Reel/Repeat/Rupture: Digital Selves, Algorithms, and the Infrastructures of Online Community
Description
This seminar invites explorations of the self as it is performed, looped, repeated, and sometimes unexpectedly ruptured within the algorithmic spaces of short-form video platforms like Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. These platforms circulate endlessly through the repetition of trends, sounds, gestures, memes, filters, and editing styles, where every “redo” is tied to an earlier referent but never fully identical. As performance theory reminds us, repetition always carries the potential for mutation, interruption, or deviation, and it is precisely within these small shifts that new meanings, affects, and possibilities emerge.
Building on this understanding, the seminar further examines how these micro-iterations of the digital self intersect with larger questions around community, belonging, and digitally mediated publics. Short-form video platforms do not only produce individual performances; they also quietly (and sometimes violently) shape how communities are imagined, recognized, surveilled, or excluded. Digital infrastructures enable certain kinds of solidarity and visibility, while simultaneously producing forms of algorithmic control, invisibilization, or fragmentation. We are interested in these ambivalent dynamics: How do repeated gestures, viral loops, or shared memes cultivate a sense of collectivity or shared affect? And in contrast, how do the same infrastructures facilitate erasure, polarization, or alienation?
Within this tension, the seminar pays particular attention to digital nostalgia, the resurfacing of one’s online past through algorithmic memory, resurfaced videos, old profiles, or forgotten posts. How do these fragments of online selves create affective bonds between people, or conversely, mark dissonance and rupture? What forms of community, counterpublics, or ephemeral collectives emerge in these moments of return?
We welcome work that foregrounds intersectional approaches, including queerness, caste, race, gender, class, disability, diaspora, and location, as well as creative, performative, and intermedial methods. Works-in-progress, experimental writing, and performance-based scholarship are encouraged.
Together, this seminar asks: What do repetition, mutation, and digital remnants reveal about how we imagine ourselves and each other within the architectures of contemporary digital life?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ashutosh Prateek is a French language Guest faculty at Miranda House, University of Delhi. They are currently a PhD Scholar at the University of Delhi, working on the exploration of queer experiences in contemporary graphic novels. Ashutosh has also been one of the jury presidents of the Choix Goncourt de l’Inde. They have presented research papers on Fractured Narratives of Indigeneity, and on coming-out narration. Their interests include painting, reels, cinema, and graphic novels.
Speaker Bio
Srishti is a social work professional and researcher with over three years’ experience in gender justice, youth leadership, and transformative education. She holds an MSW from TISS, Mumbai, and a BA in French from JNU. She has worked with grassroots organizations in India on gender, health, and youth agency, and has published on domestic violence, media representation of indigenous women, and feminist protest movements.
Speaker Bio
Wenting Cai is a Lecturer of English literature at Chongqing University, China. She has recently completed her Ph.D from the Department of English, Sun Yat-sen University, China. She has been acting as a visiting scholar at Heidelberg University, Germany, from 2023-2024. Her research interest includes mobility, vulnerability, affective narratology, and speculative narrative in contemporary literature.
Speaker Bio
Ivy Roy Sarkar is a Fellow at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), a policy think tank based in New Delhi. She earned her PhD from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Roorkee, and holds an M.A. in English from Banaras Hindu University. Her research engages with the intersections of Environmental Humanities, Geocriticism, and Extractivist Literatures, with a particular focus on South Asian fiction and Anglophone literatures from Northeast India.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Amélie Lapointe is a masters student in Comparative Literature at the University of Montreal. Her thesis discusses objectivation in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita through the use of Stendhal’s term "cristallisation". Her research areas include Latin American queer literature and the cultural and social impact of teaching French as a second language.
Speaker Bio
Aleksandra Kamińska is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw. Her interests focus on life narratives in popular culture and literature, queer temporalities, and girl as an identity category. In 2018-2019, she was advancing her research at Columbia University as a Fulbright awardee. Outside of academia, she is a co-founder of Girls and Queers to the Front initiative, which aims to uplift gender and sexual minorities by publishing zines, organizing concerts, exhibitions, and workshops
Speaker Bio
Manvendra Singh Thakur (alias Noor) is a queer and trans performance artist, documentary filmmaker, and PhD student in Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal. Their work explores queer/trans belonging in Delhi and Montréal through performance, archives, and intermedial practices, spanning films (B25) and performances (Let’s Make a Home).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ye Jiang obtained her doctorate from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her PhD research focuses on transcultural Chinese fan fiction. She is interested in comparative literature and cultural studies, and explores interdisciplinary approaches that combine traditional literary methods and paradigms with popular culture studies. Her work can be found in Transformative Works and Cultures.
Speaker Bio
Olivera Tesnohlidkova is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic) and a research member of the Literature and Society Laboratory at the Institute of Czech Literature of the CAS. She specializes in the meanings and effects of humor and satire in their various manifestations - presidential campaigns, stand-up comedy, late-night television and literature.
Speaker Bio
Ann Alex (She/Her) is a PhD Student at The Harriet Tubman Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department of the University of Maryland. She is interested in how western digital technologies enable misogyny while structurally invisiblizing caste and class differences. She aims to problematize digital media studies’ constrained treatment of the multiple modalities of race, gender, caste, and class which shape fan identities and their activities online.