependent relationship between geology and media infrastructure, which aligns itself with the current material turn in media theory, attempting to articulate the process of grounding, sourcing, fueling, and maintaining the physical site of data storage and computing. However, the media geological habit of conceiving any kind of geological formation as a storage medium risks homogenizing the diversified histories and forms of geological development. With its sinking subsidence and rock solution, the karst topography poses challenges to this conception of the land and demands an indigenous reorientation of the media geological thinking. How do we imagine the karst formation as an unstable storage or an unstorage medium? What form of temporality and spatiality does it register? What conflict does it create with media infrastructures that rely on particular material foundations and spatial imaginaries? What different mode of archival reading/understanding does the karst landscape provoke for historical writings and social critiques?

         This paper will also use a materiality perspective of media to investigate geopolitical frictions and collaborations of data centers. I content that the geo-politics is never just about the conflicts and concerns revolving around national territories and frontiers—the political interventions on the land. It is also related to the geology being a substantial force to weigh in and reshape the local politics and international relations (and the other way around)—the politics conspiring with the land. I adopt this understanding of the geo-politics to study the case of Apple’s data center in Gui’An. In the context of China, the geo-politics means the conception of the land as a fixed, firm ground fits perfectly in both the nationalist and neoliberal narratives of social stability as a communist party’s achievement and a profitable standing reserve respectively. Then to think of the land and the rocks as uniform, reliable, and lasting storage and archive is itself a form of epistemological and political nationalism and colonialism.

         China has had an increasing presence in Zimbabwe since the Look East Policy was launched by the Zimbabwean government in 2003. Drawing from the communication subfields of development communication, political economy, and environmental communication, this case study contributes to the scholarship on Africa-China relations by conducting a discourse analysis on the media representation in the Zimbabwean state-owned media (i.e. The Herald) and private media (i.e. NewsDay) about the antagonisms between mining projects operated by Chinese companies in Zimbabwe and the affected environment and agents. The purpose of this study is to consider how environmental discourses around this recent phase of foreign extractivism are shaped and represented in the Zimbabwean media and reveal how power relations are conveyed in the discourses.

         This study takes the theoretical framework of environmental discourses in the global media system (Murphy, 2017) as an analytic tool to investigate both media representation and the media institution. The theory argues that while the Promethean discourse holds a hegemonic status, alternative environmental discourses can coexist in the media commons, including ecological modernization at the national level featuring the commensurability of economic growth and environmental protection and community-centered environmental justice. Oriented by this theoretical assumption, this study explores what coexisting and competing environmental discourses are generated and circulated in Zimbabwean media on three strata–global power relations, national environmental strategies and rural marginalized ethnic minority groups.

         As environmental discourses are driven by agents and motives (Dryzek, 2005), the interplay of different environmental discourses leads to an investigation of how power relations among the multiple agents play out and what social consequences are implied in the media representation of the tension. Also, at the media institutional level, this study analyzes how the political and economic contexts of the Zimbabwean society, the structures of media ownership, and journalistic practices impact the production of these discourses.

         This paper explores the historical depth and geographical complexity that the concept of cinematic solidarities brings to the understanding of transnational connections and exchanges initiated by film cultural workers in their fights for global equality. I turn to this category after researching for several years how contemporary filmmakers, archival film researchers, activist media makers, and film festival organizers mobilized film cultural infrastructures at their disposal to take part in a wave of global uprisings that traversed the world throughout the 2010s. The projects I look into (such as Subversive Film’s archival film practice, Luta ca caba inda, the Subversive Film Festival) bring together places like Palestine, Guinea-Bissau, Cuba, Germany, Croatia, and India, signaling how contours of contemporary political imaginaries cross familiar boundaries between North and South or West and East. In this context, the notion of cinematic solidarities transcends the limitations of area studies. It offers a framework for unpacking how these projects articulate and carry out their political stakes through recognizing the necessity to establish, nurture, and expand global connections as an indispensable tool in hindering and offering alternatives to operations of racial capital and neocolonialism.

         In building my conceptualizing of cinematic solidarities, I turn to the recent work of cultural historians invested in excavating and tracing the connections forged through broader historical projects of decolonization, tricontinentalism, and Non-Aligned movement (Mahler 2018, Djagalov 2020, Bystrom et al. l 2021). Largely overlooked in and preceding the dominant globalization debates, these geopolitical alliances and their complex geographies reveal a long durée of the politicalsignificance of global media flows. The contemporary film cultural workers I focus on also evoke these histories and carry out their work as an extension or revitalization of the same traditions. To parse out the simultaneous historical continuities and ruptures underlying cinematic solidarities, I consider them in relation to Sylvia Winter’s understanding of a long durée of struggles against colonial forms of being, thinking, and governing, an account equally attentive to the past and the future “struggles to come” (Winter 2003).

