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表象文化論学会の事例

抄録

    The Association for the Studies of Culture and Representation (hyōshō bunkaron gakkai; hereafter ASCR) was established in July 2006 with its inaugural annual conference as well as general assembly. The preparatory phase included a preparatory academic conference in November 2005. Thereafter, it launched its web-newsletter REPRE in September 2006, and its annual academic journal Hyōshō in April 2007. This essay chronicles the initial phase of ASCR from the viewpoint of an actively engaged young (at the time) scholar.

    ASCR originated in the graduate and undergraduate courses of the Studies in Culture and Representation (hyōshō bunkaron) in the Komaba campus, The University of Tokyo. As a relatively new discipline of humanities, hyōshō bunkaron treats art, philosophy, and culture from a broad and transdisciplinary perspective. This essay discusses the academic and institutional circumstances surrounding hyōshō bunkaron in Japan in the first half of the 2000s, and the need to establish a new academic association whose activities are open to researchers of other academic institutions as well.

    Furthermore, the essay explicates the media environment of Japan in the 2000s, such as the proliferation of desktop publishing software and on-demand printing service, the advent of new critical and literary journals both in commercial and independent forms, and the transitory phase of the Internet culture-from the initial do-it-yourself (DIY) stage to the more commercialized space of global capitalism and attention economy. Situating the launches of REPRE and Hyōshō in these contexts, the essay explains why the former is published as a web magazine, while the latter is published semi-commercially and circulated via the distribution network of books and magazines in Japan.