Call for Papers:

Lockdown and its (Digital) Afterlives
Media, Infrastructure, and Everyday Life in Regenerative Perspective
A preconference of AoIR 2026, the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers
October 13, 2026
Hyatt Regency Hotel
Mexico City, Mexico
[From a May 19, 2026 post by Eszter Zimanyi on the AoIR mailing list]

Deadline for submission of abstracts: July 15, 2026

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:

• To situate lockdown within longer histories of digital media and infrastructural transformation;
• To foreground globally diverse and historically grounded perspectives on lockdown and its digital afterlives;
• 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@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.