Project Title

Platforms Against the System: Historicising Technologies of Transparency and Transgression

Research Topic

Anna’s research objective is to use a critical historical lens to understand how laissez-faire policies in the American technology industry and unchecked corporate growth frameworks are championed by major digital tech companies. Specifically, this project will analyse the transition from the late-twentieth to the twenty-first centuries’ configurations of popular political dissent as they were shaped by the prerogatives of profit-oriented digital platforms.

Anna is interested in the extent to which online virtual communities of the 1990s fostered horizontally networked politics and personal transgression as politically dissident forces. She intends to interrogate how the principles of the following elements were ideologically mutually constitutive of each other at the same time as their stated goals were often at odds: the Neoliberal political order, the anarchism and transgression of anti-globalisation “hacktivists” and cyberfeminists, and Silicon Valley’s anti-establishment posture. Through this work she seeks to illuminate histories that help us better understand pressing contemporary debates around platformization and political participation.

Supervisors

Dr Seeta Peña Gangadharan and Dr. Nick Anstead

Biography 

Anna completed a Master of Teaching degree from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), as well as a Master of Arts degree in History from the University of Toronto. Her MA research project investigated the naturalisation of resource extraction and colonial political economy via commercial photography in the twentieth century. She also holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Toronto.

Prior to arriving at the LSE, Anna spent four years in public education, teaching History and Social Sciences in the Toronto District School Board. Anna has been active in grassroots organising networks as an original member of Climate Justice Toronto (CJTO), which mobilises students and youth around issues of climate change, extractivism and ongoing colonial policies, as well as being involved in various other community-based campaigns with 350.org and local coalitions for free public transit. Her experience with community advocacy through both her teaching and political activities greatly inform Anna’s academic commitment to public engagement and outreach.

Anna’s doctoral work is supported at the LSE by a PhD Studentship.