[Commlist] CFP – Routledge Handbook of Platform Cultures

*CFP – Routledge Handbook of Platform Cultures* (under contract) Editor: 
Panos Kompatsiaris Abstracts (~300 words) + short bio to 
(handbookplatformcultures /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(handbookplatformcultures /at/ gmail.com)> by *31 July 2026.* Full call 
below.

Since the 2010s, the rise of platforms has marked a shift in media 
research from the early emphasis on the potential cultures of freedom, 
participation, play and democratic potential that internet scholars and 
activists highlighted, to concerns with cultures of addiction, 
exhaustion, oligopolistic concentration, disinformation, violence, 
surveillance, commodification, algorithmic bias and self-exploitative 
labour. The very term “platform” positions these infrastructures as 
neutral, egalitarian facilitators rather than “elitist gatekeepers” with 
explicit normative and technical rules built into them (Gillespie, 2010, 
p. 348). Several monographs looked at platform enclosures from 
political-economic, infrastructural and industrial perspectives by 
mobilizing specifically the term “platform” (e.g. Jin 2015; Srnicek 
2017; Van Dijck, Poell and de Waal, 2018; Steinberg, 2019; Poell, 
Nieborg, and Duffy 2021). The datafication of social and cultural life 
that accompanied this transformation yielded a set of concepts that have 
moved with somewhat unusual speed from coinage to canon, such as 
surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), data colonialism (Couldry and 
Mejias, 2019), algorithmic taste (Seaver, 2022) and algorithmic power 
(Bucher, 2018; Cheney-Lippold, 2017), among others. Critical internet 
studies is now hard to imagine without this conceptual vocabulary. Yet 
if platforms grow into such powerful interventionist systems, how do 
cultural formations, and what we might call “platform cultures”, take 
shape with and within them?
Platform-native practices such as binge-watching or scrolling, minor 
aesthetic categories (Ngai, 2012) like cringe and cursed, music 
movements such as vaporwave (Born and Haworth, 2017), or the everyday 
use of emojis, reaction buttons and memes (Shifman, 2014) codify 
cultural categories and prefigure criteria of aesthetic judgement. In 
cultures of self-tracking, measurement, wellness, self-help and life 
coaching, promises of aspiration, creativity, intimacy and empowerment 
may give way to what Lovink (2019) describes as “platform nihilism” 
involving exhaustion, burnout and boredom. The labour of influencers, 
micro-celebrities and lifestyle gurus (Baker and Rojek, 2019; Abidin and 
Brown, 2018; Raun, 2018), often both aspirational and self-exploitative 
(Duffy, 2017), constructs a logic of the self that is indistinguishable 
from the logic of the corporation (Bollmer and Guinness, 2024), creeping 
into wider social and creative life (Bishop, 2025). Generative AI 
crashes into this landscape, with filters and synthetic aesthetics, 
automated content moderation and AI-generated creative practices seeping 
into most dimensions of platformized life. Sites such as ChatGPT, Claude 
and Midjourney are themselves platforms, hijacking notions of authorship 
and knowledge production and crystallising collective human labour and 
cognition into extractive infrastructures that are increasingly 
difficult to opt out of (Pasquinelli, 2023; Lindgren, 2023; Hao, 2025).
This Handbook then sets out to explore how platforms weave and bind 
assemblages of the self and other, value and exchange, difference and 
norm. It is positioned within cultural media studies while drawing on 
critical political economy, art and aesthetics, media anthropology and 
science and technology studies, asking what platform cultures look like, 
feel like and mean: what aesthetic forms (Ngai, 2012; Berlant, 2011) and 
“personalized semiotic spectacles” (Lovink, 2022, p. 101), identities 
(Noble, 2018; Benjamin, 2019; Brock, 2020; Banet-Weiser, 2018), everyday 
habits (Paasonen, 2021) and political imaginaries they stir, from 
alt-right ecosystems (Lewis, 2018) to left-wing political streaming and 
figures like Hasan Piker (Harris, Foxman and Partin, 2023). In doing so, 
it aims to move beyond the binary of a playful, hopeful participatory 
culture “undone” by oligopolistic platformisation, and instead to reckon 
with the practices, aesthetics and politics, inherited and emergent, 
that platforms “platformise”.
The Handbook aspires to have a global perspective, as platform cultures 
extend across a multipolar ecosystem with different origins, 
architectures and logics spanning the US, China, Europe and beyond. 
