Platforming Cancel Culture : Digital Media, Identity and Cultural Intersections

Platforming Cancel Culture: Digital Media, Identity and Cultural Intersections delves into one of the most polarizing phenomena of the digital age. Bringing together global, intersectional, and interdisciplinary perspectives, this edited collection unpacks the evolving dynamics of cancel culture, examining its practices and implications across diverse political and cultural landscapes.

While some hail cancel culture as a tool for social justice, amplifying marginalized voices and calling out systemic inequalities, others critique it as performative virtue signalling or a form of censorship. This book navigates these tensions by analysing the complex interplay of digital platforms and governance mechanisms that shape cancel culture. It explores how platform architectures enable or resist cancel practices, how narratives and media discourses surrounding cancel culture are constructed and contested, and how these dynamics differ across national and cultural contexts.

The contributors engage with cutting-edge research and offer localized insights from a range of contexts—including India, South Africa, China, Southeast Europe, the US and Russia—to challenge the universalizing assumptions often made about cancel culture. Methodologically diverse, the book employs sentiment and corpus analysis, digital ethnography, interviews, case studies, and critical cultural studies to provide a multifaceted examination of this volatile site of politics and cultural expression.

By weaving together perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies, Platforming Cancel Culture presents a nuanced understanding of how cancel culture functions as a driver of accountability and a locus of contested power. This collection is an essential resource for scholars, students, and anyone seeking to critically engage with the intersections of digital media, culture, and identity in the 21st century.