[Commlist] CFP: Preconference - Lockdown and its (Digital) Afterlives

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.


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