Irina Kalinka, Ph.D.

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University

About Me

As a scholar of digital media, my work is situated at the intersection of technology, society, and power. Specifically, my focus is on tech corporations as a media industry that underpins the wide-spread platformization of public discourse, civic life, cultural production, and labor. I was inspired to pursue this work by my experiences as an elected representative in German local politics. I hold a Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.

Currently, I am a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, working on my book project "Tech-Corporate Power and the Remaking of Democracy." The book explores how major Silicon Valley tech corporations increasingly embraced and publicly legitimized their role as governing powers between 2016 and 2024 and the political imaginaries this development gave rise to.

My forthcoming research explores AI companionship and the automation of intimacy, as well as the “friendship work” performed by content creators within what I term affective platform capitalism. I also work on right-wing tech utopias and the rise of digital authoritarianism. In Fall 2026, I will be joining the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan.

CV

Kalinka_CV_Aug2026.pdf

Download CV Here

Book Project

Tech-Corporate Power and

the Remaking of Democracy

My current book project examines how major Silicon Valley tech corporations increasingly embraced and publicly legitimized their role as governing powers between 2016 and 2024. Having long presented themselves as neutral facilitators of communication, this period marked a shift toward tech corporations explicitly assuming responsibility for digital public life and positioning themselves as ‘custodians’ of democracy amidst high profile crises and calls for greater regulation.

Does digital media revitalize or undermine democracy? I make the case that this popular debate obscures another key development: this shift enabled tech corporations to shape normative meanings of democracy through the services and resources they oversee. The result is a detrimental idealization of technologically managed forms of democracy that are imposed from the top down, eroding 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.

Methodologically, I engage in discourse analysis of tech-corporate social responsibility initiatives and the close reading of related media objects, including digital platform designs, algorithmic governing initiatives, tech-utopian speculations, and educational video games.

By bringing these materisl together, 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 tech-corporate power, 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.

The Political Imaginary of User DemocracyAbstract. Does digital media revitalize or undermine democracy? This essay makes the case that this popular debate obscures another crucial development: tech corporations design and promote their own normative understanding of democracy through the services they oversee. The result is the political imaginary of user democracy. User democracy is a technocratic understanding of politics, valorizing data, automation, predictability, and systematization. Under this paradigm, digital public–political life is imagined as operational and thus potentially programmable. Democracy becomes popularly framed as a project of technological optimization and management by a technocratic elite. By contrast, this essay argues for an emancipatory understanding of democracy, which emphasizes that popular sovereignty is not an object to be facilitated by unaccountable tech monopolies from above, but a continuous struggle to build collectivity from below. This essay situates user democracy amid a change in the self-;understanding of tech corporations, as they move away from presenting themselves as mere facilitators to increasingly embrace the role of governing powers. The author analyzes public speeches and leaked internal memos from the tech sector together with tech-;corporate social-;responsibility campaigns, such as YouTube's efforts to diversify the results of its search algorithm and Meta's decision to downrank content labeled “political” altogether.

Kalinka_UserDemocracy_OverviewTalk.mp4

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.

Read "Reading in Dark Times" Here

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.

The politics of appearance on digital platforms: Personalization and censorship - Zeitschrift für PolitikwissenschaftPersonalization and censorship are two key concepts that make sense of how content curation takes shape online. Yet, they are (de)politicized in decidedly different ways in popular discourses. Censorship is already widely understood as a governing gesture that tries to influence what content is publicly available. Personalization—the focus of this paper—is, in contrast, not often considered an overreach of platform power that decides who gets to encounter what, when, and how. To counteract such a reading, this paper argues that personalization algorithms structure digital public appearance by defining its conditions of possibility through code, categorization, curation, and distribution. This represents, what radical democratic thinker Jacques Rancière calls, the power to “partition the sensible”. In other words, personalization algorithms can distinguish between political signal, that which is relevant to all, and noise, that which can be filtered out as irrelevant interference or niche interest. As such, personalization algorithms and the corporations which control them hold significant influence over how shared realities take shape across polities—or not. These content filtering mechanisms get to define—to an influential extent—the limits and categories of the common world. This means that personalization, similar to the already established concept of censorship, should be understood as a crucial mode of governing power exercised by corporations over regimes of public appearance on digital platforms.

Read "The Politics of Appearance" Here

Community Despite Connection:

Resisting the Digital Logics of Optimization and Failure.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 24.4 (2023).

https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4084.

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.

Read "Community Despite Connection" Here

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

Techno-Fascism: Past and Present: An Interdisciplinary Symposium | EventThe symposium Techno-Fascism: Past and Present will explore the convergence of far-right ideologies, authoritarian politics, and digital technologies. As…

Contact Me

Guest Lecture

"The Politics of Appearance on Digital Platforms"

Watch my guest lecture

for the course 'Introduction to Digital Media'

at Brown University:

Watch Lecture Here

Email: Irina.Kalinka@columbia.edu

Bluesky: @irikalinka.bsky.social

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