Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, HKU
January 24, 2022 (Monday), 4:30 p.m. (Hong Kong time)
Room 7.45, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
With live broadcast on Zoom:
https://hku.zoom.us/j/96628570157?pwd=VVFnUkE5YWgzNlJpcUhxbW52UU1KZz09
Meeting ID: 966 2857 0157
Password: 638644
Using interactional sociolinguistics and multimodality, I investigate how practices of eating together and eating well are discursively and multimodally performed in two different online settings: eating together in mukbang (livestream of eating) and eating well in Korean expatriates’ everyday vlogs (video blogs of everyday lives). To accomplish online commensality, mukbang participants make collaborative eating actions by incorporating spoken, typed, and bodily actions. Such collaborative eating actions contribute to framing mukbang as a shared mealtime, while also constructing a virtual sense of togetherness. Just as mukbang provides an online space to eat together, everyday vlogs provide a platform for vloggers to share how they eat well, which is more than just healthful or luxurious eating styles. Rather, it resonates with the ordinariness of what and how to eat in daily lives. The practice of eating well is also tightly linked to everyday identities of vloggers such as Koreans, foreign nationals, and local selves. Through highlighting how technologies connect food and eating practice to digital discourse, my talk provides a better understanding of how digital communication about and involving food embodies the sociocultural values of eating together and eating well.
Hanwool Choe is currently a postdoctoral fellow for the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics, with a specialization in Sociolinguistics, at Georgetown University. Prior to her Ph.D., she was a recipient of a Fulbright Graduate Study Award for her M.A. in Language & Communication at Georgetown University. She is a discourse analyst who primarily focuses on digital discourse, multimodal interaction, language and food, and life stories. Her works have appeared in journals such as Language in Society, Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse Studies, and Narrative Inquiry.
