“Infrastructuring Counterpublics” contributes to media and communication studies, to the study of digital activism, and to our understanding of dissent under digital authoritarianism. It is a thesis that does what the best work in our field does: it shows that media technologies are never merely tools for connection but are also instruments of governance, concealment, and the perpetual, fragile labour of appearing in public when appearing is forbidden.
Svetlana Chuikina’s Infrastructuring Counterpublics: Digital Engagement and Distributed Attention in Russian Anti-War Movements arrives at a moment when its object of study is being made and unmade in real time. Since February 2022, the Russian state has criminalised the word “war”, driven hundreds of thousands of its citizens into exile, and built one of the most ambitious apparatuses of digital control outside China. The people Chuikina studies — Russians who oppose the war and try to keep that opposition alive — are doing so under conditions that shift month by month: a platform blocked, a VPN removed, an organiser detained, a border crossed. A dissertation written about such a moving target risks being overtaken by events before it is printed. This one is not, because Chuikina has understood that the durable object of her study is not any particular protest or platform but the process by which dissent is built out of available media infrastructures. That analytical wager is the source of the thesis’s considerable strength.
A dissertation written about such a moving target risks being overtaken by events before it is printed. This one is not, because Chuikina has understood that the durable object of her study is not any particular protest or platform but the process by which dissent is built out of available media infrastructures.
The dissertation sits at the intersection of media and communication studies, social movement studies, and cultural studies, and it draws its conceptual energy from what has been called the infrastructural turn in our field. Chuikina reads digital activism through a materialist phenomenology in the sense of Couldry and Hepp, anchored in the British cultural studies tradition — Raymond Williams above all, but also Roger Silverstone and David Morley. The animating question is double: what do anti-war Russians do with media technologies, and what does authoritarianism do through them. The thesis answers chiefly through the first lens, tracing how ordinary people assemble themselves into political actors by perceiving, enacting, and imagining the affordances of the platforms available to them. Empirically, it rests on forty-five interviews conducted between 2023 and 2025 — divided into twenty-four “activists” and twenty-one “publics” — supplemented by multi-sited ethnography in Stockholm, Tbilisi, and Berlin, and by netnographic observation of Telegram channels and Instagram accounts. For reasons of participant safety, Chuikina decided not to interview anyone currently inside Russia. The decision is sound, and I will return to what it costs.
The book is organised in two parts: a theoretical and methodological Part I of four chapters, and an empirical Part II of three analysis chapters followed by a discussion. Part I is long, and at moments the conceptual scaffolding is more elaborate than the empirical chapters strictly require.
It is in Chapter 5 that the thesis is at its best. Chuikina reconstructs three trajectories through which her participants moved from what she nicely calls mundane engagement toward activism, and the writing here is granular, patient, and genuinely illuminating. We follow Alex, whose drift into opposition was shaped less by any organisation than by an individually assembled media repertoire — a YouTube channel here, a Telegram subscription there, an algorithmic recommendation that happened to land. We follow others for whom the bridge from the sofa to the street ran through Navalny’s regional campaigns, through Vkontakte chats and QR codes and template-based viral videos that linked streams to squares. What Chuikina shows extremely well, is that being an activist is not a stable role one occupies but a performance one sustains — assembled, mediated, and perpetually at risk of lapsing back into private life. This is a real contribution to how we think about political subject-formation under deep mediatisation, and it is earned through close attention to lived experience rather than asserted from theory.
What Chuikina shows extremely well, is that being an activist is not a stable role one occupies but a performance one sustains — assembled, mediated, and perpetually at risk of lapsing back into private life.
