Playing Politics in Digital Spaces

Frank Chouraqui is Associate Professor at Leiden University, the 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 Assistant Professor at University of Amsterdam, the 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, video game ecosystems and more.Bram Ieven is University Lecturer at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, the Netherlands, and a research fellow on the NWA project RE/Presenting Europe: Popular Representations of Diversity and Belonging in the Netherlands.Saniye Ince is PhD Candidate at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), the 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, the 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, the Netherlands, 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.

• Introducing Play and Politics: Making Worlds through Platforms and Digital Media Part I: Worlding Play and Politics 1. ‘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 Counterplay 6. 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 Play 11. 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