This chapter introduces Between Women Filmmakers Caravan as an example of transnational feminist solidarity in praxis through filmmaking and exhibition. Founded in 2008, Caravan is an independent initiative based in Cairo, Egypt which aims to foster a space for Arab women filmmakers to advocate towards gender-equality. Even though this organization has a community-based model in terms of its filmmaking training programs, it also promotes transnational exchange of ideas through their exhibition programs which brings together women filmmakers from all over the world. Caravan is by no means the only organization with focus on transnational film production and exhibition, Women Make Movies (WMM), for example, has been a catalyst for exhibiting films by women from all over the world. However, while WMM focuses on distributing women’s films at international film festivals and at university classrooms in North America, Caravan focuses on dialogue between women filmmakers. Drawing on the archival materials available at Caravan’s website—lists of films in Caravan’s annual festival, recordings of Q&As with filmmakers, and interviews with Caravan’s team—I analyze this model of feminist solidarity and argue that it disrupts the hierarchy of the West as both the provider of knowledge and the target audience of the Global South filmic productions. I celebrate Caravan as an anecdote to the commodification of culture often visible within the global festival network. Caravan is a refreshing mode of feminist solidarity in our contemporary suffocating global neoliberal mode of feminism which tends to ignore cultural specificities and reduces Arab women to victimhood status. The MENA region has always had a strong presence of women filmmakers and their work has been exhibited at several international film festivals, however, in this paper I exhibit how Caravan is a unique space of transnational feminist dialogue where women can speak from a position of equal knowledge even at the level of the power of speaking in one’s own mother tongue.

         In China, danmei (耽美) refers to the romanticization of male homosexual relationships. As danmei gained traction, production companies tried to bypass the censorship restrictions on homosexuality by toning down explicit depictions of intimacy between male characters. As a result, dangai (耽改), meaning the desexualized modification of danmei, caught on in the 2010s. Several danmei and dangai productions also saw success in international markets in East and Southeast Asia and North America. This study conceptualizes fandoms as the transcultural infrastructure for the global circulation of danmei/dangai media, and we conduct a political economic analysis of the fandoms of Modao Zushi and Word of Honor, two of the most influential danmei/dangai works. Fandoms constitute what Jenkins (2012) calls a “third space” between the corporate monetization of popular culture and the political resistance as embodied in participatory media. The transcultural fan communities of danmei/dangai reveal the disjuncture in cultural globalization (Appadurai, 1990). The cultural interpretation of danmei/dangai gets diversified and contested with fan participation. The glocalization (Kraidy, 2003) of danmei/dangai works in non-Chinese contexts further fosters the hybridization between danmei/dangai and other fan cultures. Moreover, we propose a reading of danmei/dangai fandoms from the perspective of “queer Asia” (Eguchi, 2021) and offer an intervention to the Western-centric view of queer popular culture. The heavy-handed censorship by the queerphobic Chinese state inadvertently articulates the queer potential of danmei/dangai, as it illuminates the power structure enabling heteronormativity and evokes insubordinate fan activities. Without an explicit political awareness, danmei/dangai fandoms become a counterforce against centralized regulation of gender and sexuality. As transcultural fan communities build globally, danmei/dangai works outperform other media exports that are supposed to represent China “properly.” A cultural hybrid itself, danmei/dangai points to a decentered, participatory, and multivalent imagination of queer popular culture.

         This submission is for a short film on my current archival project. I acquired a collection of thousands of videos, as well as documents, photos and audio tapes, that had been in a storage locker in southern California for two decades.

         Arab American Television (AATV), a Los Angeles-based news and media syndicate, produced a weekly bilingual, magazine-style television program throughout the 1980s and 90s. AATV saw itself as representing an immigrant community before larger society. It was also a forum for the community’s vibrant social life, complex cultural negotiations and contentious politics. AATV reflected the zeitgeist of Arab Los Angeles. It was a community that retained close contact with the Arab region even through moments of regional war and crisis. AATV was one of its connective tissues to the homeland.

