Abstract

Globalization is marked by a new role for the imagination in social life as individuals simultaneously envision “the global” and negotiate their own locality through their engagement with flows of cultural products, images and information increasingly disconnected from their place of origin. The recognition that the global and the local are simultaneously constituted creates, however, significant challenges for communication scholars. How do we explore the plurality of imagined worlds that individuals construct as they consume globalized information and popular media? This presentation will discuss the translocal approach—a theoretical and methodological endeavor focused on the concrete conditions under which various local/national environments relate to each other—developed in the book Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Popular Culture beyond East and West as a means to approach this question.

Bio

Dr. Darling-Wolf is associate professor in the Journalism Department and the Mass Media and Communication doctoral program in the School of Media and Communication. Her research focuses on global media flows and processes of transcultural influence, with a particular interest in how such processes intersect with the construction of gendered, racial and ethnic identities under conditions of globalization. Her book Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West (2015, Michigan University Press) explores historical and contemporary dynamics of popular cultural exchange between the United States, France, and Japan. She is currently editing the Handbook of Japanese Media to be published by Routledge.

 
Recent Publications
Darling-Wolf, F., “The ‘lost’ Miyazaki: How a Swiss girl can be Japanese and why it matters,” Communication, Culture & Critique, 9(3), 2015. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cccr.12122/pdf