The trajectories are organised through the thesis’s central analytical instrument: a triad of affordances, perceived (after Ingold), enacted (after Costa), and imagined (after Nagy and Neff). Here I register my first substantial reservation. The triad does a great deal of organising work — it structures the whole of Part II — but the distinctions are harder to sustain in the empirical material than in the conceptual chapter. The same artefact migrates across categories: Telegram is imagined in Chapter 5, enacted in Chapter 6, and imagined again in Chapter 7; Vkontakte is perceived in one trajectory and enacted in another. More fundamentally, the three theorists Chuikina recruits hold incompatible views about where an affordance actually resides — for Ingold perception is already activity, for Nagy and Neff perception is already imagination — so that the triad reads less as three distinct analytical objects than as three names for moments in a single process. The case of Alex is instructive here. Chuikina describes his path into activism as profoundly mediated by personalised and algorithmic technologies, and it was; but reading his story closely one sees a prior disposition toward the counter-narratives the algorithm delivered. The technology afforded his politicisation without determining it. The affordance framework, as built, has no settled place for that prior disposition — for what the subject brings to the encounter that lets the affordance take hold.
Chapter 6 turns to tactics, and it is here that the thesis extends the framework of amplification, evasion, and hijacking that I developed with Treré beyond the algorithmic terrain for which it was originally devised. This extension is a generative move. Chuikina follows anti-war signifiers as they travel: the white-blue-white flag stripped of the imperial red; hashtags that work as both spatial organisers and logistical infrastructure; micro-celebrities mobilised as what Tufekci calls focusers of attention. Most striking are the cases where hijacking leaves the screen altogether — anti-war marathons whose GPS-traced routes spell out their refusal on a map, defaced banknotes, digital Easter postcards smuggling a message past the censor. The empirical richness is undeniable.
In chapter 6 I felt one absence keenly, the one of the work of James Scott. Section 6.2, on the space of invisibility, describes precisely what Scott means by the hidden transcript — the off-stage critique that subordinated groups maintain where open dissent is foreclosed. Diana Fu’s mobilisation without masses, which Chuikina does use to good effect, is itself partly a Scott-derived argument. The dispersed, deniable, occasionally surfacing practices that fill this chapter are hidden transcripts; naming them as such would have connected the Russian case to a deep tradition of scholarship on resistance under domination.
The absence of Scott is felt again in Chapter 7, the most ambitious and most uneven of the empirical chapters. Chuikina analyses the relation between concealed coordination and public visibility through Goffman’s dramaturgy of backstage and frontstage, and through Herasimenka’s notion of polycentricity. The Feminist Anti-War Resistance appears as a paradigmatic case: a cells-based organisation distributed across Telegram, Element, Signal, and Cryptpad, with carefully differentiated layers of access. Go to the Forest offers a contrasting, chatbot-mediated model. The frontstage campaigns — “If not Putin, then a cat”, the digital-graffiti actions — are read through the platform’s algorithmic sense of the right moment. What is interesting about Chuikina’s backstage is not merely that it is hidden but that it is politically hidden; Scott’s hidden transcript would again have worked well here. The chapter’s richest finding, to my mind, is what Chuikina calls the “fractured backstage” — the labour and friction of cycling across four or five secure platforms, and the hierarchies of access and feelings of peripherality this dispersion produces. This is genuinely new, and it deserves more than the few pages it receives. It could anchor an article on its own. The fractured backstage is not an inconvenience to be noted in passing, it is a structural condition of movements that must organise under surveillance, and it produces political effects — exclusion, fragmentation, uneven participation.
This brings me to distributed attention, which Chuikina presents as her second contribution and the theoretical pivot of the work. The concept names the dynamic by which public attention in an authoritarian context is generated not through front-facing actions alone but through the interplay between visible amplification and concealed backstage infrastructure. There is something genuinely useful here, and it follows from the empirical material rather than being imposed upon it. But given its declared centrality, the concept is treated too briefly — it appears late, is defined in a handful of paragraphs, and is then restated in the conclusion. Two questions remain open. First, what does “distributed” commit the author to: the technical sense familiar from distributed systems and distributed cognition, with its connotations of decentralisation and emergence, or a looser, more metaphorical usage? Second, and more pressing, what does distributed attention do that networked attention, or Papacharissi’s affective publics, do not already do? The thesis gestures toward the answer — that the concept captures the specifically infrastructural and concealed dimension of attention under authoritarianism — but does not press it home. I am inclined to think the concept is worth the investment, which is exactly why it deserves a fuller defence than it receives.
