Korean Wave – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Call for proposals: Twenty-Five Years Later: Rethinking the Impact of Hallryu (Korean Wave) as a Global Popular Cultural Force, Special Issue of the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2023.

Submissions are encouraged from scholars that use different theoretical and empirical approaches to the special issue of Journal of Asian Pacific Communication on the impact of Korean Wave (Hallyu) as a global popular cultural force. As the process of globalization has eroded traditional forms of national culture and identity, the interfusion between local cultures and global culture continues to increase in various corner of the world. A prominent example of the globalization of culture can be found in the Korean Wave (pronounced Hallyu in Korean). The Korean Wave, which began about 25 years ago with the exporting of Korean TV dramas across East and Southeast Asia, now refers to the popularity of South Korean popular culture including drama, movies and popular music in other Asian countries. As the seventh-largest film market in the world, Korea is now a brisk exporter of music, TV programming, and films to the Asia region and other continents such as Africa, North and South Americas, and Europe. Now this Korean version of cultural imperialism has impact on Korean language, interracial marriage, imported labors to cultural commodities such as foods, cosmetics, fashion, education, and tourism.

The special issue will examine the past, present, and future impacts of Korean Wave as a global popular cultural force in terms of political, cultural, historical, sociological, and economical aspects with a focus on the key internal and external moments, constructs, elements, fads, factors shaping current and future developments of Korean Wave. The articles will examine communication and discourse in media, social media, political and cultural arenas, and space it occupies in a certain nation or region. They will also focus on how use of language (and translation) and non-verbal symbolic systems in any on communicative contexts, including face-to-face interactions/conversations/dialog within a KW context, and popular cultural texts such as films, music, animation, television drama, etc.

The Journal of Asian Pacific Communication invites authors to submit proposals or abstract for studies that engage both empirical and critical perspectives for Korean Wave (Hallyu) research. They are particularly interested in studies that apply existing empirical and critical methodologies towards analyzing and identifying the past, present, and future perspectives and phenomena. They encourage proposals from a variety of scholarly areas (e.g., intercultural, political, interpersonal, media, organizational, cultural and global studies, economics, performance studies, music, film studies, linguistics, journalism, ads and PR, and social media, etc.). Finally, the special issue welcomes any theoretical essays that deal with Korean Wave in the context of (post) cultural imperialism and post-colonialism.

Call for Book Chapters: The Korean Wave: Diffusion of Korean Pop Culture to be edited by Do Kyun David Kim. Deadline for abstracts: September 15, 2019.

Exploring the diffusion of K-pop culture in western countries, this book aims to provide generalizable analyses that explain why Korean pop culture products (e.g., K-pop songs, TV dramas, movies, foods, beauty items, etc.) have survived and enjoyed increasing popularity in western countries. While designed to provide “generalizable” analyses on Korean popular culture products, this scholarly project focuses on the popularization of the Korean culture among people in western countries: the United States, Canada, and Europe. Ample research has provided diverse explanations on the influence of western pop culture in non-western countries, however, research dealing with the cultural flow from non-western countries to western countries has been insufficient to provide generalizable explanations.

This project will fill the gap in the research on the globalization of popular culture by providing case studies of the remarkable cultural flow from South Korea to western countries, especially among people who were born and have grown up in western countries.