The SCM/ACIM Research Colloquium takes place approximately once a month for graduate students, faculty and professionals from creative media and other related disciplines to present their recent research topic/project. The colloquium offers a great opportunity for ideas exchange and intellectual conversations about one’s work. Each session will feature two speakers, a graduate student/guest speaker and a faculty member. Each presentation is about 30 minutes, followed by 15 minutes open discussion. Seminar introduction and Q&A will be hosted by Prof. Richard Allen and/or Prof. PerMagnus Lindborg. No registration is needed and light refreshments are provided.

Seminar 1 
3 October 2023, 12:30 p.m – 2:30 p.m

Melodrama and Identification

Richard Allen :: The Philosophy of Melodrama

This talk proposes a philosophy of melodrama. Melodrama is defined as the dramatization of moral conflict through an appeal to the emotions. It discriminates classical melodrama or the melodrama of good and evil, which dwells on the pathos of suffering innocence, from romantic melodrama or the melodrama of moral antinomy (Singer), which dwells on the pathos of sacrifice. It draws a series of distinctions between sympathy, pathos, empathy, and identification and briefly delineates the relationship of each to the other and to our moral responses. It argues against Smith’s theory of empathy as central or personal imagination and defends a distinctive concept of identification, based upon its roots in the medieval French “identifier,” to “regard as the same.” It concludes with a brief defence of melodrama against the charge that it is an emotionally contrived idiom that exploits our moral sentiments for meretricious ends.

Links:

https://scholars.cityu.edu.hk/en/persons/richard-william-allen(bbcf324b-ee02-4d4f-8eaa-74de81e87c3a).html

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ECofBVAAAAAJ&hl=en

Wang Yuhui :: Obsession in Distance: Interactive Participation with Hollywood Movie Periodicals in Republican China

Hollywood film reception has been a crucial way to understand the formation of film culture and vernacular modernity in Republican China, but a precise survey on the media press engaging Hollywood fandom deserves deeper consideration. Tracing the development of several major Hollywood movie magazines created by Chinese cultural entrepreneurs during the 1930s and 1940s, this essay scrutinizes the interactive participation of Chinese movie fans with the magazines’ content. It argues that the participatory mechanism expresses the anxious ambivalence within audiences’ love for Hollywood films: on one hand, interactive fandom constructs an imaginary emotional intimacy; on the other hand, that very sense of imaginary intimacy carries with it a depressing reminder of cultural and political barriers between common Chinese audiences and their fantasized Hollywood dreams.

Links:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yuhui_Wang26/research

https://scholars.cityu.edu.hk/en/persons/yuhui-wang(b1a3ff3f-59a7-494d-8671-3e4be3499d3d).html

The following are the remaining colloquium of Semester A, 2023/24:

•    October 31st

- RAY LC: Human-machine-AI collaboration in new paradigms of technology-mediated performances
- Chang Xiaoyu & Li Yanheng : Robotic arm’s strategies to overcome unexpected contingency in HRI

•    November 14th

- Michael Just: Presentation Title TBC
- Neil Leach, Bhavleen Kaur, Virginia Melnyk, Gustavo Rincon: Presentation Title TBC

•    December 5th

- Zhang Ge, Dino: Wanghong Pastiche
- Royce Ng: The Master Algorithm Redux