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?