Humans are storytellers and scholars – whether they be from the arts and humanities, the social sciences, or cultural studies – need the means to assess and interpret the symbolic narratives found within communities. Over the past two decades, a faucet has been turned on low, and a small stream of Asian scholars have started to use Ernest Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT) as their theory and method of choice. The flow of research – examining heroes, villains, settings, and plotlines – has been slow but steady; now, in this address, SCT expert Thomas G. Endres plans to turn the faucet to full. In sharing both the body of work done throughout Asia and his own studies, which range from rhetorical analysis to quantitative research, both emerging and established scholars can assess SCT’s utility as an insightful tool. Hopefully the steady stream of this theoretical framework will expand, as SCT is further applied across a variety of Asian Pacific publications and presentations.
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