Navigating platform power: Agency and resistance in digital spaces

Navigating Platform Power unpacks the relationship between digital infrastructures, political agency, and resistance. The book cultivates a theoretical dialogue across disciplines and perspectives and provides essential conceptual tools for understanding—and transforming—the conditions of political agency in the platform age. Digital platforms are material infrastructures and symbolic imaginaries that mediate contemporary formations of power, subjection, and resistance. While we know that the digitalisation of social life has come with its own forms of power and contestation, we still miss a clear compass to understand how online and offline logics intersect, mutually shape each other and enable or limit the possibility of agency in this context. Navigating Platform Power: Agency and Resistance in Digital Spaces offers an original theoretical framework for understanding how digitalisation shapes political agency. Conceptualising platforms as socio-technical assemblages, the book examines how they constrain and enable the capacities of individuals and groups, particularly those structurally marginalised, in navigating and resisting platform logics. It explores how platforms both reproduce dominant forms of control and open up spaces for collective action, autonomy and the exertion of agency.Bringing together contributors from across critical traditions—including feminism, Marxism, and post-structuralism—the volume unfolds in three parts. The first focuses on the chaining of agency, analysing how digital infrastructures reinforce domination, exploitation, and fragmentation. The second explores the unchaining of agency, engaging with practices of refusal, subversion, and the reappropriation of platform architectures. The third turns to contested digital futures, addressing the politics of disconnection, regulation, and the struggle to democratise technological life.Rather than offering a singular argument, the book cultivates a theoretical dialogue across disciplines and perspectives. It foregrounds the tensions between platform logics and political imagination, and between technological mediation and emancipatory practice. By theorising the entanglements of infrastructure, power, and subjectivity, Navigating Platform Power provides essential conceptual tools for understanding—and transforming—the conditions of political agency in the platform age. Navigating platform power: Agency and resistance in digital spaces is a groundbreaking and timely exploration of how digitalisation shapes political agency while actors navigate between infrastructure, power, and resistance. Bringing together leading voices from feminism, Marxism, and post-structuralism, it offers a theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding how platforms both restrict and empower individuals—especially those marginalised by dominant structures. With multidisciplinary insights across three parts—chaining agency, unchaining agency, debating digital futures—the volume works through the forces that shape digital control, reveals acts of refusal and subversion, and examines the struggle for more democratic technological futures. Essential reading for scholars, activists, and anyone invested in digital politics, Navigating platform power is a must-have guide to reimagining agency in the platform era.