Platform Amplification and Feminist Refusals

Talk by Assistant Professor Rianka Singh, York University, Department of Communication and Media Studies.

Abstract

Platforms are often framed as necessary for a kind of empowerment; they are spaces and places to amplify one’s voice, to have a speaking part in a narrative, and to display power even in limited ways. In popular discourse, to be given a platform is synonymous with being given a voice. By suggesting that this history of platform media extends beyond our current understanding of digital platforms, this talk will trouble the idea that speaking up via platform media is a requirement for feminist resistance. I begin by offering a history of the soapbox, which I suggest is analogous to contemporary digital platforms in that both initially provided newfound political participation and newly empowered their users with relative ease. While media facilitate and even encourage the imperative to both speak up and be seen, mediated silences and refusals can also be considered important resistant strategies today. This paper ultimately explores the political potential of silence and refusal at a time when we are increasingly turning our attention to digital media and their technical capacity to afford people a voice and right to speak and be seen.

Bio

Rianka Singh is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University.  Singh’s research is primarily concerned with the relationship between platforms and feminist politics. She is co-editor with Dr. Sarah Sharma of Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (Duke University Press, 2022). Singh’s research has been published in First Monday, Feminist Media Studies and ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology and the Canadian Journal of Communication. She is currently working on a monograph titled Platform Feminism and the Politics of Elevation.