Center on Digital Culture and Society 2026 Symposium

Good Vibes Only? How Affects and Emotions Are Mediated for Justice in Digital Culture

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About the Event

This Symposium brings together scholars across career stages and methodological traditions to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on how affects and emotions are produced, mediated, and circulated. The symposium pays particular attention to affect as both a generative force driving social movements, everyday activism, and social justice work, and as a mechanism that can be leveraged to amplify misinformation, disinformation, and digital tribalism in the face of fascism and militarism. The resulting scholarship challenges researchers to examine affect as a constitutive element of how power is exercised, contested, and mobilized in mediated spaces.

The symposium is organized by the Center on Digital Culture and Society.

Schedule

Thursday, April 9, 2026

Annenberg School for Communication

4:00-5:00 pm | Symposium Opening Reception

The Plaza Lobby

5:00-5:15 pm | Welcome Remarks and Introductions

Room 500

• Sarah Banet-Weiser (University of Pennsylvania)
• Guobin Yang (University of Pennsylvania)

5:15-6:00 pm | Keynote Speaker 

Room 500

Moderator and Introduction: Yena Lee (University of Pennsylvania)

• Paolo Gerbaudo (Complutense University, Madrid) - "Anger-triggering and laughter-tickling: theorizing social media propaganda as emotional prompting"

Friday, April 10, 2026

Annenberg School for Communication

8:30-9:15 am | Breakfast

Room 500

9:15-10:45am | Panel 1: Affective Resistance, Performance, and Cultural Politics

Room 500

Moderator: Lucy March  (University of Pennsylvania)

• Priyanka Kundu (University of Illinois Chicago), "Vibing with Mamdani: Everyday Social Justice through Joy, Pride, Swag, and Cringe by TikTok Affective Publics"
  Discussant: Areli Rocha (University of Pennsylvania)
• Annabella Marie Backes (Free University of Berlin), "Refusing to Emote: Feminist Strategies of Non-Performance on TikTok"
  Discussant: Yingchuan Qu (University of Pennsylvania)
• Mohammed Rashid (University of Southern Mississippi), "Affective Diffusion Resistance: The Work of Joyful Affect in the 2024 July Revolution in Bangladesh"  
  Discussant: Lucila Rozas (University of Pennsylvania)

10:45-11:00 am | Coffee break

Room 500

11:00 am-12:30 pm | Panel 2: Affective Infrastructures between Memory, Control, and Harm

Room 500

Moderator: Tobi Moses (University of Pennsylvania)

• Taylor Leigh Smith (University of Pennsylvania), “Remixed Modalities: Hip-Hop, Memory, and the Public Sphere”
  Discussant: Lucy March (University of Pennsylvania)
• Lizhen Zhao (University of Massachusetts Amherst) & Anqi Peng (University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign), “Digital Affective Arrangements and Intimate Governance: Matchmaking Livestreams in Post Socialist China”
  Discussant: Yuan Xu (University of Pennsylvania)
• Nora Suren (Northeastern University), “‘Freaks and Raids’: Affective Governance, Networked Misogyny, and the Emotional Politics of Digital Violence in Authoritarian Turkey”
  Discussant: Sara Reinis (University of Pennsylvania)

12:30-1:30 pm | Lunch

The Plaza Lobby

1:30-3:00pm | Panel 3: AI and the Political Economy of Intimacy

Room 500

Moderator: Lucila Rozas (University of Pennsylvania)

• Irina Kalinka (Columbia University), “From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Intimacy: The Rise of Affective Platform Capitalism”
  Discussant: Ran Wang (University of Pennsylvania)
• Malcolm Ogden (University of Richmond) & Gayas Eapen (Coastal Carolina University), “AI Voice Tech, Affect, and Articulation: Three Case Studies”
  Discussant: Liz Hallgren (University of Pennsylvania)
• Hiu Fung Chung (University of Toronto), “Towards Cruel Optimalism in Therapeutic AI: The Technopolitics of Ableist Vulnerability in Hong Kong”
  Discussant: Tobi Moses (University of Pennsylvania)

