Navigating Platform Power: Agency and Resistance in Digital Spaces

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.