[Commlist] Cfp New paths and future trajectories in digital (dis)connection studies (ECREA preconference)

»»»»**New paths and future trajectories in digital (dis)connection 
studies: unpacking the post-digital**

*Date: Monday, 7th of September 2026, 09:00 to 17:00
Venue: Masaryk University, Brno.

Deadline for Abstracts: April 1st, 2026*

The full call is available as a PDF at: 
https://ecrea2026brno.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/6.-CFA_ECREA26_Preconference_New-paths-and-future-trajectories-in-digital-disconnection-studies-1.pdf 



Rationale:

The fifth pre-conference on digital disconnection is an important 
opportunity for scholars at all career stages to reflect on how the 
individual and societal significance of digital disconnection is 
changing; what new discourses on disconnection are emerging in the 
public debate, and how the grounds of digital disconnection studies are 
shifting. The prescriptive approach adopted by several countries, 
through smartphone bans in schools and age restrictions on social media 
use, is reshaping research in this field, especially on how younger 
people experience and make sense of a form of forced disconnection.

The pre-conference has three main objectives:

1. To encourage empirical and theoretical discussions among scholars on 
how varying contexts, situations, actors, and agencies shape emerging 
pathways of digital disconnection in response to socio-cultural changes 
that increasingly challenge the normalization of digitalization as a 
dominant paradigm.

2. To foster networking to facilitate contact and career development for 
scholars from different cultural, geographical, and disciplinary 
backgrounds, ensuring ongoing continuity in nurturing exchanges of 
perspectives among researchers.

3. To promote partnerships and collaborations that compare and 
interweave knowledge, perspectives, methods, and future trajectories on 
disconnection studies.

The emergence of new crises and systemic challenges has unsettled the 
long-standing assumptions that have positioned ubiquitous digital 
connectivity as a default lifestyle and an organizing discourse. The 
backlashes of digitalization have led individuals to rethink their 
relationship with the online pervasiveness, reassessing the importance 
of personal well-being, social justice, and equity over the 
efficiency-driven logics often associated with limitless connectivity.

There is growing recognition that digitalization’s logics and 
affordances have fostered ambivalent experiences with social ties, 
societal issues, inequalities, and contexts marked by cultural 
differences and conflicts. In this scenario, digital disconnection has 
emerged both as a form of resistance and as a cultural response to the 
pressures exerted by digitalization -creating, paradoxically, new 
consumeristic demands, as labels like “digital wellbeing” and “digital 
detox” become increasingly commoditized.

Through diverse practices, tools, and strategies, individuals exercise 
agency by negotiating a balance between connection and disconnection, 
conflicting emotions, and renewed expectations toward digitally mediated 
life. However, questions of power, responsibility, and limits of 
individual agency remain on how to cultivate more ethical and 
sustainable relationships with technology.

Starting from these premises, the pre-conference invites participants to 
reflect on:

a) how different socio-cultural, political, and economic contexts shape 
the agency of

users and social groups, incentivizing or constraining disconnection 
experiences and

habits;

b) the prominent role of institutional and socio-technical actors (such 
as generative AI

platforms and algorithmic systems) in countering or fostering the decisions,

motivations, and practices related to digital platforms and their 
affordances

disengagement;

c) critical perspectives on how the grounds of disconnection studies are 
shifting due to

institutional, market-oriented, and political interferences that are 
reframing

disconnection discourses and further popularizing and commodifying 
disconnection

practices and experiences.

We welcome abstracts emphasizing the following dimensions, while noting 
that contributions

are not limited to these themes:

• Theoretical advances, methodological and empirical challenges in digital

disconnection studies.

• Cross-cultural, cross-platform, and historical perspectives on 
disconnection.

• Social, cultural, environmental, and professional motivations and 
consequences of

disconnection practices, especially for understudied social groups.

• Contextual, economic, organizational, political, and institutional 
interferences on

digital disconnection studies and practices.

• Emotional, affective, and psychological implications of disconnection 
experiences.

• Social and collective dimensions of digital disconnection.

• Critical perspectives on the role that public and private actors have on

promoting/countering digital disconnection and on how this shifts the 
grounds of digital

disconnection studies.

• Intersectional approaches to digital disconnection practices (e.g., 
ethnicity, gender,

class, age, neurodivergence…).

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

The conference is based on non-anonymous abstracts of no more than 350 
words.

Submit abstracts to https://forms.gle/kRKQ1fBR125s59kH8 
<https://forms.gle/kRKQ1fBR125s59kH8> by April 1st, 2026.

Contact person: (francesca.ieracitano /at/ uniroma1.it) 
<mailto:(francesca.ieracitano /at/ uniroma1.it)>

Abstracts will undergo a review process by the organising committee.

Decisions on acceptance will be communicated by April 23rd, 2026.

Organizing committee members:

Marie Colombe Afota (University of Montreal)

Piermarco Aroldi, Barbara Scifo (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of 
Milan)

Alex Beattie (Victoria University of Wellington)

Arianna Bussoletti, Francesca Comunello, Francesca Ieracitano (Sapienza 
University of Rome)

Ana Jorge (Lusófona University)

Monica Marra (INAF- Italian National Institute of Astrophysics)

Mora Matassi (Universidad de San Andrés)

Minh Hao Nguyen (University of Amsterdam)

Francesca Pasquali (University of Bergamo)

Sara Van Bruyssel, Mariek Vanden Abeele (Ghent University)

The pre-conference is endorsed by the following ECREA sections and TWGs:

-Digital Culture and Communication;

-Audience and Reception Studies;

-Gender, Sexuality, and Communication section;

-TWG on Aging and Communication Studies

-TWG on Media & Intimacy.

Fees: No fee is requested for participants



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