Understanding K-Pop Twitter as a site of Transnational Social Media Activism

This project aims to examine social media as a platform for political organization and social change beyond geographical boundaries in the context of K-pop fans and their transnational online communities. Social media, and twitter specifically, have long been a site of activism and popular music has always had a place in social commentary. In this paper, I seek to understand this phenomenon in the context of the large and ever-growing global community of Korean pop fans. In 2020, largely through the Black Lives Matter movement, we have seen, to the shock of many, a rise in political engagement from the K-pop fan community in a number of highly sensationalized events. Using data collected from twitter I will study the expressive sentiments and strategic organization of this population as well as how said action is perceived and engaged with by the media and general public. Additionally, I will study the transnational networks that facilitate this communal activism and the cross-cultural communication required for this level of organizational success and notoriety. My findings expose how, similar to other twitter-based New Social Movements, K-pop community action consists largely of expressive content with consistent efforts by ingroup members to define and monitor the scope of the movement and the rules of engagement. I note the importance of individual accounts with large spheres of influence in creating important community structures for content dissemination. I observe that, in these fan communities, actual transnational mobilization requires very little explicit instruction as these networks were built on shared affinity and thus have built in expectations of mutual aid. In the context of all of my findings, I reaffirm the importance of studying critically social media based community action and the positive as well as negative processes it can represent

Pathway to Future Symbiotic Creativity

This report presents a comprehensive view of our vision on the development path of the human-machine symbiotic art creation. We propose a classification of the creative system with a hierarchy of 5 classes, showing the pathway of creativity evolving from a mimic-human artist (Turing Artists) to a Machine artist in its own right. We begin with an overview of the limitations of the Turing Artists then focus on the top two-level systems, Machine Artists, emphasizing machine-human communication in art creation. In art creation, it is necessary for machines to understand humans' mental states, including desires, appreciation, and emotions, humans also need to understand machines' creative capabilities and limitations. The rapid development of immersive environment and further evolution into the new concept of metaverse enable symbiotic art creation through unprecedented flexibility of bi-directional communication between artists and art manifestation environments. By examining the latest sensor and XR technologies, we illustrate the novel way for art data collection to constitute the base of a new form of human-machine bidirectional communication and understanding in art creation. Based on such communication and understanding mechanisms, we propose a novel framework for building future Machine artists, which comes with the philosophy that a human-compatible AI system should be based on the "human-in-the-loop" principle rather than the traditional "end-to-end" dogma. By proposing a new form of inverse reinforcement learning model, we outline the platform design of machine artists, demonstrate its functions and showcase some examples of technologies we have developed. We also provide a systematic exposition of the ecosystem for AI-based symbiotic art form and community with an economic model built on NFT technology. Ethical issues for the development of machine artists are also discussed

P'ansori as Social Critique: Perpetuating a Musical Tradition in Twenty-First Century South Korea.

M.A. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference

From Associations to Info-Sociations: Civic associations and ICTs in Two Asian Cities

Non-profit civic associations are experimenting with information communications technologies (ICTs) in their work inside ‘global cities.’ The “info-sociational” concept is introduced in this paper as a heuristic and an approach for investigating ICT-linked organizational, participatory and spatial transformations in civic associations. The info-sociational approach is applied to four cases of civic environmental associations in two ‘Asian tiger’ cities-Hong Kong and Taipei-to compare their experiments with: urban map mash-ups; digital storytelling; participatory e-platforms; green new media; and networked activism. An info-sociational approach-besides providing a frame for comparatively analyzing digital practices amongst civic groups-arguably advances theory on the co-evolution of civic associations and ICTs.Special Issue: Linking the Local with the Global within Community Informatic

Expanding Identities and Advancing Global Citizenship of Underrepresented U.S. Higher Education Students Through International Virtual Exchange

Global citizenship education (GCED) helps students thrive in the multicultural 21st century world. Yet participation in study abroad and related programs in the United States – a purported “melting pot” of races and cultures – remains, disproportionately, the domain of affluent whites (Bell et al., 2021; Seid, 2021; NAFSA, 2020; IIE, 2020; Sweeney, 2013; Salisbury, et. al., 2011). In recent years, international virtual exchange (IVE), an educational experience involving sustained interaction between geographically-separated participants using technology and trained facilitators, has emerged as an affordable and scalable complement to study abroad. Analyzed at the macro level, IVE has the potential to promote world peace among future generations by bringing students around the world together instantly for dialogue and friendship. In addition to language learning, many established IVE scholars contend these exchanges, like study abroad, can foster greater understanding of different world views and address socio-political issues in an increasingly polarized world (Beelen & Jones, 2018; Helm, 2013; O’Dowd, 2021). There is a large body of research on IVE for cultural competency development, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Marinoni & van’t Land, 2020). One under-explored area, however, is the potential for IVE to draw more students from underserved communities to the global world and the career and personal development opportunities affiliated with it. Against this backdrop, this study seeks to learn from the experiences of underrepresented and historically-segregated students in IVE. To achieve this, I conducted a mixed-methods study using surveys to identify and recruit IVE participants at three large universities in the South and Midwest followed by one-on-one virtual interviews with a subset of the students to attain a more nuanced understanding of their exchange experiences. In addition, exchange field notes and my own abroad experiences have informed this study. Data from the study revealed six main themes: “Virtual connections beyond the classroom,” “Bias reduction,” “Color matters,” “Equality in digital space,” “Window to the world,” and “One step closer to abroad.” Findings suggest that sustained contact and collaboration with counterparts in other parts of the world strengthens participants’ self-efficacy, identity and desire to learn more about the global world

Faculty Scholarship Celebration 2020

Program and bibliography for Western Carolina University's annual Faculty Scholarship Celebration