Asia Mediated

Asia Mediated

Introduction

The Center for Asian Research at Arizona State University is happy to present Asia Mediated, a curated digital collection of teaching modules by ASU scholars connected by a common theme: understanding Asia through media. These modules span East, South, and Southeast Asia and connect historical themes and contexts to modern and contemporary ones. The “media” involved range from manuscripts, paintings, and books to newspapers, films, videos, websites, blogs, and today’s social media.

Organizationally, Asia Mediated is flexible. The modules may stand alone—e.g., “Gods Meditated: Religious Images, Televised Mythologies, and National Politics in Contemporary India” by Alexander Henn or “Korean Comfort Women” by YoungJu Shin—or they may be bundled by region, era, or theme to create entire courses or partial courses. The table of contents identifies twenty-nine thematic approaches to the modules, from “Arts and Aesthetics” to “Violence, War, and Peace.” These broad themes, in turn, are linked to clusters of related modules. We hope that users of the modules will experiment with the possibilities.

Asia Mediated was originally conceived by ASU Professors Juliane Schober and Pauline Cheong, of the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (SHPRS) and the Hugh Downs School of Communication (HDSC), respectively. Professors Schober and Cheong served as co-principal investigators for the Title VI Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Program grant (made available by the US Department of Education), which funded the project over a period of three years.

Aside from Professors Schober and Cheong, seventeen other ASU faculty members from eleven disciplines participated in the project as module creators and as participants in a series of seminars built around the themes of the project. Seven guest speakers presented work linked to the project. These included scholars of Myanmar, China, Korea, India, and the Philippines. Aside from these activities, Professor Cheong designed and executed an entire course titled “Digital Media, Culture, and Communication in Asia” as part of the Asia Mediated project.

Asia Mediated has been created with several audiences in mind. University undergraduates in Asia Studies and related courses in history, political science, media studies, global studies, religious studies, and gender studies (among others) are one important audience. Another is community college students and their teachers, for whom these modules offer a valuable resource for strengthening Asia Studies in this influential educational community. Many of the modules can also be used in high school classes as part of advanced placement courses in world history, global studies, and Asia studies.

Asia Mediated can be accessed via http://scalar.usc.edu/works/asiamediatedtoc. We recommend using Google Chrome and viewing modules at no more than 100% zoom for maximum performance of the Scalar software, especially for embedded films and videos. We would also like to note that much of the embedded media comes from outside sources from institutions such as The Smithsonian and from YouTube. As a result, you may encounter some advertisements.

The Center for Asian Research would like to thank many people for assisting in the Asia Mediated project, including interns from Barrett, the Honors College (Megan Kelly, Lauren Garvey, Diana Tran, Ranjani Venkatakrishnan, Arni Dizon, Sarah Cichomski) and especially Ronae Matriano, who has assisted with Asia Mediated from first to last and has mastered the secrets of Scalar and assisted virtually all the faculty module makers. As program coordinators of the Center, Chris Lundry, Jonathan Kinkel, Alexander Plum, and Chan Lwin have all played a role in shepherding the project and its many parts to completion. Finally, Jennifer Quincey curated and edited the entire collection of modules and created the index of themes and subthemes. The final version of the project, polished and complete, owes very much to her good work.

Why this work matters. The content of the Asia Mediated modules ranges far and wide and dips into history. An overriding concern of the project and the collective modules is how media both reflects and shapes the societies of Asia today. We are particularly interested in how digital media is shaping new epistemologies and knowledge formations in Asia and about Asia. These new knowledge formations are transforming many areas of everyday life, including communication, popular culture, religion, politics, and education. ASU’s Asia Mediated is designed as a contribution to understanding this profound process, both in Asia and, through Asia, in the world at large.
_______

Master list of modules