         In the late 1980s AATV gained a national footprint via the International Channel on cable, moving it into the center of national Arab American life. It was deeply imbued with a spirit of transnationalism, and embodied the inherently hybrid nature of Diasporic life. Today, AATV is largely forgotten, as it has almost no online presence and there is very little writing about the novel program.

         Through digitizing AATV videos myself on obsolete machinery, I’ve undertaken methods of media archaeology tat have me thinking about the forgotten benefits of linear media in material forms. This has proven to be for me a nostalgic practice that reminds me that analog media traveled in the world, calling into question the assumption that the digital era is inherently more transnational. The 10-15 minute video I am working on shows both the process of video recovery, as well as content from the archive that highlights the materiality of transnational media experience in the 1980s and 1990s.

         Addressing music’s contemporary technological and economic regime, David Hesmondhalgh and Leslie Meier make the surprising claim of a “loss of [music’s] cultural and emotional force” (1568). Yet, “What a time to be alive!” can be heard from Nigeria to Colombia, from South Korea to France’s blighted suburbs, precisely in the wake of their recently gained market-mediated visibility through digital music. This paper draws on a year-long ethnography of the Lagos music industry to argue that when it comes to how digital capitalism affects music, the eagerness to emphasize disruption obscures broader trends by positing as the yardstick of change a historically Western construction of music as ideally disembedded from economic relations. The entanglement of music and advertising prompted by digital platforms, and the resulting “musician as entrepreneur” trend, have indeed received particular attention in Western scholarship (Meier; Taylor; Morris; Moore; Taylor; Klein, Meier and Powers; Hesmondhalgh and Meier). The phenomenon is conventionally described as the creeping push for dominance of advertising, “an industry that spends a great deal of its time masking the fact that it exists at all” (Turner 29). However, in Nigeria, artists are prompt to indicate “paid partnership” on their online posts, not to comply with consumer protection laws that, if in existence, would hardly be enforced, but to signal their achievement in being party to transactional relationships. And while the Nigerian music industry is so intertwined with consumer brands that artists serve as proxies in the rivalries between corporate brands, the sponsorship economy has not been the subject of critical scrutiny by the local academic community (Olusoji; Okoli and Atelhe; Yékú; Ugor). Looking at digital platforms from the Global South thus destabilizes historically constructed categories too often erected as analytical concepts, suggesting a need to develop empirically grounded epistemological frameworks through diverse ethnographic entry points.

         In the span of a few decades, Turkish series morphed into a new Turkish delight that rivet hundreds of millions of viewers around the globe to their televisions, computer screens, laptops, and phones. Since their ascent to the global media stage in 2007, Turkish TV series have readily been characterized as applications of Turkish soft power. Whether they are part of Turkish public diplomacy agenda or driven by market imperatives there is an indisputable fact: they have amassed great publicity for Turkey. The topic of this study is to explore the material and representational gains amassed by Turkey through a meta analysis of scholarship about the Turkish series from the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and Europe. Preliminary findings suggest that alongside financial gains from the exports themselves, Turkey also profits from increased trade and tourism, even from countries with no historic, geographical, or affective ties Turkey (e.g., Chile, Angola, Ethiopia). Notably, Turkish series also managed to topple longstanding negative stereotypes of Turks in various locales (e.g., Middle East, Balkans, Russia, Spain). Thus, while various historical and sociocultural contexts affect their reception and what viewers construe as attractive, the global common denominator is accrued Turkish soft power.

         Over the past decade, there has been a growing trend of queer animated shows aimed primarily at children. These include The Legend of Korra (2012-14), Steven Universe (2013-19), and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018-20). I propose that these series constitute the emergence of a new genre, and that this genre of children’s queer fantasy animation has the unique potential to push the boundaries of LGBT+ representation in media and advocate for progressive social change. In this presentation, I will be using two shows as a case study to explore this emerging genre: The Owl House, produced by Disney, and Dead End: Paranormal Park, a co-production between Netflix and the British company Blink Industries. I argue that these shows arose out of the need to respond to the rise of transphobic violence in the UK, and the increasing prevalence of far-right, reactionary rhetoric in the US. Both shows utilize their unique combination of genre and format, along with the educational potential of children’s television, to advocate for the queer community and push back against virulent bigotry in both the UK and US. These series were also shaped by numerous challenges, from Disney’s censorship and conservative ideology to Netflix’s willingness to platform openly transphobic comedians. Ultimately, despite these roadblocks, both series stand as clear demonstrations of how children’s fantasy animation is forging a new frontier for queer representation in media.

