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In this paper, I intend to explore the role played by reflexivity in grounding a more critical perspective when designing, implementing and analysing participatory digital media research. To carry out this methodological reflection, I will present and discuss a recently concluded research project on young people’s game-making in an after-school programme targeting Latin American migrants in London/UK. I will pay special attention to how my subjectivities influenced planning, data generation and analysis of this programme, and to how context, lived experiences, curricular decisions and interpersonal relationships shaped the kinds of knowledge produced through this research. Findings emerging from this experience included relevant dissonances between curricular design/decisions and the use of participatory approaches in game-making, and the limitations of traditional analytical categories within the Social Sciences field (e.g., gender and intersectionality) to understanding subjectivities expressed through game-making. This study offers relevant insights into the place of reflexivity in research on digital media production by young people by highlighting its complexity and by calling for more critical and less homogenising approaches to this type of research.

This paper explores a game-making programme for 14 Latin American migrants aged 13-18 in London/UK, carried out between October/2017-January/2018, where I investigated the relationships between game conventions, platforms and personal preferences in the curation of fluid identities through game production. Participants presented varying levels of affinity with games linked both to access issues and to other specific elements (e.g. perception of games in contemporary culture, gender). Questionnaires, observations, unstructured/semistructured interviews and gaming archives were employed to explore this participatory initiative and data was analysed through Multimodal Sociosemiotics. Findings remarked how shared understandings about digital games can find their way into platforms and act as “cultural-technical gatekeepers”, supporting or hindering the engagement with game-making of those often perceived as outsiders to gaming culture. This gatekeeping happens when there are “creative dissonances” between, for example, personal preferences and platforms aligned to normative/mainstream genres. These dissonances, however, can end up fostering subversive designs, contravening gaming conventions and potentially challenging traditional gaming boundaries. This insight is relevant for understanding “cultural-technical constraints” and subversive/non-mainstream game-making, especially in relation to innovation and appropriation of game-making resources/strategies by non-mainstream groups.

This article investigates the relationship between young people’s game-making practices and meaning-making in videogames. By exploring two different games produced in a game-making club in London through a multimodal sociosemiotic approach, the author discusses how semiotic resources and modes were recruited by participants to realize different discourses. By employing concepts such as modality truth claims and grammar, he examines how these games help us reflect on the links between intertextuality, hegemonic gaming forms and sign-making through digital games. He also outlines how a broader approach to what has been recently defined as the ‘procedural’ mode by Hawreliak in Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames (2018) can be relevant for promoting different and more democratic forms of meaning-making through videogames.

The present paper discusses questions related to the histories of videogames, more specifically in how we approach videogames in Global South. By using Zeebo, a Brazilian console produced in the late 2000s as an epistemic tool, I discuss the limitations of universalist, mainstream-centric epistemological models for exploring videogames as cultural phenomena. By investigating Zeebo’s discourses about piracy and players in the Global South, I argue that this platform can be seen as a partial decolonial project, destabilising conventional historical narratives about South-North relationships in videogames, but refraining from challenging a mainstream, Global North oriented epistemology. This exploratory work, therefore, elaborates on how a decolonial project of history of videogames, one that is more epistemically just to Global South, could be sought.

In the last decades, digital games have moved from niche to mainstream. As more people play, talk about, and engage with these artifacts, they have become an important part of contemporary cultures, giving rise to game literacy—the set of skills needed to meaningfully engage with video games. While the potentials of game literacy have, to some extent, been already discussed in the literature, we have not adequately discussed the need for a game literacy that problematizes the sociocultural dimensions of gaming, including the hegemonic, exclusionary rationales implicitly disseminated through mainstream gaming. In this chapter, I outline a decolonial model for game literacy, remarking how the reflection about the gaming circuits of production and dissemination should be part of any initiative that aims at dealing with critical and creative competences towards gaming, and how these are crucial for any citizen in contemporary societies.