3:00-3:15 pm | Coffee break

Room 500

3:15-4:45 pm | Panel 4: Affective Persuasion, Boundary-Making, and Partisan Infrastructures

Room 500

Moderator: Yena Lee (University of Pennsylvania)

• Mateusz Plaza (Thomas Jefferson University) & Mary M. Alcaro (Bryn Mawr College), “Effecting Change in Affective Problems: The Role of Affect in the Mis/Disinformation Age”
  Discussant: Sherry Wang (University of Pennsylvania)
• Deana Rohlinger (Florida State University), “The Affective Infrastructures of the Left and Right”
  Discussant: Lucy March (University of Pennsylvania)
• Lucas Wong (University of Toronto), “Political Influencers and the Affective Stigmatization of Leftists on Hong Kong YouTube”
  Discussant: Yena Lee (University of Pennsylvania)

4:45-5:00 pm | Concluding Remarks

Room 500

• Guobin Yang (University of Pennsylvania)

Program details

Panel 1: Affective Resistance, Performance, and Cultural Politics

Annabella Marie Backes, “Refusing to Emote: Feminist Strategies of Non-Performance on TikTok”

Social media platforms such as TikTok are widely understood as affect-saturated environments that reward visibility, relatability, and affectively intense performance. Accordingly, research on digital feminist activism has focused primarily on how affect and emotion are mobilized and circulated. This paper shifts attention to a different tendency: feminist creators who refuse to emote. Rather than reading this refusal as emotional absence or disengagement, it conceptualizes refusing to emote as a gendered and politically charged affective media practice. Drawing on multimodal qualitative analysis, the study examines feminist TikToks across three cases: abortion rights activism following the Roe v. Wade overturn, responses to the Mazan rape cases, and the circulation of Paris Paloma’s viral sound “Labour.” Across these cases, creators withdraw embodied emotional performance through practices such as silent storytelling, neutralized educational formats, and disembodied carousel posts. Affect is redistributed into text, sound, and visual sequencing, challenging platform norms of expressive visibility. The paper argues that non-performance constitutes a distinct feminist aesthetic and a critical intervention into TikTok’s infrastructure of feeling.

Priyanka Kundu -  “Vibing with Mamdani: Everyday Social Justice through Joy, Pride, Swag, and Cringe by TikTok Affective Publics” 

Digital platforms have become a key medium for political participation, civic engagement, and social movements. How does affect and playfulness play a role there? This paper examines how TikTok creators evolve as affective publics through their playful micro-activism and/or civic engagement. The study examines the case of Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 New York City mayoral campaign, focusing on TikTok performances set to the viral soundtrack “The name is MAMDANI.” Supporters of Mamdani across NYC and beyond created a fandom-like ecosystem of memes, dances, remixes, and parodic videos with this soundtrack. Drawing on the concept of affective design (Ash, 2012; Brown et al., 2024) and Papacharissi’s (2015) theory of affective publics, the study asks: a) how do the TikTok public leverage the “affective design” of the platform in performing with the soundtrack? And b) how do they evolve as affective publics and perform micro-activism within their performance? Using discourse analysis of the 20 most-viewed videos tied to the soundtrack, the paper shows how joy, pride, humor, and cringe function as subtle yet meaningful political expressions of solidarity, representation, and belonging.

Mohammed Rashid - “Affective Diffusion Resistance: The Work of Joyful Affect in the 2024 July Revolution in Bangladesh”

The July 2024 student uprising in Bangladesh marks a defining moment in South Asia’s youth-led democratic movements. While conventional discourse around the movement has often highlighted emotions of grief, fear, and anger as its driving forces, this paper contends that joy, hope, and collective warmth were equally potent, if not more so, as political catalysts. Drawing on digital ethnography, interviews with student protesters, and a close reading of protest songs, memes, and graffiti, this paper introduces the concept of “affective diffusion”: the deliberate circulation of uplifting emotions through digital media to sustain mobilization and reshape protest narratives. In this case, revolutionary anthems, vibrant wall art, protest memes, and joyful imagery shared across online platforms became far more than mere expressions of resistance; they became tactical tools that engendered a shared sense of vitality and pride. These affective “loops,” wherein on-the-ground joy is captured, circulated, and reintegrated into the movement, invigorated both local and global support. The study argues that this tactical and collective elevation of joy was integral to the movement's success. This paper thus positions affective diffusion as a vital lens through which to examine contemporary social movements, illustrating how joy can serve as both a radical strategy and a transformative force against authoritarianism. 