The methodological chapter is competent and ethically serious, particularly on the protection of participants, but it leaves one thing a bit underdeveloped: researcher’s positionality. Chuikina, a Swedish scholar of Kazakhstani origin, positions herself throughout as an external observer of the anti-war milieu rather than as a participant in it, and the relationships with her interviewees were built through the research itself rather than preceding it. An outsider whose access is achieved rather than given occupies a distinctive position, and it raises questions such as: what does a non-Russian, non-activist vantage point make visible in this material that an insider’s account might not, and what might it miss? The thesis treats positionality procedurally rather than substantively, and the reader is left to infer what a few pages of reflexive analysis would have made visible.
I have dwelt on reservations because that is the reviewer’s office, but I want to end where the thesis itself is strongest, and where it moved me most as a reader. Chuikina’s most elegant theoretical decision is to read Russian counterpublics through Hannah Arendt’s space of appearance rather than through the Habermasian public sphere. The choice opens precisely the analytical space that a deliberative model closes: it lets her ask how plurality and action constitute a public, rather than how rational consensus is reached, and it fits a situation in which appearing at all — being seen to dissent — is the political act, and the dangerous one. In the closing pages she argues that under authoritarian conditions the space of appearance becomes plural and semi-private, folded into everyday life, where remaining under the radar is itself a condition of freedom. This is a real revision, and a contestable one, but it is the kind of productive overreach that marks a thinker willing to make a concept work for a world its author never saw. Whether the semi-private locus Chuikina describes is still an Arendtian space of appearance, or something new that Arendt’s vocabulary can name but not contain, is a question I leave open, because the thesis has earned the right to pose it.
Chuikina’s most elegant theoretical decision is to read Russian counterpublics through Hannah Arendt’s space of appearance rather than through the Habermasian public sphere.
Infrastructuring Counterpublics contributes to media and communication studies, to the study of digital activism, and to our understanding of dissent under digital authoritarianism. Its strengths are its concept of infrastructuring, developed coherently across the chapters; its granular account of how ordinary people become political actors; and the sheer quality of attention it brings to a field in violent motion. Its weaknesses are mostly weaknesses of compression — a central concept underdeveloped, a methodological self-understanding left half-articulated, a couple of interlocutors who should have been at the table. Several of them are the raw material of the strong articles this dissertation will become. It is, in the end, a thesis that does what the best work in our field does: it shows that media technologies are never merely tools for connection but are also instruments of governance, concealment, and the perpetual, fragile labour of appearing in public when appearing is forbidden.
The link to the dissertation
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A2047687&dswid=-8910
References
Costa, E. (2018). Affordances-in-practice: An ethnographic critique of social media logic and context collapse. New Media & Society, 20(10), 3641–3656.
Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2017). The mediated construction of reality. Polity Press.
Fu, D. (2018). Mobilizing without the masses: Control and contention in China. Cambridge University Press.
Herasimenka, A. (2022). Adjusting democracy assistance to the age of digital dissidents. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 19(4), 451–465.
Ingold, T. (2018). Back to the future with the theory of affordances. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 8(1–2), 39–44.
Nagy, P., & Neff, G. (2015). Imagined affordance: Reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. Social Media + Society, 1(2), 1–49.
Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford University Press.
Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. Yale University Press.
Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and morality: On the rise of the mediapolis. Polity Press.
Treré, E., & Bonini, T. (2024). Amplification, evasion, hijacking: Algorithms as repertoire for social movements and the struggle for visibility. Social Movement Studies, 23(3), 303–319.
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press.
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