Playing Politics in Digital Spaces: Life After Social Media

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.

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.