We continue our series of talks with groundbreaking researchers from around the world on matters of global interest.

Our next online event will take place on Wednesday 7th December at 14.00 GMT (15.00 CET) on Zoom. Maria O’Brien of Queen’s University Belfast MA in Arts Management & Cultural Policy (AMCP) in conversation with Brooke Erin Duffy and David Nieborg, two of the three co-authors of their groundbreaking book Platforms & Cultural Production (Polity) published in 2022.

For further information, please contact Maria O’Brien maria.obrien@qub.ac.uk

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Platforms & Cultural Production: a short description

The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to Twitch and TikTok – is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting, among others – are evolving at breakneck speed.

In our talk, Duffy and Nieborg will discuss how their co-authored book (with Thomas Poell) explores both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. Offering a novel conceptual framework grounded in illuminating case studies, this talk is essential for students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are transforming – and what the stakes are for understanding platform power.

Biographies:

Brooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. She's the author or co-author of three books, including (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017)--named as one of the "Top Tech Books of 2017” by Wired. Duffy’s research has been published in such journals as Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, Feminist Media Studies, Social Media + Society, and Media, Culture & Society. Duffy has disseminated her research to a broader audience through popular writing in The Atlantic, Vox, Salon, and Wired, among others.

David B. Nieborg is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto and a Visiting Professor (’22-’23) at the University of Amsterdam. He held visiting and fellowship appointments with MIT, the Queensland University of Technology, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. David published on the game industry, app and platform economics, and game journalism in academic outlets such as New Media & Society, Social Media + Society and Media, Culture and Society. He is the co-author of Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021) and Mainstreaming and Game Journalism (MIT Press, 2023).

Maria O'Brien is a researcher and lecturer on the MA in Arts Management in Queen's University Belfast