Youjeong Oh: “Instagrammable Places: Aesthetic Representation and Contested Urban Transformation”

Global Media Industry Speaker Series and the RTF Media Studies Colloquium present a talk by Youjeong Oh, Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin.

This presentation explores how Instagram mediates the meanings of place by discussing two cases: Ihwa Mural Village in Seoul and the Woljeong beach on Jeju island in South Korea. The functional protocols of Instagram—its graphic-oriented nature, ability to promote inter-subjective communication of self-reflexivity, and role as an individual and collective archive of particular place images—construct the place myth centering on aesthetic representational qualities. Both influenced by and participating in the Instagram culture, tourists have flowed to those places to achieve visually captivating photos. Such interactions between representational practices and subsequent influx of tourists reshape the material and spatial realities of place involving construction boom, land use change, property value hikes, gentrification and displacement. The talk tackles the contrasts between contested place transformations reconfigured by social media and non-contested media representations. 

Youjeong Oh is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. in geography from University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Oh is the author of Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place (Cornell, 2018). Her research explores urbanism, development and dispossession, social movement, and media, tourism, and place in East Asia. Dr. Oh’s current research is about (over)development, dispossession, and desires in Jeju, South Korea.

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