Panel 2: Affective Infrastructures between Memory, Control, and Harm

Taylor Leigh Smith - “Remixed Modalities: Hip-Hop, Memory, and the Public Sphere” 

Founded in the literal and figurative fires of urban neglect and youth disillusionment (Chang, 2005), hip-hop's ascent to prominence has kindled a contentious relationship between hip-hop's success and its ability to maintain ties to its roots as a culture and discourse created to "disrupt" public space for "disenfranchised Black people" (Pough, 2004, p. 27). "Remixed Modalities" examines how digital hip-hop archives on Instagram and the communal, affective, and experiential-based memory negotiation that occur within them are integral to hip-hop culture's quest to maintain a connection with its counterpublic origins. Building on scholarship on hip-hop culture (Pough, 2004; Neal, 1998), the public sphere (Squires, 2002; Hill, 2018), collective memory and archiving (Baker, 1994; Erll, 2011,) platforms (Leaver, 2020; Brock, 2012; Florini, 2014), and the affective potential of social media archives (bruce, 2022; Holowka, 2018), this project asks: How might the addition of studying those outside the realm of traditional archivists and curators complicate our understanding of who is authorized to act as architects of Black memory? How do Black communal practices of memory-making and information diffusion adapt to the possibilities of new digital media, specifically Instagram? How do these "acknowledgments of time, memory, and affect" allow hip-hop users to utilize "Instagram as an 'Archive of Feeling'" (bruce, 2022, p. 249; Holowka, 2018, p. 192)? Utilizing a tri-tiered methodological process focusing on content, production, and consumption, this auto ethnographic project examines Instagram posts, with discourse analysis of comments and visual analysis of posts, culminating in the production of a digital archive and an accompanying "scroll-back" short film (Robards & Lincoln, 2019, p. 2). "Remixed Modalities" will contribute to the scholarship on hip-hop's relationship to media and technology, Black memory and digital archival practices, and the affective possibilities of digital media and archives.

Lizhen Zhao and Anqi Peng - “Digital Affective Arrangements and Intimate Governance: Matchmaking Livestreams in Post Socialist China” 

In this study, we examine digital livestreams featuring “ze ou ding wei” (“partner selection positioning”), a format in which professional matchmakers assess callers’ romantic market positions and recommend strategies to optimize their marriage prospects. Drawing on the concept of “affective arrangement,” which highlights distinctive and heterogeneous elements that constitute “a specific mode of affecting and being affected,” we conceptualize matchmaking livestreams as “digital affective arrangements”—socio-technical formations in which discursive frameworks, multi-modal interactions, and technological interfaces converge to mobilize and regulate affect in real time. Based on digital ethnography across six months, our analysis illuminates how a cluster of affects belonging to what we called “marriage optimism,” borrowing from Berlant’s term “cruel optimism,” is orchestrated in these online intimate publics. Following a relational understanding of affect, we argue that marriage optimism in digital matchmaking is not merely an outcome of social relations but an infrastructural condition imbricated within them. This affective formation is central to the mundane micropolitics of digital matchmaking, and it is both an effect of and a structuring condition through which anxieties are governed, social inequalities are reproduced, and the matchmaking economy is sustained. 

