The World as Abyss

Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s New Media & Digital Cultures Working Group Co-Hosts Reed Van Schenck and Elaine Venter discuss their special section entitled Digital Platforms and Agency, which appeared in Lateral 14.2 (Fall 2025), with additional content from three of the included authors: Kelsey Cummings (Christopher Newport University), Nina Medvedeva (Winona State University), and Nathalie Schäfer (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Chris Alen Sula.

Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s Crip Cultures/Critical Disability Studies Working Group Co-Host Theodora Danylevich discuss crip silences, crip futurities, and crip joy with authors Alyson Patsavas (University of Illinois, Chicago), Alyson K. Spurgas (Trinity College), and Jess Whatcott (San Diego State University). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Angela Carter.

AI literacy, digital politics, and the 2024 US presidential election Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group Co-Host Reed Van Schenck discuss AI literacy, digital politics, and the 2024 US presidential election with authors Elizabeth Losh (William and Mary) and Rita Raley (UC Santa Barbara). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Stefania Milan. A note on our cover image for this episode: "Erica" and "Derek" (named by ChatGPT) are DALL-E-generated images depicting what ChatGPT offered as a response to the following prompt: "How would you describe a profile for the "undecided voter" going into the 2024 presidential election in the United States? Provide two: one leaning toward the democratic candidate and one leaning toward the republican candidate." Image generated on May 13, 2025, using GPT-4o and DALL·E 3.

Discussion of Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements with author Fan Yang

The local, global, and transnational impact of cruise ships and the tourism industry

The Caribbean as an abyssal concept

New work on Samuel Beckett, disability, and relaxed performance. Andrew Culp and Cultural Studies Association’s Black and Race Studies Working Group Co-Host Shauna Rigaud discuss The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (University of Westminster Press, 2023) with authors Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler. This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Richard T. Stafford.

Andrew Culp and Cultural Studies Association's New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group Co-Chair Claudia Skinner take a look into Adi Kuntzman and Esperanza Miyake’s new book Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: In Search of the Opt-Out Button, published by University of Westminster Press (2022). Accompanied by a scholarly essay by Tero Karppi.   The Misunderstanding(s) of Disconnection Studies By Tero Karppi “This is often how our work is misunderstood: as that we are calling people to live in the woods and kind of get off the grid,” explains Adi Kuntsman towards the end of this episode of Positions. Kunstman together with Esperanza Miyake is the author of a recent book Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement and in this episode, they characterize the state of our current digital dependency. The fallacy Kuntsman’s statement above outlines—that academic studies of digital refusal are simultaneously driving an abstention from technology—is important because it shows a tendency to give an oversimplistic solution to a complex problem. The acts of switching off, imposing a moratorium, or moving to a blackout zone all seem like acts of instrumental rationality, but the reasoning only applies if technology is external, like an add-on feature, to our culture and not its constitutive part. In other words, to imagine that one can switch off technology is to imagine that one can switch off culture. Through this lens, I will discuss some of the ways the podcast articulates the challenges of studies of our dependencies with Internet-based culture.  Tiziana Terranova quickly recaps the origin story of our cultural moment from the perspective of a network: the Internet begun as “a set of interoperable network protocols governed by a series of public and/or voluntary non-profit organizations” and after the network was commercialized, it gave power to big companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.1 Individuals and businesses alike found themselves being bonded with digital services in different walks of their lives. Being always on and actively engaging on social media, what Ludmilla Lupinacci calls “compulsory continuous connectedness,”2 became a necessity for thriving, and in some cases surviving in the changing media environment. Some users turned into influencers and started making money through social media. Others followed, not the influencers’ paths, but their daily Instagram and TikTok feeds.  Kuntsman and Miyake, however, go beyond social media and maintain that the state of “compulsory digitality” characterizes our living in modern society in general. The digital is our relationships maintained on social media, the digital is our mortgage handled through electronic banking, and the digital is Uber’s algorithm that determines who gets the next ride and when. The term “digital” works as an abstraction of all the practical and sometimes impractical ways our lives are connected to the Internet and its online services. In their book, Kuntsman and Miyake explain that compulsory digitality peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic when individuals and organizations shifted “most everyday activities online, to facilitate social distancing and minimise exposure to coronavirus.”3 While many of us may be actively trying to forget life under COVID-19—according to World Health Organization it is not currently a global health emergency—the stat...