Guest editors
Joyhanna Yoo (California State University, Sacramento) and Mie Hiramoto (National University of Singapore)

Description
The explosive impact of the global popularization of cultural genres from South Korea has come to be known as the Korean wave, or hallyu, encapsulating various facets of daily life, from music and television to fashion, film, and culinary trends. The rapid and broad diffusion of genres associated with the Korean wave has largely been possible through digitally mediated discourse and has been driven by (trans)national corporate partnerships as well as fueled by fans’ participatory cultures. The key role of the Internet in hallyu’s mediation further opens up genres to vehement negotiation of meaning from fans and consumers. Digital labor such as commenting, editing, uploading, subtitling, and sharing continues to reconfigure the pathways through which the Korean wave is (re)produced, (re)circulated and (re)imagined. Despite such practices relying heavily on the creative circulation of language and other signs, studies of hallyu largely have not addressed media discourse in a systematic way. Moreover, signs associated with Korean popular culture take on different meanings as they are consumed in different local contexts; thus, scholarly examinations of hallyu must engage how consumption patterns adapt to and intersect with locally meaningful categories of identities, community, and power.

By (re)examining globally circulating signs associated with Korean popular culture, this special issue aims to center the key role of language – both as metapragmatic ‘cultural object’ (i.e. the topics of conversation) as well as a powerful semiotic tool through which local signs are negotiated. The aims of this special issue are twofold: to expand language-based studies of the internet-mediated Korean wave by taking a semiotically informed discourse-analytic approach to this ubiquitous global phenomenon, and secondly, to examine local instantiations of the Korean wave in different contexts by accounting for everyday actors’ communicative practices.

We are looking for papers that approach the study of Korean wave-affiliated genres with a strong linguistic or semiotic approach. Though not expected to engage a specific theoretical approach, accepted papers will attend to at least one of the following:
- semiotic processes such as circulation, local meaning-making, resignification, etc.
- (re)significations of language and other signs in context
- the role of mediatized language/discourse in shaping Korean popular culture
- metapragmatic discourses (e.g. by fans) vis-à-vis Korean wave genres

Submission guidelines
Please include the following with your submission: (1) full name, pronouns, institution; (2) tentative title and 3-5 key words; (3) a 500-word abstract, with references; (4) a short author bio of up to 150 words that includes areas of research expertise and relevant publications; (5) any relevant information regarding previous publications of the work to be submitted (either in its entirety or in significant sections) including journal articles, working papers, chapters in edited collections, etc.

Please email your submissions to Joyhanna Yoo ([email protected]) by April 30, 2024.

Projected timeline (subject to change):
The timeline we propose is as follows:
● 500-word abstracts due April 30, 2024
● Proposal decisions made by May 13, 2024
● Full-length article due by August 30, 2024 (full papers are not to exceed 8,000 words including references but not abstract)
● Anticipated publication: spring 2025

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
Applied Linguistics
Discourse Analysis
Sociolinguistics