A 30 min. talk by Youngju Ryu, 2018-19 Institute for the Humanities Hunting Family Fellow and associate professor of modern Korean literature) followed by Q & A.

"South Korea just showed the world how to do democracy," reported The Washington Post on May 10, 2017, a day after Koreans voted a new president into office following the impeachment of Park Geun-hye. Officially dubbed the "Candlelight Revolution," the peaceful transfer of power was a result of massive street demonstrations, which in turn highlighted the role of new media such as the podcast. Ideally suited to the era of smartphones, podcast fell through the cracks in the regulatory framework of South Korean media environment, and allowed the public to access information and news stories that had been quashed in mainstream terrestrial, cable, and paper news media. The podcast also became the venue for innovating political idiom in irreverent and parodic ways, and for bringing politics into the realm of pop culture in a widespread phenomenon that came to be known as “poli-tainment” (politics + entertainment). As part of ongoing work on cultural politics of resistance and democratization, the talk will address how the podcast boom sparked the carnivalesque rebirth of protest culture at the heart of South Korea's latest struggle for democracy.