         My paper aims to highlight various asymmetric inequalities in the global creative industries, with the example of a cultural production ‘Coke Studio’ which is officially sponsored by the Coca-Cola Company and produced by local musicians and creative producers in Pakistan. My discussion will focus on the multiple layers of mediatization surrounding this production,with an interrogation of the socio-political implications of the ways in which global capitalist corporations like Coca-Cola Company facilitate the production of new cultural forms through their marketing strategies in the Global South and how these cultural products are then marketed on the digital media platforms.

         Using the “creative ambivalence” (Hodgson 2021) framework, I explore the paradoxical ways in which such cultural production and creative labor consequently facilitates the flow of global capital and is deeply imbricated within the circuits of corporate capitalism while at the same time creating agentive spaces and networks of grassroots globalization for the creative producers. My work highlights the strategic role that foreign subsidiary actors like the Coca-Cola Company in Pakistan play for the multinational in “producing locality” through the appropriation of local traditions and cultural narratives, or strategies like “nation branding” and “nostalgia marking” in productions like Coke Studio. It also questions the inherent contradiction of privatizing social data from the cultural commons in the Global South.

         I analyze the ways in which the symbolic economies of social-cultural capital shape the qualitative and subjective experience of creative labor as a social category on the digital music streaming platforms. I underline the ways in which the entertainment platforms like Spotify, Apple Music etc. provide global visibility and opportunity to creative artists from the Global South, which clearly has a significant impact on the work they are producing. I also interrogate, however, the structural imbalance that exists in this interaction when strategies of data assetization, algorithmic bordering and categorization exploits and sometimes limits the work of these creative laborers. However while these digital platforms use different forms of data capture for value creation, I also argue that creative artists from the Global South work within different regimes of values which oftentimes allows them to make different meanings and connections through the digital connectivity on these platforms. My research incorporates digital ethnographies, interviews and data visualizations to show the scope and scale of such ambivalence.

        Upon its release in the March of 2022, RRR, a Telugu movie directed by S.S. Rajamouli, quickly went on to become one of the biggest blockbusters of the post-Covid Indian film industry. Grossing over $11.11 million solely in its Domestic Box-office revenue and over $90 million in international markets, it quickly became a truly international phenomenon. For the first time, a popular Indian action film seemed to have impressed established film critics like Richard Brody (NYT), Simon Abrams (Roger Ebert), and David Sims (The Atlantic). Everyone, it seemed, was impressed with the film’s aesthetics [“maximalist poetry”] and its narrative structure [“political screed”]. However, while the western critics treated RRR as the arrival of a non-western popular action blockbuster that could finally make “Hollywood Jealous,” critics in India were suspicious of the politics animating the film-text. Behind the gravity-defying sequences of flying motorcycles and fighting sequences with traditional bows and arrows, there was an uncanny Hindu nationalist fantasy operating underneath what otherwise was an action-packed narrative― a fantasy that precisely went undetected by the critical eye of the established film critics.

What happens to film’s underlying ideologies as they start circulating within transnational qua Global circuits? Is the discrepancy between international praise and local suspicion simply a symptom of message(s) getting ‘lost in translation,’ or do the Transnational media circuits operate within codes of legibility that fails to read anything beyond the surface-level action? By taking the case of RRR, my presentation will interrogate the category of the ‘Transnational’ and think about the pressing thematic of ‘Nationalism’ circulating within the times of Transnational cinema. I will i) show how the category of ‘Transnational,’ while promising certain openness towards global media production, remains quite limited in its ability to read and make legible the non-western media productions, and ii) argue for a re-evaluation of what we have come to understand as ‘Transnational’ in the Nationalist resurgence.

        In the last decade, there has been an emerging scholarly and public interest in the Eastern European region’s geopolitical and cultural status, followed by a significant trend of locally developed but globally distributed Eastern European quality television series. I intent to show the relationship between postcolonial symbolism and post-socialist cultural hierarchies by analyzing television series such as Czech series The Sleepers (Bez vědomí, HBO, 2019), Hungarian The Informant (A besúgó, HBO, 2022) and Polish 1983 (Netflix, 2018). All of these products represent a hybrid generic repertoire and they are concerned with the region’s troubled past, using state socialist regimes as contemporary allegories of alarming issues such as white nationalism, right-wing populism, and social control. These notions serve as analytical terms in the presentation. Relying on comparative narrative- and textual analysis, this lecture argues that contemporary Eastern European serial products are utilizing a transnational, Westernized image of socialism to address tendencies of contemporary political authoritarianism. I examine bonds of power and representation in pre-figurative spectacles of state socialist regimes, personal and political legacies, aesthetic and social codes and strategies of self-colonization. I also state that the proliferation of Cold War frameworks in contemporary Eastern European popular media is not isolated from the historical legacy of socialist television: these products use socialism as an allegory to implement social criticism towards contemporary populist regimes. I will also touch on how HBO’s decision on halting original local production in most parts of Europe – including Central and Eastern Europe – redistribute the market and take effect on production and consumption by examining RTL Hungary’s first original quality television series called The King (A király, RTL, 2022).

