Research seminar: K-pop, TikTok, and Social Media Dance

Dr. Chuyun Oh's talk will focus on the idea of "social media dance" by drawing examples from K-pop and TikTok dance challenges and how social media has altered our perception of dance.

The talk is based on K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media (Routledge, 2022) which became No.1 in the new releases on Amazon in Communications and Popular Dance in July 2022. 

It is the first book that theorizes K-pop dance and dance fandom on social media based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, choreography, and participation-observation with 40 amateur and professional K-pop dancers in New York, California, and Seoul.

The book traces the evolution of K-pop dance from the 1980s to the 2020s and explains its distinctive feature called ‘gestural point choreography’ – front-driven, two-dimensional, decorative and charming movements of the upper body and face – as an example of what the author theorizes as ‘social media dance.’

Dr. Oh's talk will focus on the idea of "social media dance" by drawing examples from K-pop and TikTok dance challenges and how the stage -social media - has altered our perception of creating, performing, watching, and sharing dance. 

Dr. Chuyun Oh (Ph.D. in Performance Studies at UT Austin) is an Associate Professor of Dance at San Diego State University.

 

As a Fulbright scholar and former award-winning professional dancer, she focuses on ethnography, performance activism, and racial and gender identities in transnational popular culture. Her work has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, Dance Chronicle, The Journal of Popular Culture, Communication, Culture & Critique, The International Journal of the History of Sport, The Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, and The Journal of Fandom Studies.

As a pioneer of K-pop dance studies, she received the Top Paper (2019) and Top Contributed Performance three times (2016- 2018) from the Performance Studies Division at the National Communication Association and was invited as the David Sanjek Keynote Speaker in Popular Music at the 64th Annual Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2019.

Her work has received global media coverage from India, China, the US, and S. Korea. She is a co-editor of Candlelight Movement, Democracy, and Communication in Korea (Routledge, 2021) and the author of K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media (Routledge, 2023).

The seminar will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Please contact mediaresearchsupport@leeds.ac.uk before 12pm on 29th September to request an invitation.