Nora Suren - “‘Freaks and Raids’: Affective Governance, Networked Misogyny, and the Emotional Politics of Digital Violence in Authoritarian Turkey”

This paper examines how digital harassment operates as a form of affective governance in Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian online environment. Drawing on two years of digital ethnography and interviews with 33 feminist, queer, and politically dissident content creators, I argue that misogyny, transphobia, and coordinated harassment are not incidental byproducts of online culture but constitute a systemic emotional infrastructure that disciplines dissent and sustains authoritarian power. Creators are routinely targeted through coordinated “raids” involving mass reporting, trolling, doxxing, and meme warfare, which mobilize affects such as fear, disgust, and humiliation to delegitimize feminist and LGBTQ+ voices.
I show how these affective dynamics produce what I conceptualize as political precarity: an overlapping vulnerability shaped by both platform governance (e.g., algorithmic suppression) and ideological repression. The paper introduces the concept of visibility fatigue to describe the emotional exhaustion that emerges from being simultaneously hyper-visible as a target and hyper-vulnerable to attack. At the same time, creators develop micro-publics of care through private channels and backchannel networks that circulate solidarity, emotional support, and collective resilience. By foregrounding affect, this paper reframes digital violence as a political and emotional system through which authoritarianism is both enacted and contested.

Panel 3: AI and the Political Economy of Intimacy

Irina Kalinka - “From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Intimacy: The Rise of Affective Platform Capitalism” 

There has been much debate about artificial intelligence and its potential to reach the intelligence of humans. Less attention has been paid to claims about the ability of AI to simulate emotional intelligence and empathy, generating artificial intimacy. 
My project interrogates this commercialization of feeling through popular AI companion chatbots, such as Elon Musk’s “Ani” or “Replika.” Demand is growing rapidly: of the 337 active, revenue-generating apps available worldwide, 128 were released in 2025.
Responses have largely focused on whether AI can truly show care, or on individual mental health and privacy risks. I shift the lens to collective impacts. AI companions embody the rise of affective platform capitalism: the mobilization of technologies and techniques that aim to emotionally bind users to technological services, exemplifying the tech-corporate governance of affect.
Drawing on recent reporting, examples of interactions with AI companions posted by users, and digital media studies, I show how these systems are engineered to generate trust, attachment, and long-term engagement. I argue they serve as the “human face” of powerful tech-companies, obscuring centralized power structures behind a multiplicity of friendly facades. Emotional reliance on artificial others may also divert time and resources from the demanding work of cultivating human collectivity to advocate for a more just world.

Malcolm Ogden and Gayas Eapen - “AI Voice Tech, Affect, and Articulation: Three Case Studies”

This paper considers the implications of recent developments in AI-powered synthetic voice technologies relative to a range of already-existing cultural and affective attachments surrounding the human voice. Drawing on sound studies work on machine listening, cultural studies theories of articulation, and affect theory, we first consider the AI audio company ElevenLabs, including promotional and marketing materials as well as recent news coverage of the company's "acquisition" of the vocal talents of several major Hollywood actors. We connect this set of objects to specifically situated cultural anxieties surrounding the human voice's perceived relationship to (certain conceptions of) intimacy, authenticity, and individuality. For our second case study we analyze Spotify's AI-powered "DJ" tool as being representative of the more general manner in which AI voice technologies are being utilized as connective tissue to fill in spaces amidst a host of already-existing regimes of corporate and artificially-generated cultural production. The final case study that we consider is the "Learning with Lyrics" social media account. We conclude with some reflection on what these three case studies show in sum, which is, among other things, the operationalization of a radically dispersed discretization of voice, affect, accent, and intonation by conflicting entities and interests.

Hiu Fung Chung - “Towards Cruel Optimalism in Therapeutic AI: The Technopolitics of Ableist Vulnerability in Hong Kong”

Artificial intelligence (AI) has learned to speak the language of healing and empathy, despite persistent concerns about hallucinations and chatbot psychosis haunting its promises. While communication and media studies have examined the social consequences of “emotion AI,” these critiques often rely on universalist conceptions of AI and remain detached from the cultural, institutional and infrastructural contexts in which AI innovation is embedded. This paper offers a technopolitical critique of these promises based on ethnographic research on a Cantonese-language therapeutic AI project in Hong Kong. Weaving together Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism with disability media studies, I introduce cruel optimalism to describe an affective regime in which mental optimization becomes both a technical mandate of automation and a moral horizon of flourishing, even as it disappoints both users and those who labor to sustain its promise. I argue that this regime is organized through ableist norms of vulnerability, shaping who can be recognized as vulnerable, how therapeutic communication is mediated, and how mental failure is moralized as micro-relational insufficiency rather than social suffering. The paper contributes to critical AI studies by advancing a technopolitical approach to therapeutic AI that interrogates affective and disability-based inequalities in data-driven care.

