Netflix and Korean Original Series: Global and Local Impacts in the Future
Event Sponsored by Ellen and Robert Kaplan.
Thursday, October 12, 2023
4pm-5:30pm EST
Mandel Forum, located on the first floor of Mandel Center for the Humanities
About the Event
Korean TV and films have grown globally in popularity in recent years, from the super successful Squid Game series to All of Us Are Dead. Have you stopped to wonder why?
Claflin University Professor Hyejung Ju will broadly introduce how complex Korean media structures have gained a foothold into international circuits of media, and how power relations have been navigated to open doors for Korean productions to be featured on contested streaming TV platforms like Netflix.
During this talk, Professor Ju will highlight how the streaming giant Netflix has established a transnational media and production strategy to bring foreign TV/films into American living rooms.
About the Speaker
Hyejung Ju is a Professor in the Department of Mass Communications at Claflin University, a Liberal Arts University in South Carolina. She was born and grew up in Seoul, S. Korea (Korea, after) until she came to the United States for her doctoral program in Communication at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. She studied media, journalism, and communications broadly from her B.A. at Dongguk University and M.A. at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea.
Dr. Ju has researched the media's transnational content production, distribution, and audience-consuming experiences of those content via different digital media. More specifically, she has studied increasing transnational media practices, flows, and impacts with non-western media and their content. Recently, her research has been thriving in the Korean media’s collaboration with Netflix and other global streaming players (Disney+ and Apple TV), which is an ongoing developing trend in global media contexts. This line of research contributes to enriching the societal and industrial values of many kinds of globalization studies. Dr. Ju’s work calls for a critical approach to a changing phase of the local/national media’s transnational and further quasi-global mobility along with high-end digital media and diversified transnational audience cultures.
For years, she has published articles in several media and communication journals such as:
Journal of International & Intercultural Communication
Critical Studies in Television (in-press)
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Journal of International Communication
Communication, Culture, & Critique
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication
Journal of Creative Communications
Asian Women
In 2020, she published her book Transnational Korean Television: Cultural Storytelling and Digital Audiences. It showcased globalizing Korean TV content and its industries and is considered the first scholarly book to introduce and provide critical media analyses on Korean TV's transnational impacts. With collaboration, Dr. Ju produced several book chapters about Korean popular culture and the non-Western media. For instance, the chapter for the edition of The Korean Wave: Korean Popular Culture in Global Context (2014), and another article for The Soft Power of the Korean Wave: Parasite, BTS, and Drama (2021).