Standing Session

Asian / Film and Media Studies

Xinming Liao (University of California - Irvine)
xinm@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

Suchen Ding (University of California - Irvine)
such@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

For over a century, Asian film and media have offered sites ripe for cultural analyses. While resisting the essentializing label of "Asian," this session seeks to benefit from conversations that emerge when we recognize the heterogeneity of Asia as well as the commonalities that run through its various cultural products. In 2026, this session invites particular attention to power and hierarchy in Asian film and media, welcoming analyses that move beyond the binary of domination and resistance to explore the more ambivalent, entangled, and contradictory ways that power and resistance operate across cultural forms and social life. Featuring papers about work produced across a variety of geopolitical settings and historical periods, presenters are encouraged to bring analyses of film, television, digital media, video games, or any work that fits the conversation of “film and media studies.” By looking at such texts separately from, while remaining attentive to, literary culture, this session fosters ongoing exchanges within the Asian Studies conversation at the annual PAMLA conference.

Scholarship in Asian film and media has long grappled with the very questions at the center of PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” addressing issues such as who rules, who is ruled, and who gets to tell the story. We invite proposals to pay particular attention to power dynamics and societal hierarchy in Asian film and media, welcoming analyses that move beyond the binary of domination and resistance to explore the more ambivalent, entangled, and contradictory ways that power and resistance operate across cultural forms and social life.

Building on the concerns of power and conflict, this session does not seek to use Asian contexts as supplements to scholarly discussions on film and media in the United States, but instead aims to unravel the potential intersections between the two fields. It will feature papers that look at film and media produced in a variety of geopolitical settings, across a wide range of historical periods in Asian contexts. In doing so, we hope to foster greater exchange between ongoing conversations within Asian Studies and Film and Media Studies at the annual PAMLA conference.

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to:
- Temporal and spatial politics
- Media infrastructure and the material conditions of cultural production
- Platform economies, digital labor, and algorithmic governance
- State power, censorship, and ideological governance
- Histories of media institutions, archives, and circulation
- Transnational flows, co-productions, and global capital
- Everyday life, affect, and the politics of subjectivity
- Environmental media and ecological costs of media systems
- Video games, interactive media, and new forms of control and agency

We welcome proposals across film, television, digital media, and related forms, as well as interdisciplinary and methodologically experimental approaches. By bringing these perspectives into conversation, this session aims to rethink how power is mediated, inhabited, and contested across diverse Asian contexts.