Panel 3: Affective Persuasion, Boundary-Making, and Partisan Infrastructures

Mateusz Plaza and Mary M Alcaro - “Effecting Change in Affective Problems: The Role of Affect in the Mis/Disinformation Age”

Our paper considers the reasons, reactions, and ramifications of affective language as a tool for persuasion in the digital sphere. We begin by presenting Heidegger's theory of language as a tool of dasein, recognizing the role that language plays in shaping the affect of those who engage with it. Then, we explore the pitfalls of relying upon logic alone to solve the problem of mis/disinformation circulation. We next present contemporary examples of how affective language is weaponized in the digital sphere, concluding by considering the role new technologies play in perpetuating the problem of mis/disinformation, and the challenges we can expect to face as such tools gain popularity. In emphasizing the significant role that affect plays in the reception and processing of information, we might gain a fuller understanding of the complexity of the problem before us. Our interdisciplinary approach engages with the phenomenological complexity of the human mind, recognizing that humans, unlike machines, possess emotions that cannot help but color our experiences, actions, and decision-making. When we fail to account for, or directly address, these emotions, we become vulnerable to building technologies that unwittingly exacerbate the problem of affective language as a mechanism of mis/dis information.

Deana Rohlinger - “The Affective Infrastructures of the Left and Right”

Digital cultures run on emotion, but not all affects circulate equally or do the same political work. This paper argues that partisan media comment sections function as affective infrastructures that teach users how to feel about politics and justice. Using thousands of comments from conservative (Breitbart, Daily Caller, The Daily Wire) and liberal (Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Raw Story) outlets collected around major political crises between 2018 and 2025, I analyze how emotions are produced and stabilized in ideologically homogenous publics. Comments were coded for emotional tone, blame attribution, identity cues, and justice-related language. The analysis reveals a structural asymmetry. Right-wing comment spaces cultivate a durable emotional repertoire organized around grievance, threat, and retributive justice. In contrast, left-wing spaces express empathy and moral alarm tied to restorative justice (albeit it is marked by volatility and fatigue). These asymmetries help explain digital tribalism, emotional burnout, and uneven capacities for democratic engagement.

Lucas Wong - “Political Influencers and the Affective Stigmatization of Leftists on Hong Kong YouTube”

This article investigates the affective stigmatization of leftists on Hong Kong YouTube. Particularly, it examines how this affective stigma is generated through the labelling of zogaau (左膠), which condenses fears and hatred by tying left-wing ideals to communism and to perceived threats to Hong Kong’s capitalist and localist order in the post-2019 media environment. Using rhetorical and qualitative textual analysis, this article analyzes post-2019 Hong Kong YouTube videos to ask: (1) How do Hong Kong political influencers deploy the label zogaau and the affects embedded in it to frame the leftists, and (2) What are the challenges of de-stigmatizing the label zogaau? Theoretically, I treat hatred and fear as circulating attachments that influencers perform and amplify, approaching them as “ugly feelings,” and connecting this affective circulation to a “distribution of the sensible” that structures what becomes politically audible on the platform. Ultimately, I argue that zogaau operates less as an ideological descriptor than as a flexible signifier of betrayal and naivety that bundles disparate grievances into a common-sense aversion to left politics. The article hence contributes a concept of affective boundary policing for understanding influencer politics in Hong Kong and offers a portable framework for studying global stigmatizing labels in platformed political discourse.

Speakers’ Bios

Mary M. Alcaro

Mary M. Alcaro is a Visiting Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, where her research integrates literature, the medical humanities, and affect theory, with a particular focus on historical understandings of sex and gender, as well as the social and literary impacts of epidemic disease. Her current research builds upon her doctoral thesis, “Unspeakable But Not Unspoken: The Literary Language of Plague Trauma in Middle English Literature,” which uses trauma theory as a hermeneutic for reading medieval texts produced during outbreaks of the Black Death in England. Dr. Alcaro also participates in public humanities education initiatives at The Rosenbach Museum and Library and serves as a staff writer for Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. She holds a PhD in English from Rutgers University.

