I'm particularly interested in East Asian media, mainly Chinese, Japanese and Korean media. I want to do broad and deep research on the scholarly research about love and romantic relationships in all cultures, including American culture, especially Hollywood's romantic stories. Based on research from previous studies, we find theories and arguments on how media have created a way to represent love and romantic relationship and if this representation has created a type of "reality." I also want to question if this representation impacts other aspects in society, such as dating culture and our perception of a "normal" romantic relationship. We can also ask questions about how this representation promotes the consumer culture or promotes the interaction between consumer culture and a romantic relationship.
This project will be a comparative study between different cultures, between different historical eras, or a specific examination of a media product in contemporary society, such as a TV drama or a film from any culture. If you are interested in literature, media studies, or sociology, this project will fit your field very well.
In preparation I have created the steps below for the work on this research project:
Step 1, we do research to find related books, academic papers or other literature that have examined a similar issue.
Step 2, we work on a specific media product, which could be from East Asia or anywhere in the world. You can choose a topic like "how Hollywood has represented romantic relationship in sit-coms; how Korean TV dramas have created romantic sentiments with the examples of......; or how some current TV dramas have negotiated between being masculine and being romantic, etc.
The main part of the collaborative research is to find related academic writings, theories and literature together. Then write a literature review as the introduction of our research on a special media product using the theories and arguments we found to analyze a concrete example.