Thématique a priori universelle, l’amour prête aisément à des réflexions anhistoriques que la philosophie antique aurait déjà définitivement formulées. Pourtant, la variabilité historique de ses expressions et la querelle sans cesse renouvelée sur ses significations démontrent qu’elle est, elle aussi, traversée de divers conflits épistémologiques. Loin d’un idéal transcendant, les récents travaux envisagent l’amour comme une visée communicationnelle en même temps que décroît l’idéologie du sacrifice personnel et que se forge une démocratie relationnelle où chacun doit en théorie pouvoir se faire entendre. Les outils y sont ceux de l’expression personnelle et de la responsabilisation, de la délibération et du compromis pour que soit construite une sphère publique intime où communiquent couple et individualités.

RésuméLes séries télévisées américaines ont dès les années 1950 problématisé les articulations entre modèles amoureux et vagues d’émancipation des femmes. Cet article, centré sur les amours des héroïnes, propose un découpage en trois temps de l’histoire de ces séries, qui tend à montrer que si le romantisme continue de sous-tendre les pratiques, il se trouve confronté à la dissymétrie qu’il provoque entre hommes et femmes et perd du terrain face à la « relation pure », nouvel idéal relationnel. Les femmes au foyer des années 1950 sont soumises à l’insatisfaction de leur condition et laissent transparaître les premiers échecs de l’amour romantique, alors que, deux décennies plus tard, au milieu des années 1990, les working girls célibataires, égéries de l’après-féminisme, constituent l’amour en une menace à leur indépendance et à leur épanouissement. Enfin la récente vague de quadragénaires, veuves ou divorcées, tente de dépasser la contradiction entre indépendance et amour, en pratiquant réellement la « relation pure ».

Overly persistent pursuit is a staple of movie love stories, but a new study shows that it could normalize some troubling behaviors.

Transnational Korean Television: Cultural Storytelling and Digital Audience provides previously absent analyses of Korean TV dramas' transnational influences, peculiar production features, distribution, and consumption to enrich the contextual understanding of Korean TV's transcultural mobility. Even as academic discussions about the Korean Wave have heated up, Korean television studies from transnational viewpoints often lack in-depth analysis and overlook the recently extended flow of Korean television beyond Asia. This book illustrates the ecology of Korean television along with the Korean Wave for the past two decades in order to showcase Korean TV dramas' international mobility and its constant expansion with the different Western television and their audiences. Korean TV dramas' mobility in crossing borders has been seen in both transnational and transcultural flows, and the book opens up the potential to observe the constant flow of Korean television content in new places, peoples, manners, and platforms around the world. Scholars of media studies, communication, cultural studies, and Asian studies will find this book especially useful.

Since the Korean War (1950-53), South Korea (hereafter Korea) has undergone a series of political changes. The move towards democratisation was largely spurred on by the demonstrations and riots occurring throughout the 1980s. In 1987 massive demonstrations forced the then President Chun DooHwan to call a new presidential election, and President-elect Rho Tae-Woo to implement more social reforms. The notion of civil society in Korea has been a relatively new concept until very recently, mainly because it has not achieved wide recognition from the public, media or the state. The development of a people’s movement advocating democracy could be said to be the foundation of ‘civil society’ in Korea.

Japan in the 1990s differs vastly from what it had been two or three decades earlier. The Japanese state has undergone such a fundamental change that it has been described as a ‘regime shift’ (Pempel 1998). Although the longterm ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has returned to power after its defeat in 1993, it no longer has an absolute majority in the Cabinet. Surrounded by numerous scandals and corruption charges, both the government and bureaucracy have undergone major reforms to increase transparency and reduce bureaucratic influence over the policy-making process. The Japanese Diet has, for example, passed the Information Disclosure Law to increase openness in the administration. Economic policies have also been transformed to cope with the malaise characterised by continuing problems of bad loans in the financial sector, rising unemployment and declining manufacturing productivity.

Television first appeared in Hong Kong in 1957. It was a cable television service run by the Rediffusion Company which had operated a highly successful wired sound broadcasting service since 1949. Hong Kong was the first British colony to have television. But the Rediffusion television service was very expensive. Its monthly subscription fee was HK$55. In 1958, a technical worker’s monthly wages were HK$360 and an unskilled worker earned only HK$75 (Hong Kong Government 1959: 32). A year before the introduction of free-to-air television in 1967, Rediffusion television had only 67,000 subscribers (Hong Kong Government 1967: 206). Thus before 1967 television was an elite medium and its social impact was minimal.

