Please find the CFP below for a preconference organized by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. The event will take place at the Hyatt Regency in Mexico City on October 13, 2026, just before the
Associaton of Internet Researchers conference officially kicks off.
Call for Proposals: lockdown and its (Digital) Afterlives: Media, Infrastructure, and
Everyday Life in Regenerative Perspective
Date: October 13, 2026 Location: Hyatt Regency Hotel, Mexico City, Mexico Contact: (cargc /at/ asc.upenn.edu)
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic instantiated waves of lockdowns of
varying severity across the globe. As nations struggled to reach
consensus over how to best contain and manage the spread of the highly
contagious and deadly disease, tech entrepreneurs and platform companies
positioned their digital infrastructures as essential solutions to the
crisis. From videoconferencing platforms enabling remote work,
education, and sociality, to app-based delivery services, telehealth,
and digital entertainment ecosystems, platform capitalism rapidly
expanded its reach into the most intimate domains of everyday life (van
Dijck, Poell, & de Waal, 2018; Srnicek, 2017). At the same time,
governments and public health authorities deployed controversial digital
surveillance mechanisms—including contact tracing apps, mobility
tracking, and biometric monitoring—raising urgent questions about
privacy, governance, and digital sovereignty (Couldry & Mejias, 2019;
Zuboff, 2023).
Lockdowns thus became sites of (re)generation for material, social, and
embodied media practices and relations. They accelerated ongoing
processes of platformization, infrastructural dependency, and mediated
presence, while also generating new forms of digital experimentation,
resistance, and adaptation. For many, lockdown transformed domestic
spaces into hybrid environments of labor, leisure, and care,
reconfiguring the boundaries between public and private life. These
transformations not only reshaped everyday media practices but also
restructured media industries, governance regimes, and cultural
imaginaries of connectivity and isolation.
Rather than understanding lockdown solely as a temporary rupture, this
preconference approaches lockdown as a generative historical
conjuncture— a turning point that shaped lasting transformations in
digital infrastructures, media practices, and social relations. Scholars
have begun to examine how lockdown intensified existing inequalities
while also generating new forms of mediated intimacy, visibility, and
infrastructural awareness (e.g., Chun, 2021). Yet there remains a need
for globally grounded, historically informed analyses that situate
lockdown within longer trajectories of media transformation,
particularly across the Global South and diasporic contexts.
We aim to bring together scholars tackling these and related questions
to deepen and broaden media and communication studies’ understanding of
COVID-19 lockdowns as a critical turning point in digital media history.
In alignment with AoIR 2026’s theme of Regeneration(s), this
preconference foregrounds lockdown as a moment of technological,
cultural, and methodological regeneration—one that reshaped
infrastructures of communication, redefined the spatial and temporal
coordinates of everyday life, and reoriented scholarly approaches to
digital media.
This preconference builds on an ongoing collaborative effort to rethink
media history and theory from a global perspective spearheaded by the
Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. We wish to extend
conversations initiated through three previous preconferences (“Media
and Communication Studies in Global Contexts: A Critical History”;
“Repressed Histories of Communication and Media Studies”; and
“Non-Aligned Disruptions: Global Media Histories in the Wake of
Decolonization”) held in Canada, Australia, and the United States
respectively. Together, these events hosted dialogues around decentering
dominant narratives and developing alternative genealogies of media and
communication. Lockdown and its (Digital) Afterlives advances this
agenda by focusing on lockdown as a globally uneven yet widely shared
media historical experience.
Structure and Goals
The preconference will be organized as a set of four roundtables, each
bringing a set of participants and one facilitator. This roundtable
format is designed to foster sustained dialogue, intellectual exchange,
and collaborative thinking rather than formal paper presentations. Each
roundtable will focus on a shared conceptual theme, with participants
offering brief opening remarks (5–7 minutes each) followed by moderated
discussion and audience engagement. The preconference will conclude with
a collective plenary session in which facilitators identify future
directions for research and collaboration.
The goals of the preconference are threefold:
1) To situate lockdown within longer histories of digital media and
infrastructural transformation;
2) To foreground globally diverse and historically grounded perspectives
on lockdown and its digital afterlives;
3) To foster interdisciplinary dialogue and build scholarly networks
around emerging research on media, infrastructure, and crisis.
We invite submissions that address one or more of the following
roundtable topics:
Temporalities of Lockdown: Explore the differing and contradictory
temporal experiences of lockdown, including suspension, acceleration,
waiting, and temporal fragmentation, from a global media studies
perspective.
Platformization and Infrastructural Expansion: (Re)assess shifts in
media industries, platform governance, and infrastructural dependency
during and after lockdown, including the rapid expansion of
videoconferencing, streaming, platform labor, and algorithmic management.
Domestic Media Ecologies and the Reconfiguration of “Home”: Theorize
“being at home” before, during, and after lockdown, including the
transformation of domestic spaces into hybrid sites of work, care, and
mediated presence.
Mobilities and Social Architectures of Control: Consider how lockdown
(re)generated forms of digital surveillance and mobility restrictions,
including contact tracing, biometric monitoring, vaccine passports, and
the expansion of state and corporate data collection regimes.
Information about submissions
Authors should submit an extended abstract of 350–400 words (excluding
references) to (cargc /at/ asc.upenn.edu)
In a single PDF, please include: • Your name • Institutional affiliation • Email address • Title of your proposed presentation
• Extended abstract detailing how your research contributes to the
conversations proposed by any of the roundtable topics
The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2026.
Authors will be notified by August 15, 2026 if their abstract has been accepted.
Organizers: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, University of Pennsylvania Mariela Morales Suarez, University of Pennsylvania Aswin Punathambekar, University of Pennsylvania Eszter Zimanyi, University of Pennsylvania References
Chun, W. H. K. (2021). Discriminating data: Correlation, neighborhoods,
and the new politics of recognition. MIT Press.
Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The costs of connection: How data
is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. Stanford
University Press.
Gray, M. L., & Suri, S. (2019). Ghost work: How to stop Silicon Valley
from building a new global underclass. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Parks, L., & Starosielski, N. (Eds.). (2015). Signal traffic: Critical
studies of media infrastructures. University of Illinois Press.
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.
van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The platform society:
Public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2023). The age of surveillance capitalism. In Social theory
re-wired (pp. 203-213). Routledge.