Call for Articles: Re-visiting ‘Localities’ in the Audio-Visual Field - Volume 6 Issue 2 (2025): June

‘Locality’ as a concept can be associated with many things such as a place, a feeling, a community or a collective experience. In some contexts, it evokes ideas about borders, boundaries and constraints or suggests a nostalgic sense of stability and fixity. However, instead of reflecting ideas about confinement, as Doreen Massey describes, localities are about interactions which are much likely constructed by differences and conflicts. They are dynamic meeting points which include multiple internal conflicts that are historically constituted (Massey, 2013; Keyder, 1999: Mills, 2018) and cannot be thought apart from the movements that shape the globalized world. The movements of people, goods, labor, capital, stories and experiences (Appadurai, 1996) are fundamental to understanding the dynamic formations of localities that can only be described as ever changing. To put it differently, although the term ‘locality’ has often been bound up within the duality of the local and the global within the audio-visual content creation, production and consumption, influences, flows, interactions and intersections have in fact been intrinsic to the term.

            Localities and localization strategies have been a topic of discussion mainly in the field of film and television studies. In this field, ‘localities’ has been approached from many aspects, discussing the sites of audiences, images and production (Rose, 2016). In so far as television is concerned, discussions surrounding locality is mainly connected to the global flow of television contents in their original or adapted versions (Moran, 2009; Baran, 2023; Kaptan&Tutucu, 2021). For instance, audience reception of different contents is explored within the discourse of cultural or multiple proximities (Straubhaar, 1991; Aslan, 2019; Yanardağoğlu&Karam, 2013). The glocalization of television contents has been argued with a focus on the intertextual dialogue between television industries, giving localized responses to narrative and stylistic influences from diverse geographies (Dhoest, 2007; Öztürkmen, 2022; Aitaki, 2024). Dubbing and subtitling have been approached not only as localization practices (Adamou and Knox, 2011) but also perceived as a reflection of power dynamics that are inherent to the contemporary television industry (Barra, 2021). Sharing capital, labor and know-how through regional collaborations and co-productions has been another significant topic to discuss the connections among different localities (Bengesser, 2018; Behlil, 2010).

            The interactions that define localities in a dynamic manner have been intensified with the emergence of transnational streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ (Chalaby, 2022). Film and television contents from various geographies are strategically aligned side by side within the catalogues of these platforms, reconceptualizing the ‘patch - work quilt’ (Sinclair et. al. 1996) structure of mainstream television flow in transnational terms. In an attempt to address to a global audience, these streaming platforms do not only use algorithms (Lobato, 2019) to create contents that could work anywhere but also redefine ‘locality’ strategically by enhancing ‘touristic gaze’ (Urry, 1990; Vitrinel&Ildır, 2021) or using conspicuous localism (Havens, 2018) to create a transnational appeal. An alternative way to characterize localities is captured by Zhang (2010) who address how, through filmmakers’ movement across geographies, ‘mobility, migration and nomadism’, a relationality occurs between localities. This process which he captures with the term ‘poly-localities’ breaks away from essentialized notions of locality that puts particular emphasis on uniqueness and exclusivity.  

            This issue of Reflektif mainly intends to dwell on this highly dynamic conceptualization of ‘locality’ as an ongoing dialogue in the audio-visual and particularly in film and television industries and explores how we imagine and define ‘localities’ in audio-visual productions. In other words, how is the idea of locality imagined in terms of its relation to other scales, the national, the regional and the global? How do these imaginaries operate in terms of their significance for the different aspects of these productions, including adaptation to different cultural contexts? Can the relationship between various localities be thought of as a assemblage?  

We would like to invite contributions on the multi-faceted dimensions of ‘localities’ focusing on, but not limited to, the following topics:

Local / locality / localities in visual culture.

Global / glocal genres.

Filmmaking practices.

Streaming platforms operating in the local contexts.

Production, adaptation, reception of TV series.

Sound, dubbing and subtitling as localization practices.

Stardom, casting and performance.

Exilic cinema.

 

Issue Editors: Ayşegül Kesirli Unur, Nazan Haydari

Deadline for article submissions: April 2, 2025

 

References

Adamou, C., & Knox, S. (2011). “Transforming television drama through dubbing and subtitling: Sex and the Cities.” Critical Studies in Television, 6(1), 1-21.

Aitaki, G. (2024). “Becoming a Netflix nation: Extroversion, exportability, and visibility through a case study of Maestro in Blue.” NECSUS 13(1), Spring 2024: 242-265.

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (Vol. 1). U of Minnesota Press.

Aslan, P. (2019). International Communication within the Context of Popular Culture: A Study on the Success Turkish Television Series Have Had in Latin America. Connectist: Istanbul University Journal of Communication Sciences, 2019(57), 25-50.

Baran, Ş. (2023) Selling Turkish Quality: Multiple Proximities and Turkish format Exports in the Post-Streaming Era. International Communication Gazette 85(3-4): 271-288.

Barra, L. (2021) “Make It Circulate! Localization, Dubbing and the Support to European Non National Crime Drama.” Detecting Europe in Contemporary Crime Narratives: Online International Conference Print Fiction, Film, and Television, University of Bologna, June 21-23.

Behlil, M. (2010). “Close Encounters?: Contemporary Turkish Television and Cinema.” Wide Screen, 2(2): 1-14.

Bengesser, C. H. (2018, November). “From Convergence to Conflict: Public service values in the co-productions between DR and ZDF.” In ECREA 2018: Centres and Peripheries: Communication, Research, Translation.

Chalaby, J. K. (2022). “Global streamers: Placing the transnational at the heart of TV culture.” Journal of Digital Media & Policy, 13(2), 223-241.

Dhoest, A. (2007). “The national everyday in contemporary European television fiction: The Flemish case.” Critical Studies in Television, 2(2), 60-76.

Havens, T. (2018). “Transnational Television Dramas and the Aesthetics of Conspicuous Localism.” Flow Journal, April 30. < https://www.flowjournal.org/2018/04/transnational-television-dramas/>

Kaptan, Y., & Tutucu, M. (2021). “The Rise of Kdramas in the Middle East”. The soft power of the Korean Wave: Parasite, BTS and Drama. Kim, Youna (Ed.) Routledge.

Keyder, Ç. (1999) “The Setting.” In Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local. Keyder, Ç. (Ed.) Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: 3-28.