Annabella Backes

Annabella Backes is a PhD researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre Affective Societies, project “Contested Order of Emotions,” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her research examines how affect and emotion mobilize and become contested in feminist and anti-feminist discourses on social media, with a particular focus on networked feminism on TikTok. Using qualitative methods, she studies discourses around gendered inequalities, sexualized violence, abortion rights, and trans rights.

 

Sarah Banet-Weiser

Sarah Banet-Weiser is the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and is Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication. In addition, she is a research professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the founding director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools. Her teaching and research interests include gender in the media, identity, citizenship and cultural politics, consumer culture and popular media, race and the media and intersectional feminism. Committed to intellectual and activist conversations that explore how global media politics are exercised, expressed and perpetuated in different cultural contexts, she has authored or edited eight books, including Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), the award-winning Authentic M: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2012), Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Duke, 2018) and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and essays.

Hiu-Fung Chung

Hiu-Fung Chung is a Ph.D. candidate in Media, Technology & Culture at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. His recent research explores the intersections of technology, inequality, and social suffering across different sociocultural and organizational contexts, particularly in relation to work, mental care and digital activism. His recent writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Information, Communication & Society and Media, Culture & Society.

 

Gayas Eapen

Gayas Eapen is a media ethnographer and practitioner. His work engages with media in public, sonic street media, and global digital cultures. His work has been published in Asiascape: Digital Asia and the De Geuyter Handbook of Digital Culture. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Culture and Design at Coastal Carolina University.

 

 

 

Paolo Gerbaudo

Paolo Gerbaudo is a senior researcher in the department of political science of Complutense University in Madrid and at the Alameda Institute. His research focuses on the relationship between digital technology and politics and its consequences for social movements, public opinion and the state. He is the author of four monographs including 'Tweets and the Streets' (2012) and 'The Digital Party' (2019) and is currently working on a new book on the online battle for political sentiment.

Irina Kalinka

Irina Kalinka is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, working on a book project titled “From Software to Social Engineering: How Technoplutocrats Seized Unprecedented Power over Democratic Politics.” As a scholar of digital media and politics, her research explores tech-corporate power and the societal implications of emerging technologies. Her work has appeared in Public Culture, Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, and Media Theory.

Priyanka Kundu

Priyanka Kundu is a doctoral candidate in Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago and a DDC × TrygFonden Fellow at the Digital Democracy Centre, University of Southern Denmark. Her research focuses on social media, AI, and politics, political messaging and framing, platform affordances, persuasion, and propaganda. She has published several peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and has presented her research at 20 national and international conferences. Priyanka has professional experience as a journalist and university faculty member. She enjoys reading, traveling by public transit, and walking through neighborhoods and parks.

Malcolm Ogden

Malcolm Ogden is a media theorist and historian whose work examines the interrelations of digital media, bodily-sensation, and capitalist political economy. Recent work of his has been published in the De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Cultures, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Culture, Theory, and Critique, and is forthcoming in Media Theory and Post45. He is Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at the University of Richmond.

Anqi Peng

Anqi Peng earned her Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in August 2025. Her research lies at the intersection of media studies, critical cultural studies, and gender studies. Her dissertation, “Leftover Women,” Media Discourses, and Gender and Class Dynamics in Post-Socialist China, examines how media representations of single women function as key sites of gendered and classed governance in the post-socialist era. She is currently developing a series of projects on China’s digital culture, intimate publics, and matchmaking.

Mateusz Plaza

Mateusz Plaza is a Psychiatry Resident at Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital. A former Fulbright Researcher in Philosophy, Dr. Plaza researches the impact of cybertechnologies upon human consciousness. His work in forensic psychiatry combines an interest in psychopathologies with a concern for the consequences of dis/misinformation in online spaces. His current work examines the ways digital infrastructures-- including blockchain and artificial intelligence-- shape cognition, decision making, and human behavior.

