Pinoy pop culture refers to widespread material and symbolic products and practices in the overlapping spheres of media, the arts, politics, fashion, music, sport, religion, among others. Since the late 1980s, scholarship on Philippine popular culture has provided insights into our society’s symbolic, social and political order as well as people’s hopes, fears and fantasies. Popular or non-elite forms and practices are productive sites to examine socio-cultural transformations and continuities.
The ubiquity and indispensability of media in everyday life make it not only the most recognizable cultural form but also the medium through which cultural products and practices gain presence and meaning. As media technologies and media environments become more interactive, interconnected and accessible, media users are not only consumers but also producers of content. They now have the capacity to talk back, tell their stories and represent themselves. Over the last several years, social media have shaped content and audiences across media genres. Media organizations have responded by incorporating audience-generated content into their productions. At the same time, today’s media technologies have eroded boundaries between the local and global, thereby expanding users’ engagements beyond the nation and creating new audiences for content producers.
In light of such transformations, the Ateneo de Manila University Department of Communication’s National Conference seeks to raise recurring and new questions about Philippine popular culture, particularly its mediated forms: What do the new capacities of media audiences and producers mean for the consumption, production and circulation of Pinoy pop culture? Do media productions and texts in the social media age challenge the symbolic and political order or reinforce it? What fantasies and fears, anxieties and aspirations, pleasures and powers emerge from current audience engagements? We invited papers that examine Pinoy pop culture through comparative and critical perspectives.
The conference seeks to approach inquiries into Pinoy pop culture through comparative analysis in order to identify continuities, differences and variations between periods, localities, contexts, actors and aspects of the media process. Comparisons can be made within the Philippine context or in relation to culturally proximate regions such as Southeast Asia, South and East Asia and Latin America. At the same time, critical frameworks reveal power relations, interests and logics that are encoded into media texts and practices. In combining comparative and critical perspectives to analyze Pinoy pop culture, we seek to produce more nuanced accounts of media and everyday life, especially the ways actors exercise agency in response to economic and political forces that shape the media environment.
In examining contemporary media texts and practices, the conference becomes a space for scholars, students and practitioners to engage one another in grappling with the ways media complicate and constitute Filipinos’ identifications, relations and valuations.
We invited papers on the following themes or topics:
- Identity and sociality on social media
- Everyday photography and practices of image curation
- Romantic comedy and Pinoy audiences
- Digital filmmaking and transformations in the film industry
- Pinoy music consumption and production on the Internet
- Food, fashion and social media
- Queer presence in Pinoy mainstream media
- Reality television and its audiences
- Pinoy fan fiction, blogs and self-publishing
- The mediation of sport and rise of sport celebrities
- Transformations in news organizations
- Political participation and protest on social media platforms
- News audiences and social news sites
- Audiences and production practices of tabloids and comics
- Emergent discourses on local radio
- Advertising and Filipino bodies
- Drama and sexuality in telenovelas and e-pocketbooks
- Expressions of faith in contemporary media