        The remote game island in Squid Game is an allegorical space detached from reality and yet reflects the entire world system in which the state of exception, embodied by the island, is intrinsic. Game players pursue their supralegal desires while following the rules of the games that are fundamentally permissive, contingent, and self-modulating. While this contradiction is naturalized, they internalize the biopolitical ideology of neoliberal capitalism, the law of fair competition and free choice turning into the free-for-all survivalism justified in a war of all against all. Updating Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, I will address the game island as a ‘reflexive heterotopia’ in this aspect; an ‘other’ space that complementarily counters the rest of the world while mirroring the whole world, including the very exceptional place, self-reflexively. Here, the gamers, though degraded into bare lives to be slaughtered, also experience a sort of existential gift-giving to each other, unexpected sacrifice and guilt entailing ethical indebtedness beyond capitalist calculation.

        Such ambivalence not only emerges through different phases in the drama but also expands through its unprecedently viral global phenomenon. The losers’ brutal story hit the jackpot in the cultural market. Netflix’s stock price rocketed thanks to the cheaply-produced local drama’s globally appealing harsh critique of capitalism. Following Parasite, Squid Game became another global Korean product that manifested the ‘performative self-contradiction’ of the capitalist market capitalizing on anti-capitalist culture and vice versa. This paradoxical feedback loop of mutual benefits underlies today’s cultural survivalism. Media content can depict capitalistic catastrophes more cinematically by depending more financially on the capitalist system. Conversely, this system can reinforce itself more powerfully by embracing and investing in such critical content more benevolently. The tug-of-war between cultural products critical of the system and the system reappropriating them proliferates infinitely across a broad spectrum of positions and ideologies. This contextual contradiction is what the reflexive heterotopia ultimately reflects. Then I will ask: what is Squid Game good for?

        The 1990s-2000s witnessed the dramatic evolution of video games, the boom of the market economy, China’s integration into the world, and the flourishing of nationalism in China. In the Chinese video game industry, there are two main discourses in this period, which respectively and contradictorily represent the stigmatization and legitimization of video games: digital drug discourse and nationalist discourse. Digital drug discourse, regarding video games as virtual drugs, represents panic about game addiction and games’ negative influence on the body and morals of young people. Nationalist discourse indicates panic toward the exotic narrative, capital, and ideology (Zhang, 2013). This study aims to figure out what had given rise to the tension between the two discourses and how this tension, in turn, shaped the Chinese game industry.

        Using historical and political-economic methods, this study mainly conducts discourse analysis on three newspapers (People’s Daily, Guangming Daily, and Southern Weekly) and three magazines (Play, Popsoft, and Electronic Game Software), which are the main battlefield of public opinion about video games in the 1990s and 2000s. My work provides an intersectional perspective of media globalization and media territorialization and nationalism with the existing literature in Media Industry Studies. Western research on game industries is rooted in global capitalism, and games are generally considered to be media of global hypercapitalism rather than national products (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Havens & Lotz, 2012; Nieborg, 2021). Thus, in the game industry studies, the regional industry (Nieborg & de Kloet, 2016; Ruffino & Woodcock, 2021; Williams, 2002) or regional inequalities (Cohendet et al., 2018; de Prato et al., 2014) are analyzed from the different positions in the global industrial chains, as well as various production or consumption structures. The struggle and fusion of power, culture, and ideology are not fully assessed from a national perspective. Zhang (2013) pointed out that the nationalist surge in the Chinese video game industry unleashes their cultural and economic productivity. Showing the boycott of foreign games by Chinese players, the competition between Chinese game companies and foreign game companies, and the government's restrictions on foreign capital, this study lends a composite lens to critique the mainstream media/state’s nationalist and territorialized transformation of the media industry in the context of media globalization.