Irina Kalinka, Ph.D.

Read the Pilot Article for the Book Here:

The Political Imaginary of User Democracy

Public Culture 37.1, 39-59.

Book Project Talk:

"The Political Imaginary of User Democracy" 

at Columbia University (45min + Q&A)

Further Publications

Reading in Dark Times:

Toward a Queer Politics of Repair. 

Media Theory 7.1. 125-146 (2023).

The essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’ by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997; 2003) has been frequently cited as a foundational text of post-critique, especially in literary and queer theory. In this article, I make the case for reparative reading as a consciously political project, inspired by Sedgwick’s deep commitment to making oppositional strategy, and bring this understanding in critical conversation with examples of its uptake during the post-critical “reparative turn” in the Humanities. 

I further posit that Sedgwick was already engaging in such reparative projects even before she explicitly theorized this practice through a close-reading of her 1991 article ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.’ My overarching argument is that reparative reading, while at times misappropriated, can still provide the foundation for a larger project of queer repair – a prefigurative politics of the imagination.

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable.

This project rejects such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together by technology, and instead, proposes that ‘community’ is best understood as a negative and inoperative phenomenon in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic feminism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community. Though the two understandings of community discussed here are ultimately different, they both emphasize a structuring absence, a void at the heart of social relations, leading to a rejection of the politics of communal essence and wholeness. Together, they articulate a critique of what I see as the main danger of platform capitalism's insistence on its specific vision of community: the foreclosure of a dimension of generative antagonism and of an opening for the unexpected, for ‘the political’ (le politique). While the dimension of ‘the political’ can never be fully foreclosed, the efforts of platform capitalism nonetheless alienate us from experiences of community understood as negative presence and thus as an ongoing work-in-progress and common responsibility.

Guest Lecture

Watch my guest lecture 

"The Politics of Appearance on Digital Platforms"

for the course 'Introduction to Digital Media' 

at Brown University: 

Course Portfolio 

Introduction to Media and Cultural Studies

This course serves as an introduction to key texts, concepts, and thinkers in Media and Cultural Studies. Rather than presenting a reductionist, linear narrative that uncritically traces the triumphs of Western technological innovations and genius individuals, this course instead explores media as organizational and management devices that produce particular kinds of knowledge and power, including by influencing our understanding of social issues and social justice.

We will explore how media, as vehicles of knowledge production, are intimately connected to meaning-making, policing, and exclusion practices. At the same time, media can be repurposed as instruments for liberation struggles and emancipatory imaginaries of all kinds. Throughout the course, we will learn about these themes both through the lens of a critical history of the present, emphasizing the long-standing value struggles that underpin media

environments and inform practices of re-mediation and cultural production, and also through being in conversation with recent trends in media studies and contemporary social issues.

Technology & Social Justice

Technological inventions have consistently spawned corresponding utopian visions of total social improvement, followed closely by dystopian fears and moral panics. The current advances in digital technologies are no different. Producing the full range of reactions all at once – from celebrations of “networked protests” to wild accusations of “fake news” to dire warnings against the proliferation of “AI deep fakes” – responses to today’s media environments proclaim the end of politics as we know it ... for better or worse.

 Through close reading and discussion of key texts of political and media theory, this course will show that such media developments and corresponding discourses of political crises are never completely “new” but can be historically and intellectually situated in much longer struggles over the ideals that should structure our communities. The digital age certainly did not “invent” white supremacy, isolated individualism, segregated information landscapes, or deliberate and manipulative misreporting, for example. Together we will question both triumphant digital utopianism and fatalist assumptions of ubiquitous manipulation, and instead engage in more complex readings of the ways technology, oppression, and struggles for justice are related.

The Attention Economy

Why is it so hard to put your phone down? Who benefits from keeping us constantly glued to screens—and what are the broader consequences for our relationships, politics, creativity, and sense of self?

This course explores the attention economy: the social, cultural, and economic systems that compete for and profit from human attention. From the autoplay feature on streaming services that encourages binge-watching to the lure of the endless scroll, clickbait headlines, and sensationalist imagery, digital media can be remarkably effective at keeping users’ attention engaged. Drawing on perspectives from media studies, history, and science and technology studies, we will explore how digital platforms are designed to capture and shape our attention, why they are built this way, and what values these design choices embody. 

By the end of the course, you will understand the design and business models underlying digital platforms, recognize attention-grabbing strategies and their consequences, and develop your own arguments about digital society’s relationship to attention, including imagining alternative ways of designing digital futures. The course will also encourage students to critically reflect on attention as a philosophical concept and an embodied experience in their own lives, including through various attention-related exercises. Attention is, by definition, limited. Together, we will ask: How do you want to “spend” yours?

Digital Media & Democracy

Headlines warning of a crisis of democracy fueled by digital technology are everywhere. They point to the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories, increasing political polarization and hate speech, AI-generated propaganda, or the unprecedented concentration of power over shared information landscapes in the hands of a few technology companies. Simultaneously, digital platforms have also been celebrated for fostering new forms of civic engagement,

amplifying marginalized voices, and making media production and political participation more accessible. How should we make sense of these competing narratives? 

In this course, we will explore what a healthy democracy requires in the digital age and how digital media shape how we debate, participate, and imagine being in community together. At the intersection of media studies and political theory, the course examines how digital technologies transform the public sphere, activist organizing, ideals of citizenship, and the distribution of power.

This course is for anyone interested in understanding the political consequences of living in a digitally mediated world. It will equip you with the concepts to critically evaluate competing visions of democracy, analyze how digital media shape political life and public discourse, and develop thoughtful arguments about how digital technologies might be governed to foster more democratic, equitable, and inclusive societies—or whether some technological developments should be resisted altogether in the interest of defending the public good.