 

Mohammed Rashid

Mohammed Rashid (he/they) is an Assistant Professor of Critical Cultural Communication at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is a former postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. Mohammed’s book project, in progress, titled Queer Media in Bangladesh: Mediated Sexualities and Negotiable Visibilities, explores the invisible digital media cultures of Bangladeshi queer counter-publics to imagine local activist frameworks and queer futurities. Mohammed’s research has appeared in QED, Media Fields, Research in Developmental Disabilities, and Flow. He has won several awards for research and service from NCA and HASTAC.

Deana A. Rohlinger

Deana A. Rohlinger is the Mildred and Claude Pepper Distinguished Professor in Sociology, a research associate in the Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy, and an Associate Dean in the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy at Florida State University. She is the author of Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America (Cambridge University Press, 2015), New Media and Society (New York University Press, 2019), and more than 60 research articles and book chapters on digital media, political participation, and American politics. Deana is the former chair of two sections of the American Sociological Association - the section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology and the section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements, a member of the National Institute for Civil Discourse Research Network, a member of Social Science Research Council’s MediaWell, and an on the Advisory Board of TrustDefender. Deana’s forthcoming book, Attention Trap: Why Social Movements Struggle in a Digitally Driven Age, explores the effects of the attention economy on contemporary activism and the implications for American democracy.

Taylor L. Smith

Taylor L. Smith is completing her doctoral work at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Smith holds a degree in African & African-American Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work explores Black girls and women’s unique contributions to Black textual and visual literacies with specific attention to aesthetic, memory, and archival construction. Additionally, she investigates how long-standing Black communal practices of memory-making and information diffusion adapt to the possibilities of digital media. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Digital Culture and Society.

Nora Suren

Dr. Nora Suren is a global digital media scholar and educator whose work sits at the intersection of platform governance, creator culture, global media, and gender and sexuality. She is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University.

Dr. Suren earned her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2025. Her dissertation, Navigating Double Oppression Online: How Alternative Content Creators Maintain Their Ideological Integrity under Algorithmic Bias and Turkish Authoritarianism, draws on digital ethnography, platform analysis, and interviews to examine how politically precarious and marginalized creators navigate algorithmic suppression and authoritarian contexts in Turkey. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from UMass Amherst and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

During the 2024–2025 academic year, she was a Visiting Scholar and Dissertation Fellow at MIT, jointly appointed in Women’s and Gender Studies and Comparative Media Studies/Writing. She is also affiliated with the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab and the Content Creator Scholars Network. Her work has appeared in International Journal of Communication, The Communication Review, and Advertising & Society Quarterly, as well as in edited volumes including The Routledge Handbook on the Influence Industry.

Lucas L. H. Wong

Lucas L. H. Wong is a PhD student at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he is concerned with cultural politics in East Asia. His main research interest rests in the intersection of media and education. Previously, he has written about youth political participation, documentary filmmaking, and transitional justice with a regional focus on Hong Kong and Taiwan. His publications have appeared in international journals including Asian Cinema, Journal of Screenwriting, Social Sciences, and Journal of Electronic Publishing. His current research focuses on public intellectuals and knowledge dissemination across various social media platforms in East Asia.

Guobin Yang

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009), The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016), and The Wuhan Lockdown (2022). He has edited or co-edited seven books, including, most recently, Pandemic Crossings: Digital Technology, Everyday Experience, and Governance in the COVID-19 Crisis (with Bingchun Meng and Elaine Yuan, 2024). His current research focuses on digital activism, civic storytelling, and the digital politics of emotions.

Lizhen Zhao

Lizhen Zhao is a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. In her research, she critically examines the cultural, social, spatial, and environmental implications of digital technologies and platform capitalism. Her work has been published in Media Culture & Society, edited volumes Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (2nd Edition), and The Spectacle of Online Life.

 

 

 

Moderators and Discussants

• Liz Hallgren
• Yena Lee, Ph.D.
• Lucy March, Ph.D.
• Tobi Moses
• Devo Probol
• Yingchuan Qu
• Sara Reinis
• Arelí Rocha
• Lucila Rozas
• Ran Wang
• Sherry Wang
• Yuan Xu