Mediating Rurality and Cultural Memory: Public Broadcasting, Local Communities, and Folk Performance In Postwar East Asia

How have mass media produced, circulated, and contested images of the rural, the local, and “home” in modern societies? This session invites papers that examine the mediation of rurality and cultural memory through broadcasting, film, sound media, digital platforms, exhibitions, festivals, and other cultural forms. We are especially interested in the ways media institutions, state agencies, experts, artists, local communities, and audiences have collaborated and negotiated in making “rural” people, places, practices, and traditions publicly visible.
The session welcomes historical and contemporary studies of agricultural programming, development communication, folk and popular music, local festivals, heritage performances, tourism media, community media, and audiovisual archives. Possible questions include: How do media translate local knowledge and everyday practices into national or transnational imaginaries? How are authenticity, nostalgia, modernization, and regional identity produced and contested? What kinds of power relations emerge between producers, experts, performers, residents, and publics? How can sociologists use broadcast archives, visual materials, sound recordings, and production documents to analyze the social construction of place and belonging?
By bringing together media sociology, sociology of knowledge and culture, rural sociology, sociology of the arts, and visual sociology, the session aims to develop comparative perspectives on the cultural politics of mediated rurality in turbulent times.