AoIR 2026 Pre-conference: Lockdown and its (Digital) Afterlives

Please join us for the AoIR 2026 Pre-conference, "Lockdown and its (Digital) Afterlives," that will take place on October 13, 2026 in Mexico City, Mexico.

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.

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. Previous preconferences in this realm include “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."

To view the pre-conference program, please visit https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/events/lockdown-and-its-digital-afterlives-media-infrastructure-and-everyday-life-regenerative-perspective .