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Navigating platform power

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This volume provides a fresh cross-disciplinary perspective on the politics of digitalisation, through the lens of feminism, Marxism and poststructuralism and drawing on empirical examples in polic...
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  • 27 October 2026
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Digital platforms are reshaping exploitation and liberation. And yet, we know too little of how the political agency of multiple social groups changes at the junctures of online and offline spaces: the edited book Political Agency within and of Platform Societies fills this gap. The book’s introductory theoretical framework elaborates on how different digital actors move social relations between two opposites that can chain or unchain the possibilities of transformative political agency. The 18 chapters expand the framework through a dialogue among multiple theoretical approaches, including feminism, Marxism, and post-structuralism. The authors draw on relevant empirical examples exploring policy-making, party politics, civil society organisation and social movements. In summary, the volume provides a fresh cross-disciplinary perspective on the politics of digitalisation. By doing so, the book advances knowledge on the barriers to overcome and the conditions to facilitate imaginaries and practices of liberation in the transnational public sphere.
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Price: £95.00
Pages: 360
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date: 27 October 2026
ISBN: 9781526190314
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

POLITICAL SCIENCE / Comparative Politics, Comparative politics, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Process / Media & Internet, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Technology Studies, Impact of science and technology on society, Digital and information technologies: social and ethical aspects

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Dr Marco Guglielmo Royal Holloway University of London

Dr Pauline Sophie Heinrichs, KCL,

Professor Ben O’Loughlin, Royal Holloway, University of London

Introduction - Professor Ben O’Loughlin,Dr Pauline Sophie Heinrichs, Dr Kat Gupta and Dr Marco Guglielmo
Part I: Chaining Political Agency
1. Algorithmic Agency: The Accelerated Techno-Mediation of Cultural Conflicts - Dr Mikael Andéhn
2. A matter of time: Political Agency and Temporal Precarity in Platform Societies - Dr Ilona Steiler and Dr Lorena Ramirez Hincapie
3. Digital Ideology and Material Exploitation of Labour and the Environment - Dr Giorgio Pirina
4. The Illusion of Emancipation and the Limits of Strategic Narratives: Climate Change, Agency and the Promise of Technological Salvation - Dr Pauline Sophie Heinrichs
5. Political Parties: Empowering the People or Amassing Power in the Digital Age? - Dr Ramón Villaplana Jiménez, Prof Giulia Sandri and Dr Adrián Megías Collado
6. Exploitable Agency: Feedback Mechanisms as a Management Technique in Platform Work - Hugh Hammond
7. Digital Media and the Struggles over Norm Contestation to Silence LGBTQ+ Communities - Jonathan Pettifer
Part 2: Unchaining Political Agency
8. Progressive Politics as a Digital Common: The Organisation of Disruptive Agency - Dr Bradley Ward and Dr Melany Cruz
9. Platforms, policy and power in the imagined futures of digital public spaces - Dr Naomi Jacobs and Dr Louise Mullagh
10. Public Inquiries and Digital Platforms: Spaces of Resistance or Continued Containment - Nathan Critch and D’arcy Ritchie
11. The Digital Transformation of Political Parties and Political Agency: bottom up activism vs. hyperleaderships - Dr Jasmin Fitzpatrick and Professor Oscar Barbera
12. Embubbled on Platforms? How young people become politicised on social media - Scott Downham
13. Social Value First: Digital Platforms for a New Economy of the Commons - Gabiele Masci, Dr Lavinia Pastore and Professor Luigi Corvo
14. Digital Platforms as Third Spaces of Gender Resistance - Antonia Alecu
15. Visibility as Vulnerability? Conceiving Solutions to Feminist Harms in the Online Global Political Sphere - Rachel Brock
Part 3: The Routes towards Emancipation within and of Platform Societies
16. El Remiendo, Recuperation, Reparation - Dr Helen Thornham and Dr Edgar Gómez-Cruz
17. On Platform Hegemony and Resistance: The Metapolitics of Digital Platforms - Dr Alex Williams
18. Commonify platforms: The Multiplicity of Digital Subjects and Practices of Resistance towards Emancipation - Professor Phoebe Moore, Dr Marco Guglielmo, Professor Peter Bloom
Conclusions - Dr Kat Gupta, Professor Ben O’Loughlin, Dr Pauline Sophie Heinrichs and Dr Marco Guglielmo