Dear AOIR members, Routledge and I have agreed to launch a new book series (Routledge Research in Digital Media and Culture in Asia) since April 2016. This will be of interest to some of you. ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN DIGITAL MEDIA AND CULTURE IN ASIA Editor Dal Yong Jin, Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University Since the late 1990s, Asia has emerged as one of the major centers for the production of digital media and transnational popular culture. While the influence of Western culture and technologies has continued in the global markets, the Asian cultural and digital industries have developed many of their digital technologies, such as social networking sites, instant mobile messengers, smartphones and relevant applications. Asian cultural industries have also created media/cultural products, such as television programs, films, music, and digital games, and expanded the export of these products to the global markets. Consequently, Asian digital technologies and popular culture consisting of non-Western based digital media and cultural forms have rapidly become a global sensation wherein Western audiences as well as Asian users enjoy several local cultural forms, including popular music and television programs, as well as digital technologies. This new book series critically, culturally, and historically contextualizes the nascent development of Asian popular culture and digital technologies. The books in this series emphasize that digital technologies and culture are fundamentally altering the ways in which we communicate. The series examines questions about the impact of digital media and society in all its facets, including economics, culture and politics. As its detailed major goals, this book series investigates Asian media, popular culture and digital technologies, encompassing all major cultural sectors, from television programs to online games, and from pop music to smartphones, as well as digital technologies and social media, through the use of consistent theoretical and methodological frameworks. In particular, the books in this series explore media convergence between digital technologies and content to analyze the emergence of cutting-edge digital culture, such as webtoons, mobile novels, and mobile games. The books in the series mostly determine the possibility of the advancement of non-Western theories and new theoretical perspectives in the midst of the continuation of Western dominance. In other words, with the growth of local popular culture and digital technologies, the books explore whether non-Western perspectives challenge central assumptions and arguments developed by Western perspectives. They may discuss the integration of Western and non-Western perspectives in media and area studies, the uses of theories of global comparative research, the relevance of non-Western theories and models, and successful and failed efforts at theoretical cross-pollination. We hope to secure the book series as the platform of choice for the best scholarship within the field. While our primary emphasis will be upon single/joint-authored books, we will consider edited collections where the book is brought together by editors in ways that result in a coherent work that is both innovative and more than the sum of the individual chapters. The topic areas listed below are illustrative only. Asian Video Games Digital Storytelling Asia: convergence of popular culture and the smartphone Political Economy of the Asian App Economy in the Digital Platform Era Asian Cinema New Media and Asian Society Asian Mobile Communication, Culture and Society Transnationality and Digital Migration Platform Technologies and Transformation of Asian Youth Culture Digital Asia Cyber Security, Intellectual Property, and Digital Labor in Asia Asian ICT Industry and Policy History of Asian Digital Media Asian Youth and Media Asian Soft Power Construction of Pan-Asian Culture Regional Co-production in Cultural Industries South Asian Digital Media and Popular Culture Korean Pop Music Comparison Studies of Korean and Japanese Popular Culture Please contact me if you have any questions and relevant projects you want to submit to this book series Dal Yong Jin (djin@sfu.ca) School of Communication, Simon Fraser University