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Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)
Digital platforms are not neutral conduits but active architects of social life. This session investigates how platform design, algorithms, and governance shape contemporary identity, community, and exclusion. Moving beyond narratives of digital connection, we examine how belonging is “platformed”—mediated, managed, and often monetized by corporate technologies.
While platform affordances can empower marginalized groups to find community, they simultaneously enable new forms of surveillance, algorithmic discrimination, and social sorting. This session explores how race, gender, sexuality, and class are encoded into digital systems and how platform governance often reinforces existing hierarchies under claims of neutrality.
We invite empirical studies and theoretical interventions addressing: How do algorithmic systems shape identity performance and social categorization? What new forms of solidarity and exclusion emerge through platform affordances? How do individuals and communities resist, adapt to, or reshape these technological constraints? By centering the interplay between identity, power, and technology, this session advances a critical understanding of digital belonging within the changing landscape of new media.
Margins to Mainstream: Evolutions in Transgender Discourse on Twitter, 2010-2019 - Vineet Xie-Gupta, Northwestern University; Tara Marie Gonsalves, Columbia University
Platformed Publics and Fugitive Sexualities: Queer Exhibitionism's Liminal Architectures of Privacy - Evan Jiancheng Zhao, Northwestern University
Reframing Transnormativity as a Project of Exclusivity: Examining Transmedicalist Identity Formation in Online Spaces - Dakesian Woods, University of Illinois at Chicago; Ian Kennedy, University of Illinois-Chicago
Stigma, Visibility, and Embodied Labour: Grassroots Female Dance Livestreamers’ Boundary Work under Platform Governance in China - Yubai Li
The Right Way to Feel Wrong: Affective Performance, Cultural Competence, and Belonging on Tumblr - Ashley Lucia Torres, University of California-Irvine