The Power of Platforms and Maps

At a moment when digital infrastructures are increasingly entangled with geopolitical tensions, economic concentration, and the rapid expansion of AI, it is urgent to reconsider how power operates through the platforms and interfaces that organise everyday life. Bringing together two recent books—Platforms: A Critical Introduction by Anne Helmond and Fernando van der Vlist and Maps as Media by Alex Gekker—, we'll open up a broader discussion on the politics of digital systems. Both works will be situated within a shared inquiry into how platforms and spatial media shape contemporary culture, economies, and governance, in the form of a panel discussion featuring leading local scholars.

Digital platforms have, over the past two decades, evolved from relatively bounded services into expansive ecosystems that structure markets, public discourse, and social interaction. At the same time, digital maps have transformed from representational tools into active media that guide movement, organise labour, and embed forms of surveillance and personalisation into everyday navigation. Bringing these perspectives into dialogue highlights how platformisation and spatial media converge in practices of datafication, infrastructural control, and the subtle exercise of power.

The programme opens with short presentations introducing key concepts and arguments, followed by a moderated panel discussion with invited scholars and respondents. Together, they will reflect on themes including platform power, “casual” forms of influence, digital labour, data governance, and the emerging role of AI in reshaping both platforms and mapping technologies.

By connecting critical platform studies with research on mapping interfaces and spatial media, this event invites students, researchers, and a wider audience to engage with the infrastructures that increasingly organise how we see, navigate, and act in the world.

Patforms: A Critical Introduction and Maps as Media were both published in 2026 with Polity Press.

Programme

15:00 Book presentations, panel discussion and Q&A
16:30 Drinks
17:30 End

Practical information

This event is free and open to everyone. We do ask that you register in advance. The event will take place at VOX-POP (ground floor), Binnengasthuisstraat 9.