About
Irina Kalinka (she/her) works at the intersections of technology, society, and power, with a focus on tech-corporations as a media industry that underpins the wide-spread platformization of public discourse, civic life, cultural production, labor, and sociality.
Her current book project, “User Democracy: The Political Coming of Age of Tech-Corporate Power”, examines how tech-corporations began to act more explicitly and publicly as private governing entities post-2016. Debates about the political impact of digital platforms often revolve around a central, limiting dichotomy: Does digital media revitalize or undermine democracy? Her book argues that this popular debate obscures another crucial development: tech corporations can design and promote their own normative conceptualizations of democracy through the services and resources they oversee. In conversation with radical democratic theory, the book traces the consequences of this shift, including the growing idealization of technologically managed forms of democracy, which in turn de-emphasizes emancipatory understandings of democratic life.
A pilot article on the concept of “user democracy” appeared in Public Culture. Irina’s work has also been published in Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, and Media Theory. Her forthcoming research explores AI companionship and the automation of intimacy, as well as the “friendship work” performed by content creators within what she terms affective platform capitalism. She also studies right-wing tech utopias and the rise of digital authoritarianism. In Spring 2026, she organized a major conference at Columbia University on these themes.
Irina teaches courses on technology and social justice, digital political economy, AI, digital authoritarianism, and democracy in the digital age. Before joining the Digital Studies Institute, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Her academic work is informed by her prior experiences as an elected representative in German local politics.
