Playing Politics in Digital Spaces

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.

• Introducing Play and Politics: Making Worlds through Platforms and Digital MediaPart I: Worlding Play and Politics1. ‘Cloud supervisors’: COVID construction vehicles as playful cultural creation versus ludic governmentality2. Playing with technology towards populist governmentality in Turkey3. Politics in highly playful experiences4. Ludologistics and the politics of playful military technologies5. Humoring the norm: Politics of legal humorPart II: Platforms, Dark Play, and Counterplay6. Taken over by the trolls: Dark play, trolling, and absorption in Trumpism7. Red Scare girlfriends: Language games with the Red Scare podcast, or the ludic logic of online contrarianism8. THIS IS NOT A GAME, LEARN TO PLAY THE GAME: Huizinga’s homo ludens, violence, and the QAnon conspiracy9. Digital alchemy as play: Black women domestic workers on Brazilian social media10. All the world’s a stage: The ironic worlding of ‘Birds Aren’t Real’Part III: Material Practices of Political Play11. The promise of freedom in historical games: The politics of past-play12. Games to put platforms in their place13. (Ir)resistible bodies: Larp as sociocultural technology for building queer heterotopias14. From playful protests to toy activism: Troubleshooting tweets of art activist Barbie15. Sharing interspecies stories on social media: An exploration of Australian older adult’s’ pet image sharing practices16. King of the Hill or the storming of the Capitol as double play: The multiplications of worlds through social media platformsIndex