Insofar as nation states, rather than merely free-floating corporations, 
assume an increasingly pervasive role in steering platform capitalisms 
and cultures (Steinberg, Zhang, and Mukherjee, 2024) this Handbook 
builds on this line of inquiry by asking: do Chinese-designed algorithms 
generate different aesthetic sensibilities than American ones, or is 
there a transcultural and transnational algorithmic uniformity rooted in 
the design assumption of an already-formed “global” audience? How do 
platform cultures develop within distinct digital ecosystems, including 
super-apps such as China’s WeChat (Plantin and de Seta, 2019), Russia’s 
Yandex (Kontareva and Kenney, 2023), and Southeast Asia’s Grab (Goggin 
and Athique, 2026), as well as the streaming and content infrastructures 
of the Arabic-speaking world (Khalil and Zayani, 2022), and others that 
operate with different languages and regulatory regimes? What happens 
when circulating platform practices like influencer culture are enacted 
in national or regional contexts with diverse political structures and 
linguistic landscapes? Case studies extend across continents and 
contexts beyond the Western ones, including but not limited to Asian 
digital cultures (de Kloet et al., 2019), African mobile-first platform 
ecologies, Latin American platform practices, and other contexts often 
grouped under the heading of the “Global South” (Arora, 2019; 
Bouquillion, Ithurbide and Mattelart, 2023).
Topics
The volume welcomes chapters that offer conceptually grounded overviews 
of their topic area, accessible to an interdisciplinary readership. 
Chapters should map key debates, ideas and developments, drawing on 
examples (including the contributor’s own research where relevant) to 
ground and illustrate the argument. Contributors are encouraged to 
attend to intersections of class, power and identity, and to draw on 
geographically diverse examples where relevant to their topic. The 
volume is provisionally organised around six thematic sections 
addressing: (I) technology, datafication and experience; (II) 
aesthetics, niches and affects; (III) identities, intimacies and 
commodification; (IV) labour, attention and value; (V) everyday platform 
practices; and (VI) political movements and counterpublics.
Indicative topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Technology and datafication: platform capitalism and selfhood; 
algorithmic subjectivities; algorithmisation and cultural life; 
quantified selves and self-tracking; surveillance and internalised 
moderation; algorithmic visibility and inclusion/exclusion; AI 
creativity and the posthuman; generative AI, authorship and knowledge.
Aesthetics, style and affect: cringe and cursed aesthetics; edgelordism 
and reactive identities; glitch aesthetics; AI filters and synthetic 
aesthetics; aesthetic niches (e.g., cottagecore, dark academia, 
goblincore, NPC); cute animals and animal tokenism; nostalgia and 
retro-digital aesthetics; meme ecologies; music; nostalgia.
Identities and intimacies: platform romance, dating, friendship and 
affect; gender performance, empowerment and commodification; race, 
ethnicity and digital identity; food nationalism; tourists and nomads; 
intersectionality; manosphere (e.g., incels, PUAs, NoFappers); 
trad-wives and platformed conservatism; girlboss and neoliberal 
feminism; entrepreneurial masculinities.
Labour, attention and value: influencer cultures and micro-celebrity; 
parasocial relationships and fan labour; affective labour and emotional 
branding; attention subjectivities; gig work and precarious economies; 
algorithms and self-performance; clickbait cultures; video (TikTok, 
YouTube); creator cultures and content optimization.
Everyday practices: scrolling, swiping, binge-watching; doomscrolling, 
digital fatigue and boredom; addiction and discontinuity; cancelling and 
online judgement; trolling, harassment and affective violence; internet 
slang; oversharing and vulnerability; challenges, duets and rituals; 
pranks, comedy and humour; networked mourning and grief practices; 
children and digital parenting; online care and mutual aid; wellness, 
life coaching, “biohacking” and confessional cultures; reading attention 
and short-form vs. long-form reading.
Movements, politics and counterpublics: platform activism and 
countercultures; conspiracy; meme warfare; BreadTube and LeftTube; 
hustle and grindset memes; platformed spirituality and online faith; 
digital sovereignty and citizenship; messaging publics (e.g., WhatsApp, 
WeChat, Telegram); platform nationalism; policy and citizenship cultures 
(e.g., Great Firewall of China, EU Digital Services Act); mobile-first 
cultures; data frugality practices; streaming violence, wars, and 
atrocity witnessing; environment and climate activism.
Submission Guidelines
If you are interested in contributing, please send an abstract of 
approximately 300 words and a short biographical note to 
(handbookplatformcultures /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(handbookplatformcultures /at/ gmail.com)> by July 31, 2026.
Abstracts should include a working title, a brief outline of the 
chapter’s argument and scope, and an indication of the platforms, cases 
or cultural phenomena that will be discussed.
Timeline
Abstract submission deadline: July 31, 2026
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2026
Full chapter submission: April 1, 2027
Peer review feedback to authors: May 15, 2027
Revised chapters due: June 15, 2027
Final manuscript submission to Routledge: July 2027
References
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Arora, P. (2019) The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West. 
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