Dear colleagues, 

We would like to cordially invite you to our upcoming Global Digital Cultures Soirée, which will take place on October 31, 2022, between 18:00 and 22:00 (location to be determined). 

The objective is to stage lively debate and stimulate fruitful exchanges between Amsterdam-based researchers working on Global Digital Cultures across the humanities, social sciences, and economics.

This time, we invite Marc Steinberg and Tommy Tse to the stage to discuss their work on platforms and cultural production in East Asia.

Marc Steinberg is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University. Marc Steinberg's research focuses on animation, media industry studies, and digital media, focusing on the role of digital platforms in mediating cultural production and experience. His second monograph, The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Commercial Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), tracks the platform-led transformation of film, media, and Internet cultures. Offering a comparative study of platformization with a focus on Japan as the key site for global platformization, the book systematically examines the managerial, medial, and social functions of platform theories and platform practices.

Tommy Tse is an Assistant Professor in the Television and Cross-Media Culture (TVCMC) program at the Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam. He is also affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the HKU Global China Social Research Hub, and the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University as an Honorary Associate Professor (2022 – 2025). He specialises in East Asia’s media and cultural industries, creative labour, consumer culture and sociology of fashion. In 2022, Tse received the prestigious European Research Council's Consolidator Grant (ERC CoG) (2 million Euros) for his 5-year multi-sited ethnographic project entitled "China Fashion Power - Fashioning Power through South-South Interaction: Re-thinking Creativity, Authenticity, Cultural Mediation and Consumer Agency along China-Africa Fashion Value Chains".

After brief presentations from these scholars, the floor will be open for questions and comments from participants. To prepare for the discussion, we will share the texts with you in due time following your registration. 

As always, our soirées involve food and drinks; the evening will start with drinks, and dinner will be served around 19:30.

We look forward to seeing you!

Thomas Poell & Rivke Jaffe