Tabitha Adler
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Tabitha Adler, M.A.
Doctoral Student
Goethe University Frankfurt
Tabitha Adler is a PhD student in media studies at Goethe University Frankfurt and a research assistant in the current CEDITRAA project.
She holds an M.A. in media and cultural studies and a dual-major B.A. in English and political science from University Freiburg. Tabitha studies the K-pop fandom in South Africa, K-pop fans as cultural diplomats, the political and societal positions of K-pop, and practices of distribution within the Korean idol industry since 2023. The focus of her dissertation project lies on the spread of K-pop through a variety of distribution strategies and practices, as well as the effect and transformation of these strategies within the addressed audience segments. Central to this work are the different formats the idol industry produces and the fan practices in South Africa, Germany, and South Korea.
Tabitha Adler primarily contributes to the work in Working Area D: Regional and Transregional Circulation(s), in Working Area B: Legal and Institutional Frameworks, and in Project 1.3 Transformation of the Korean Wave.
My CEDITRAA story
Coming from a background of cultural studies, political science and media studies, this project gives me the opportunity to combine various aspects of my academic interest. In the last years, K-pop has become a focus in my studies because it combines pop culture, Korean domestic policies, societal issues, and the use of social media to gather an audience and nourish fan loyalties. The Korean idol industry continuously develops further strategies to make use of new digital innovations and infrastructures, with the focus on YouTube being their first step towards a social media-oriented genre. Today we see trends like AI-Idols and songs that are produced for TikTok-challenges, while K-pop fandoms are a driving force for the popularity of K-pop worldwide. The latter is achieved through online networking, fan voting systems and streaming, where both fans and the idol industry target algorithms and website-specific structures to reach a large audience. CEDITRAA gives me an opportunity to further investigate how the idol industry and fandoms make use of these structures, and how different cultural and regional aspects affect local fan practices.
