Social Text Colonial Studies of the Platform Special Issue

Category: Publication

This special issue seeks to explain what platforms do and contextualize them within colonial history. Looking at the long history of platforms sheds light on why algorithmic grammars always segment populations into exploitable and condemnable differences parsed by granular gradations of marketability. This special issue argues that the very notion of a “platform” is a product of colonial history and an abstraction that accomplishes the erasure of the history that produced it. The papers in this special issue argue that coloniality must be included in the definition of a platform so that platform power can be fully understood through its colonial ontologies of race, gender, disability, and more. This collection intervenes in platform scholarship to demand 400 years of platform studies, not just 50. Expected theoretical contributions: Genealogies of the “Data Industries” including data annotation, cloud infrastructures, and data analytics Eighteenth-century corporate technologies, interfaces, and data practices Intellectual histories of the idea of digital colonialism Modern technological legacies of slavery and indenture systems in biometrics, tracking software, and visa portals New materialist histories of analogue-digital governance Connections between machine learning and scientific racism and ableism Colonial treaties as software Posthumanist theories of eighteenth-century technology; how its intra-acting agencies enact, produce, and come to matter Platforms and territorialization / re-territorialization

Initiator(s):
Social Text Collective

Deadline: 01.03.2025
Publication-Type: Article / Journal

https://socialtextjournal.org/call-for-papers-colonial-studies-of-the-platform/

Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein