Irina Kalinka, Ph.D.

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University

About Me

A scholar of digital media with a global purview, my research and teaching areas combine digital platform studies with questions of democracy and social justice. I was inspired to pursue an academic career by my experiences as an elected representative in German local politics. As a result, my approach to research is deeply influenced by my commitment to collaboration and knowledge mobilization.

Currently, I am a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, with a concurrent position as lecturer at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and affiliate of the Center for Comparative Media. I hold a Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.

Micro Introduction Talk:

"Local Politics, Digital Media, and the Public Good"

at Brown University (5min)

CV

Kalinka_CV_May2025.pdf

Download CV Here

Book Project: User Democracy

Debates about the political impact of digital platforms often revolve around a central, limiting dichotomy: Does digital media revitalize or undermine democracy? In my current book project, I make the case that this popular debate obscures another crucial development: tech-corporations design and promote their own normative conceptualization of democracy through the services and resources they oversee.

The resulting political imaginary of user democracy is informed by a technocratic understanding of politics, including a belief in the programmability of digital public life. Each of my chapters charts an aim of the political coming of age of tech-corporate power, epitomized by user democracy:

1) the popular, utopian aspiration in the tech-sector to escape from politics and difference,

2) the efforts of tech-corporations to appear as socially responsible governing powers,

3) the habituation of user-citizens into properly behaved subjects, and

4) the administration of platforms as privately-owned public space.

Read the Pilot Article for the Book Here:

The Political Imaginary of User Democracy

Public Culture 37.1, 39-59.

https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11714154

Kalinka_UserDemocracy_OverviewTalk.mp4

Book Project Talk:

"The Political Imaginary of User Democracy"

at Columbia University (45min + Q&A)

Publications

The Political Imaginary of User Democracy

Public Culture 37.1, 39-59.

Read "The Political Imaginary of User Democracy" Here

Reading in Dark Times:

Toward a Queer Politics of Repair.

Media Theory 7.1. 125-146 (2023).

The essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’ by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997; 2003) has been frequently cited as a foundational text of post-critique, especially in literary and queer theory. In this article, I make the case for reparative reading as a consciously political project, inspired by Sedgwick’s deep commitment to making oppositional strategy, and bring this understanding in critical conversation with examples of its uptake during the post-critical “reparative turn” in the Humanities.

I further posit that Sedgwick was already engaging in such reparative projects even before she explicitly theorized this practice through a close-reading of her 1991 article ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.’ My overarching argument is that reparative reading, while at times misappropriated, can still provide the foundation for a larger project of queer repair – a prefigurative politics of the imagination.

Read "Reading in Dark Times" Here

The Politics of Appearance on Digital Platforms:

Personalization and Censorship.

Z Politikwiss 32, 531-549 (2022).

https://doi.org/10.1007/s41358-021-00307-x.

The politics of appearance on digital platforms: Personalization and censorship - Zeitschrift für PolitikwissenschaftPersonalization and censorship are two key concepts that make sense of how content curation takes shape online. Yet, they are (de)politicized in decidedly different ways in popular discourses. Censorship is already widely understood as a governing gesture that tries to influence what content is publicly available. Personalization—the focus of this paper—is, in contrast, not often considered an overreach of platform power that decides who gets to encounter what, when, and how. To counteract such a reading, this paper argues that personalization algorithms structure digital public appearance by defining its conditions of possibility through code, categorization, curation, and distribution. This represents, what radical democratic thinker Jacques Rancière calls, the power to “partition the sensible”. In other words, personalization algorithms can distinguish between political signal, that which is relevant to all, and noise, that which can be filtered out as irrelevant interference or niche interest. As such, personalization algorithms and the corporations which control them hold significant influence over how shared realities take shape across polities—or not. These content filtering mechanisms get to define—to an influential extent—the limits and categories of the common world. This means that personalization, similar to the already established concept of censorship, should be understood as a crucial mode of governing power exercised by corporations over regimes of public appearance on digital platforms.

Read "The Politics of Appearance" Here

Community Despite Connection:

Resisting the Digital Logics of Optimization and Failure.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 24.4 (2023).

https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4084.

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable.

This project rejects such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together by technology, and instead, proposes that ‘community’ is best understood as a negative and inoperative phenomenon in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic feminism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community. Though the two understandings of community discussed here are ultimately different, they both emphasize a structuring absence, a void at the heart of social relations, leading to a rejection of the politics of communal essence and wholeness. Together, they articulate a critique of what I see as the main danger of platform capitalism's insistence on its specific vision of community: the foreclosure of a dimension of generative antagonism and of an opening for the unexpected, for ‘the political’ (le politique). While the dimension of ‘the political’ can never be fully foreclosed, the efforts of platform capitalism nonetheless alienate us from experiences of community understood as negative presence and thus as an ongoing work-in-progress and common responsibility.

Read "Community Despite Connection" Here