Issue 14.2 (Fall 2025)

Bicycle couriers are key contributors to urban food delivery platforms. This article outlines the multiple and uneven ways in which delivery riders are “put to work” in the platform economy. Using the vignette of a single delivery by a bicycle courier working in Los Angeles, I illustrate some of the processes contained in platform labor. By breaking down in detail the economics behind platform food delivery, which is commonly performed at a loss, other forms of accumulating value beyond the delivery itself, such as being available, contributing advertising, and generating data become visible. Finally, exploring the history of the sandwich… Read more >

This article interrogates the visual and political logics that make black protest intelligible within modern regimes of political appearance. Focusing on the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 Minneapolis uprising, the essay draws on Afropessimist and psychoanalytic theory to examine how the riot unsettles the frameworks that render Blackness legible only through vulnerability, loss, or redemptive spectacle. Against interpretations that recuperate black protest as democratic renewal or moral claim, it theorizes black protest as a site of rupture rather than representation, and as an encounter that exposes the limits of visibility politics and gestures toward a mode of relation… Read more >

This literary essay examines and rehearses the conceptual challenge fatigue poses to diagnosis in its clinical and critical registers. Taking as its case study Joan Copjec’s essay “Battle Fatigue: Kiarostami and Capitalism”—wherein fatigue, conceptually declined from Levinas’ weariness of existence and the psychoanalytic death drive, is deployed as a theoretical lens through which to read Abbas Kiarostami’s film Taste of Cherry—this essay argues that Copjec’s diagnosis of Badii’s unexplainable suicidality qua fatigue mirrors the clinic’s insofar as both render fatigue into a diagnosis of exclusion predicated on forensic registers of negative evidence. For Copjec, fatigue is a symptom of Badii’s… Read more >

This piece introduces a special section on digital platforms and agency. It unpacks the tension between, on the one hand, the imposition of digital platforms upon cultures by immensely-powerful technology companies, and on the other hand, the emergence of possibilities as people work, play, and express themselves on platforms. Cultural studies, which has always concerned itself with structure, culture, and agency, is well-positioned to work through this tension in order to orient scholars of platform studies toward radical critique and political action. The introduction situates the invited works of “Digital Platforms and Agency” in this context, elaborates upon cultural studies’… Read more >

This article explores how platforms reinforce structures of racism and coloniality in Washington DC’s majority-Black Ward 7 and Ward 8. Drawing on ethnographic research with Black hosts who short-term rent on Airbnb, I follow how Black residents’ imaginaries of space are superseded by platform-enabled white users’ imaginaries through Airbnb’s “Location” star ratings. This rating draws down hosts’ overall ratings based on guests’ racist experiences of feeling “unsafe” in majority-Black working-class neighborhoods—resulting in lower visibility on Airbnb’s app, decreased bookings, and financial losses. Using a geopolitical conception of racism on platforms which I call the Colonial Racial Capitalist Stack (CRCStack), I… Read more >

This paper explores how Black women on TikTok activate platform affordances to make themselves visible within the search engine. Specifically, we offer #BlackGirlPilates as a case study, given the increased interest following socialite Lori Harvey’s endorsement of the exercise at the 2022 Met Gala. Both Pilates and Western Technoculture have been studied in regards to its centrality of whiteness as normative. Thus, we conduct a comparative analysis of #pilates and #BlackGirlPilates in TikTok’s search engine to see how the addition of a racial qualifier changes results. Our analysis reveals that the “anonymous” user within a search for content on Pilates… Read more >

First released by Amazon in 2014, the digital voice assistant Alexa allows users to connect and automate their smart home devices through the sound of their voice. Alexa’s automation of domestic spaces comes, however, with its own set of anxieties. How much data does Alexa sense and capture, and how is this data used? How is agency distributed between humans and the machines surrounding them? Is Alexa an empowering tool, or an invasion of privacy that undermines human agency? In this paper, we trace the ways in which the anxieties surrounding the blurred boundaries of human and non-human agencies introduced… Read more >

Across a wide range of cultural and socio-political contexts, matchmaking has been valued as a legitimate profession that involves labor and remuneration in cultures. It represents the long-lasting commercialization of effective intimacy building. In the era of algorithms and platforms,the emergence of modern matchmaking, such as in mobile dating apps (MDAs), showcases the impact of platformization and suggests that traditional matchmaking labor relations have shifted in MDAs and modern matchmaking approaches. Thus, with this paper, we ask in what ways contemporary dating practices essentially reinterpret the dated pattern of matchmaking in digital environments and shift its labor aspects. We aim… Read more >

With live streaming capabilities becoming increasingly important to the success of social media applications and representing central modes of engagement for popular digital platforms, the economic and socio-political functions of live streaming are critical to an understanding of changing new media landscapes. The existing scholarship on Twitch and similar live streaming platforms has demonstrated the importance of both financial investments and affective labor to these digital spaces. Building from existing scholarship, this article will apply a critical-cultural lens to analyze the ways in which Twitch’s interface mediates users’ agency through mechanics centered on affect, capital, and their intersections. How do… Read more >

The pervasive practice of botting by using fame-enhancing bots and operating porn bots, and Instagram’s opaque and unreliable authenticity governance, has evoked human Instagram users to actively police and govern botting and other bot activity. Botting describes repetitive and quantitative posting, messaging and engaging on social media platforms to provoke reciprocal engagement. Running bot police accounts, Instagram users engage and try to play an active role in the authenticity governance process of Instagram. The article investigates why and how Instagram users govern two types of “inauthentic” Instabots, which concentrate on detecting automated interactions by fame-enhancing bots and reporting porn bots.… Read more >

This article analyzes the role of race in the branding rhetoric of the “free speech software company” Gab AI Inc. as found in the X/Twitter and blog posts promoting its products. This analysis aims to assess conservative anxieties about content moderation which drive the creation of alternative social media platforms like Gab. The article argues that the point of stasis, or core set of issues in a debate, in Gab’s branding rhetoric between the company and its audience is a shared fantasy of white enslavement/abjection by the content moderation policies of “Big Tech” companies. This point of stasis is extended… Read more >

What are the new racial politics of individual agency and collective recognition in a putatively “post-race” era defined, in large part, by platform capitalism’s increasingly pervasive technologies for identity management and securitization? This essay begins with Apple’s highly publicized 2016 counterterrorism dispute with the FBI and the company’s subsequent marketing campaign for facial recognition-based password encryption (Face ID) before turning at length to recent anglophone novels of ethnicity—by Bharati Mukherjee, Mohsin Hamid, and Teju Cole—that lend narrative expansion to the “post-racial” racializing logics that Apple’s litigation and campaign materials reveal. A cathexis for Big Tech’s identity politics as a whole,… Read more >

Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s Crip Cultures/Critical Disability Studies Working Group Co-Host Theodora Danylevich discuss crip silences, crip futurities, and crip joy with authors Alyson Patsavas (University of Illinois, Chicago), Alyson K. Spurgas (Trinity College), and Jess Whatcott (San Diego State University). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Angela Carter. Read more >