Irina Kalinka, Ph.D.
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University
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About Me
About Me
A scholar of digital media with a global purview, my research and teaching areas combine digital platform studies with questions of democracy and social justice. I was inspired to pursue an academic career by my experiences as an elected representative in German local politics. As a result, my approach to research is deeply influenced by my commitment to collaboration and knowledge mobilization.
Currently, I am a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, with a concurrent position as lecturer at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and affiliate of the Center for Comparative Media. I hold a Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.
Micro Introduction Talk:
"Local Politics, Digital Media, and the Public Good"
at Brown University (5min)
Book Project
Book Project
From Software to Social Engineering:
From Software to Social Engineering:
Tech-Oligarchy and the Undoing of Democracy
Tech-Oligarchy and the Undoing of Democracy
Debates about the political impact of digital platforms often revolve around a central, limiting dichotomy: Does digital media revitalize or undermine democracy? In my current book project, I make the case that this popular debate obscures another crucial development: a small elite of tech-corporations can design and promote their own normative conceptualization of democracy through the immensely influential services and resources they oversee.
The result is a detrimental idealization of technologically managed forms of democracy that are imposed from the top down, de-emphasizing emancipatory understandings of democracy as a collective and inclusive world-making effort—the political imaginary of user democracy.
Democratic politics is here reduced to a project of technological optimization, management, and social engineering by a technocratic elite. I argue that the approaches justified under this banner, cloaked in the language of societal improvement and liberal democracy, in fact legitimize the expansion of corporate power and undermine the need for political contestation and public accountability. In short, user democracy is not meaningfully democratic at all, mobilizing the language of democracy to hasten its undoing.
The project’s key contribution is its establishment of tech-corporate governing rationality as an influential normative force with its own, distinct approaches and modes of value. I also challenge a wide-spread politics of fatalism in which centralized corporate power is equated to technological innovation and so naturalized and assumed to only be minimally subjectable to intervention—a dangerously disempowering and depoliticizing stance.
Each chapter charts a particular aim of the political coming of age of the tech-oligarchy, epitomized by the rise of user democracy as a central sociopolitical paradigm in the present:
1) the popular, utopian aspiration in the tech-sector to escape from politics and difference,
2) the efforts of tech-corporations to appear as socially responsible governing powers and to legitimize their influence,
3) the habituation of user-citizens into properly behaved subjects, and
4) the administration of platforms as privately-owned public space.
Read the Pilot Article for the Book Here:
The Political Imaginary of User Democracy
Public Culture 37.1, 39-59.
Kalinka_UserDemocracy_OverviewTalk.mp4Book Project Talk:
"The Political Imaginary of User Democracy"
at Columbia University (45min + Q&A)
Publications
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.
The Politics of Appearance on Digital Platforms:
Personalization and Censorship.
Z Politikwiss 32, 531-549 (2022).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41358-021-00307-x.
Community Despite Connection:
Resisting the Digital Logics of Optimization and Failure.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 24.4 (2023).
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.
Next Talks
Next Talks
January 9, 2026:
“The Rise of Tech-Corporate Governmentality,”
Annual Conference on ‘Navigating Digital Democracy’ of the
Political Studies Association’s Media and Politics Group
& Technology, Information and Policy Group, Bournemouth University
March 7, 2026:
“The Digital Aesthetics of Gated Communities,”
Northeast Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention, Pittsburgh
March 26 - 28, 2026:
"Molding the User-Citizen:
Digital Citizenship Paedagogy in Google’s Interland,"
Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago
April 10, 2026:
“From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Intimacy:
The Rise of Affective Platform Capitalism,”
Center on Digital Culture and Society Symposium
“Good Vibes Only?,” Annenberg School for Communication, UPenn
Save the Date:
TECHNO-FASCISM SYMPOSIUM
April 3rd, 2026
Columbia University | Conference Co-Organizer
Guest Lecture
Guest Lecture
"The Politics of Appearance on Digital Platforms"
Watch my guest lecture
for the course 'Introduction to Digital Media'
at Brown University:
Email: Irina.Kalinka@columbia.edu
Bluesky: @irikalinka.bsky.social
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