Platformed Contention: Digital Cultures, AI, and the Reconfiguration of Collective Action for the Global Majority

Digital platforms and artificial intelligence are not merely new tools for activists; they are increasingly part of the terrain on which collective action is organized, made visible, distorted, repressed, and contested. Across recent mobilizations — from Gen Z protests in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to feminist, climate, anti-austerity, pro-democracy, and anti-war movements — contention has unfolded through shifting relations between streets, screens, algorithms, encrypted communities, livestreams, memes, and popular culture.

This joint session between RC48 Social Movements, Collective Action and Social Change and WG10 Digital Sociology asks how platformed and algorithmic environments are transforming the repertoires, temporalities, dynamics, risks, and political meanings of protest. We invite papers that examine how activists appropriate, resist, and repurpose digital infrastructures; how visibility and invisibility are produced by algorithmic systems; how AI is used in activist communication, repression, surveillance, or counter-information; and how platformed repertoires interact with embodied and street-based forms of contention.

The session invites theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions, especially studies that go beyond cases from the Global North and focus on local infrastructures, political regimes, inequalities, and cultures of participation across the Global Majority. We are particularly interested in research on platform-mediated mobilization, digital repression and circumvention, encrypted coordination, misinformation and counter-information, youth cultures, memes, symbols, and the transfer of tactics across different contexts.

Rather than treating platforms and AI as technological solutionism, the session examines them as contested arenas where grievances are framed, identities are performed, publics are (re)assembled, and power is negotiated in contemporary forms of collective action.