On 12:00-14:30pm, Friday 22nd September I will be returning to my alma mater to present at the Trans-Asia Workshop hosted by the Monash Asia Institute. The workshop is entitled “The ‘political’ potential of digital communication and social media.”  Registration and venue details are available here. If you wish to attend, please ensure you RSVP as seating is limited.

Here is some more info on the event:

The rise of digital communication and social media has revolutionarily opened up the potential for newly engendering cross-border alliances, social movements, activisms and affective publics. However, what has also been generated is group polarisation, hate speech and fake news. This brainstorming workshop aims to revisit the “political” potential, and limitation, of digital communication and social media by considering some cases in Asian contexts.

We will start the workshop with three brief presentations (15-20min each) as below, followed by discussion.

*Earvin Cabalquinto on Affective Publics (Philippines/diaspora) (Monash University)

*Tom Baudinette on Transnational Sexual Politics in East Asia (Japan-Korea-China) (Macquarie University)

*Yacinta Kurniasih on Social-Media and Multilingualism in Indonesia (Monash University)

I’ll be focusing particularly on my research on gay dating apps in Japan and their role in fostering trans-Asian intimacies among gay men from South Korea, China, and Japan. I will be exploring how such dating apps provide alternative spaces for developing relationships between East Asian men in response to rising anti-Chinese and anti-Korean xenophobia in Japan’s gay sub-culture (about which I have written in my award-winning article “Ethnosexual Frontiers in Queer Tokyo”).