The question of why civil society presents such appeal for commentators, scholars and journalists writing about developing nations is an important one. The most likely explanation is that a kind of global faith exists in civil society as the driving force of a new world order. This global transformation, exemplified by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, celebrates people’s freedom to participate in public discourse, and ultimately in processes of directly electing political representatives. In this sense the concepts of civil society and the public sphere come together to describe a global anti-authoritarian groundswell where the power of ideas is linked to global cultural development.

In the uprising of 16-20 January 2001, which ousted former Philippine President Joseph Estrada from power, two forces stood out as pivotal: television (specifically the coverage of the impeachment trial which was the centre of public attention) and civil society (which was instrumental in the uprising itself). In this chapter I argue that notwithstanding the central importance of television in this most recent national political change, the regulation of the sector and its long-term associations with crony capitalism have established barriers to civil society finding its voice on television.

Singapore has changed dramatically in the last forty years, moving in the 1960s and 1970s from domestic import substitution to low-cost exportoriented goods. Then in the 1980s developing a regional financial and business hub and now increasingly positioning itself as an exporter of capital and expertise (Courtenay 1995: 90). With exceptionally high economic growth rates most years, a GNP per capita of US$6,000 more than Australia and three times Australia’s annual average growth, Singapore has attracted a high percentage of foreign direct investment. Despite exhibiting similar advantages to Australia in terms of a well-educated workforce, competitive pricing, developed transport and telecommunications and citizens from culturally diverse business, family and personal networks throughout the region, Singapore’s media and resultant civil and civic development has not been as progressive and liberal as Australia’s and indeed has not kept pace. So it would appear that state existence, security and prosperity as desired ends for Singapore do not necessarily rely on an equal strengthening of the public sphere, or at least this is not evident to date.

Television was introduced to Indonesia in 1962 as part of President Sukarno’s flurry of nationalistic ‘symbol wielding’ associated with the Fourth Asian Games (Feith 1963). Televisi Republik Indonesia’s (TVRI) legal status as a creature of the president was reinforced further in Presidential Decree #27, 1963, when it was absorbed after the Games into the ‘Spirit of Sukarno Foundation’, a highly personalised institution under the direct control of the President. TVRI was established as a Foundation in its own right on 20 October 1963, with the President as General Manager (Presidential Decree #215, 1963). Article 3 nominates TVRI as the sole organisation authorised to establish and develop television stations in Indonesia, a highly significant provision which made the commercial broadcasters established in the 1990s dependent on TVRI. TVRI’s status as an activity of the TVRI Foundation was not formally revoked until the enactment of Broadcasting Law #24, 1997, although in administrative practice it came under the control of the Department of Information in 1966.

Modern Malaysia was established in 1963 following a drawn-out struggle against British interests which had occupied territory on Penang and Singapore and the Straits of Malacca in 1786, 1819 and 1824 respectively. In 1867 these outposts came under the control of the British Colonial Office and were governed as a Crown Colony. Although Britain did not directly colonise the Malay States, which remained legally autonomous, it imposed effective administrative control over Malaya and the Borneo territories from the late 1870s until the Japanese occupation in 1942.

The reform of media regulation can be read as part of the wider movement towards democratisation in Thailand in the 1990s. Real progress was made in media reform, yet as the traditional control of the Army has been reduced, the power of commercial media monopolies has grown. The main threat to further media liberalisation is now the growth of private monopolies. This was exemplified by the election of Thaksin Shinawatra in January 2001, as he is a media magnate on an international scale comparable with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Both men have used their communications business as a path to political power. The first part of this chapter will summarise Thai ideas about civil society, television regulation and the political context of media reform, followed by an analysis of how civil society issues are represented on Thai TV. Broadly, there are urban news and current affairs programmes of an investigative nature, and then there are rural-oriented programmes featuring community participation, notably Lan Ban Lan Muang. Finally, the prospects for media regulation since Thaksin’s election will be considered. The progress towards media reform made in the second half of the 1990s has since stalled under Thaksin’s new government.