Dear list members, [Apologies for cross-posting] The following call may be of interest to some of you. CFP – Routledge Handbook of Platform Cultures (under contract) Editor: Panos Kompatsiaris Abstracts (~300 words) plus a short bio to handbookplatformcultures@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@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 Abidin, C. and Brown, M.L. (2018) Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Arora, P. (2019) The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Baker, S.A. and Rojek, C. (2019) Lifestyle Gurus: Constructing Authority and Influence Online. Cambridge: Polity Press. Banet-Weiser, S. (2018) Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham: Duke University Press. Benjamin, R. (2019) Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Bishop, S. (2025) Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture. Oakland: University of California Press. Bollmer, G. and Guinness, K. (2024) The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Born, G. and Haworth, C. (2017) ‘From microsound to vaporwave: Internet-mediated musics, online methods, and genre’, Music and Letters, 98(4), pp. 601–647. Bouquillion, P., Ithurbide, C., and Mattelart, T. (eds.) (2023) Digital Platforms and the Global South: Reconfiguring Power Relations in the Cultural Industries. London: Routledge. Brock, A. (2020) Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. New York: NYU Press. Bucher, T. (2018) If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017) We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: NYU Press. Couldry, N. and Mejias, U.A. (2019) The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. de Kloet, J., Poell, T., Zeng, G and Chow, Y.F. (2019) ‘The platformization of Chinese society’, Chinese Journal of Communication, 12(3), pp. 249–256. Duffy, B.E. (2017) (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hao, K. (2025) Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. New York: Penguin Press. Harris, B.C., Foxman, M. and Partin, W.C. (2023) ‘“Don't Make Me Ratio You Again”: How Political Influencers Encourage Platformed Political Participation’, Social Media + Society, 9(2). Gillespie, T. (2010) ‘The politics of “platforms”’, New Media & Society, 12(3), pp. 347–364. Goggin, G. and Athique, A.M. (2026) ‘Super apps as digital transaction platforms: What Southeast Asia's Grab tells us’, Platforms and Society. 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