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Playing Politics in Digital Spaces offers a timely analysis of play and politics woven together to imagine and enact new worlds, democratic and reactionary alike.
Bringing together media and philosophical insights into the concepts of play, politics and worlding (or world-making), the book highlights the dual potential of play-politics for both oppression and liberation. Through theoretical and cultural historical perspectives on the emergence and repercussions of a post-digital "radical uncertainty", the book allows readers to understand how play has become a crucial component of contemporary politics. It examines this through an array of diverse cases, from different places and scale.
This book will interest scholars and students from media studies, philosophy, cultural studies, games and play studies, and political theory and philosophy, and will be valuable for other stakeholders including policy makers, politicians, journalists, game designers, activists and NGOs.
List of contents
Introducing Play and Politics: Making Worlds through Platforms and Digital Media
Part I: Worlding Play and Politics1. 'Cloud supervisors': COVID construction vehicles as playful cultural creation versus ludic governmentality
2. Playing with technology towards populist governmentality in Turkey
3. Politics in highly playful experiences
4. Ludologistics and the politics of playful military technologies
5. Humoring the norm: Politics of legal humor
Part II: Platforms, Dark Play, and Counterplay6. Taken over by the trolls: Dark play, trolling, and absorption in Trumpism
7. Red Scare girlfriends: Language games with the Red Scare podcast, or the ludic logic of online contrarianism
8. THIS IS NOT A GAME, LEARN TO PLAY THE GAME: Huizinga's homo ludens, violence, and the QAnon conspiracy
9. Digital alchemy as play: Black women domestic workers on Brazilian social media
10. All the world's a stage: The ironic worlding of 'Birds Aren't Real'
Part III: Material Practices of Political Play11. The promise of freedom in historical games: The politics of past-play
12. Games to put platforms in their place
13. (Ir)resistible bodies: Larp as sociocultural technology for building queer heterotopias
14. From playful protests to toy activism: Troubleshooting tweets of art activist Barbie
15. Sharing interspecies stories on social media: An exploration of Australian older adult's' pet image sharing practices
16. King of the Hill or the storming of the Capitol as double play: The multiplications of worlds through social media platforms
Index
About the author
Frank Chouraqui is Associate Professor at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of
Ambiguity and the Absolute (2014),
The Body and Embodiment: A Philosophical Guide (2021), and the co-editor (with Emmanuel Alloa and Rajiv Kaushik) of
Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Thought (2018). He works in political approaches to phenomenology, social epistemology and the philosophy of play.
Alex Gekker is an Assistant Professor at University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. His research incorporates various aspects of digital media, primarily focusing on platforms, infrastructures and interfaces to analyze diverse objects like data centers, maps, surveillance assemblages, autonomous cars, videogame ecosystems and more.
Bram Ieven is a University Lecturer at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, Netherlands and a research fellow on the NWA project
RE/Presenting Europe: Popular representations of diversity and belonging in the Netherlands.
Saniye Ince is a PhD candidate at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), Netherlands. Her dissertation explores media manifestations of Türkiye's political polarization through a lens of play. Her main research interests are philosophy of play and media studies.
Frans-Willem Korsten is Professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, Netherlands, with a long interest in the relation between sovereignty and theatricality. he contributes to the interdisciplinary field of law, literature and the arts and is working on a monograph on populists' play with the judiciary.
Sybille Lammes is Professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, the Netherlands. She does research on the nexus of play, daily life and digital media from an interdisciplinary angle, including cultural studies, science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and critical geography. She is co-editor of
The Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods (2018) and section editor for the Routledge Resources Online: Screen Studies (fc.).
Sara Polak is university lecturer in American Studies at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, with a long-running interest in the intersection of play and presidential media communication. She is PI of the ERC project Worlding America: How Play Shaped the United States from New Media to Politics, 1503-2028.
