Asian Cultural Research Network (ACRN)

School of Culture and Communication

Youth Travel, Migration, and Transnational Media between Asia and Australia

In cultural globalisation, increases in the trans-national movements of people and media connect Australia with Asia more than ever before. Over the past decade Australia has welcomed increasing numbers of youth travellers, international students, and permanent migrants from Asia. In the same period, an Asian mediasphere has been consolidating, with cross-border mobility of media intensifying due to ubiquitous broadband connectivity and mobile media technologies. These allow the ready accessibility of Asian media content in Australia, and enable migrant populations to effortlessly maintain trans-border social networks.

This project is a three-year collaboration between researchers in the School of Culture and Communication and scholars in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University. The project's goal is to develop an international research network to collaboratively research the cultural effects of the intensified mobility of both media and people between Asia and Australia as a result of globalisation in our region.

Through a series of activities in both Melbourne and Hong Kong over this three-year period, including masterclasses, public lectures, cross-institutional research training linkups, collaborative research workshops and joint publications and grant applications, the project's principal aims are to:

• Enhance collaborative exchange between researchers working in Melbourne and Hong Kong on projects concerned with the cultural effects of the increased mobility of people and media in our region
• Establish networks of communication and exchange to assist the scholarly development of early career and postgraduate researchers in Asia-related cultural research at UoM, HKBU, and other universities in our region

Events

Digital Citizenship in Asia

October 2018

In the past two decades, the study of digital citizenship has emerged as an important site of study in the field of communications and new media. Studies on the concept has developed from focusing on normative ideas on citizenship to a more multidimensional, non-linear understanding (Coleman, 2006; Choi, 2016), seen as 'a fluid interface' remaking the idea of citizenship (Vivienne, McCosker, Johns, 2016). Youth, in particular has emerged as key players. However, research on youth and digital citizenship tended to focus on youth living in developed Western countries with more 'stable' democratic and civic engagements. The Digital Citizenship in Asia Seminar aims to work out how youth in Asian societies are actively participating and engaging in digital citizenship. The speakers will be presenting their research on youth and their forms of engagement with digital citizenship in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines.

Special Journal Issue

Third Special Journal Issue

A special issue of the Chinese open access cultural studies journal, Refeng《热风》, was edited by Fran Martin and published in 2019. The issue gathers together five of the papers presented at our 2018 symposium at the National University of Singapore on Digital Citizenship in Asia, in Chinese translation. Refeng is published by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Shanghai University.

View the issue

Second Special Journal Issue

A special issue of Cultural Studies on "Mobilities, Borders and Precarities in Asia's New Millennium," gathering together nine papers presented at the ACRN's "Mobilities and Borders" symposium at HKBU in October 2016, is being co-edited by Fran Martin, John Nguyet Erni and Audrey Yue (publication scheduled 2019-2020).

Special Journal Issue

This 2017 special issue of Cultural Studies Review, on "Media Mobilities and Identity in East and South East Asia", co-edited by Daniel Edwards, Louis Ho and Seokhun Choi, grows out of the Asian Cultural Research Network's activities with Hong Kong Baptist University and Yonsei University in Melbourne in 2015.

View the issue

Contact

Assoc. Professor Fran Martin
Email: f.martin@unimelb.edu.au

Supported by the School of Culture and Communication

The Asian Cultural Research Network is a collaboration between researchers in the School of Culture and Communication (SCC) and colleagues at Hong Kong Baptist University and the National University of Singapore.

The Network was initiated by Fran Martin and Audrey Yue, academics within the School, and funded by a University of Melbourne International Research and Research Training Grant. It has been supported by the School and the University to run a series of international research workshops, public talks, and postgraduate masterclasses that have resulted in the production of three journal special issues.