Call for Contributions until 28/02/22: BTS, a Critical Reader

^{Responsible Contact Person at CEDITRAA: Casandra Christinean}

Dr. Frances Gateward, one of the guest lecturers of last year’s Korean Popular Culture Workshop, and her research team are calling for contributions for their volume “BTS: A Critical Reader”.  They seek rigorous but accessible contributions from academics, fans, artists, and/or geared towards a general readership/undergraduate reader from a wide-range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. 

“BTS is the biggest popular music act on the planet, with a passionate fandom of unprecedented size and diversity. As a multi-faceted cultural phenomenon, BTS has often brought forth reductive claims of universal appeal to explain their global success.”

This reader proposes BTS as a lens to think about performance, participation, aesthetics, capital, and geopolitics. We want to engage in conversations about the tensions and contradictions found within the narratives of identity, culture, history, and form that emerge from encounters with BTS. How do we compose and create theory through BTS to think about affect, genre, soft power, masculinity, performance, fandom, language, the global music industry, or a seemingly throwaway gesture (a raised eyebrow or a wink)? What does BTS tell us about the communities/social worlds around us?”

More information at: https://criticalbtsreader.com

Please submit 500-word abstracts + 200-word bios by February 28, 2022 to criticalbtsreader@gmail.com.

Full essays (approximately 3000-4000 words) are due July 1, 2022. Final acceptance is provisional on editorial assessment of full essays.