Regional Creativity and New Media Practices
When you submit this form, it will not automatically collect your details like name and email address unless you provide it yourself. *Required
Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 30 October 2025
Deadline for full paper: 31 March 2026
Expected date of publication: end of 2026, selected authors will be notified.
——————————–
YouTube has been hosting independent projects, short films, and accounts of everyday life globally (Strangelove 2010; Cunningham et al. 2016; Burgess and Green 2018). It has transformed into a versatile new media platform for filmmakers, artists, and content producers, covering a wide range of aesthetics, narratives, and movements at the home of diverse smaller-scale new media phenomena in a great number of local languages (Nguyen 2019; Abidin 2021; Soriano and Cabalquinto 2022; Suwarno 2025). As YouTube’s popularity continues to surge across Southeast Asia, producers and everyday viewers are developing media practices that both reflect and reshape local cultural paradigms while negotiating global digital trends. In the recent years, these producers are more visible and bolder in crafting their own regional creativity that both reflect and reshape local cultural paradigms. Moreover, newly constructed media practices, such as monetisation, local production, and interregional collaboration, put both producers and viewers in dynamic negotiations with the global digital trends.
In this context, this special issue intends to identify, navigate and theorise YouTube as space for regional creativity within Southeast Asia. We seek to bring new insights into the understanding of the new media cultural practices in Southeast Asia and broaden the conversation among YouTube scholars, practitioners, and creators. We invite interdisciplinary contributions that employ diverse methodological approaches, including but not limited to digital ethnography, platform studies, critical discourse analysis, and comparative case studies. We particularly encourage scholarship that engages with the cultural, historical, and political context of YouTube production practice in Southeast Asia.
Possible topics and questions could include, but are not limited to:
> Identity Politics and Representation
- What new forms of regional creativity have emerged through Southeast Asian YouTube?
- How do Southeast Asian filmmakers, artists or creators articulate intersectional identities within YouTube platform constraints and local cultural politics?
- In what ways do communities across Southeast Asia utilise YouTube to construct their own narratives and/or counter-narrative to dominant media representations?
> New Media Practice and Negotiation:
- How do Southeast Asian filmmakers, artists or creators navigate localised/globalised practice and values of creativity and authenticity?
- How do they negotiate between global platform conventions and local cultural expressions?
- How do language choices, translation practices, and cultural negotiations among Southeast Asian YouTubers reflect power relations between local, national, and global audiences?
——————————–
Please submit an extended/long abstract of 500–700 words and a short bio (100 words) below.
——————————–
Notification of abstract acceptance will be sent by 30 October 2025.
Accepted authors will be invited to submit full paper of 7,000–9,000 words by 31 March 2026, with a target publication date at the end of December 2026.
Feel free to send your queries to the editors:
Ratna Erika M. Suwarno (rsuwarno@student.unimelb.edu.au) and Tito Ambyo (arsisto.ambyo@rmit.edu.au).
Find out more about the program here.