Lockdown and its (Digital) Afterlives: Media, Infrastructure, and Everyday Life in Regenerative Perspective
October 13, 2026
8:30am-4:45pm
- Hyatt Regency Mexico City, Regency Room F
Please join us for the AoIR 2026 Pre-conference, "Lockdown and its (Digital) Afterlives: Media, Infrastructure, and Everyday Life in Regenerative Perspective," that will take place on October 13, 2026 in Mexico City, Mexico.
About the Pre-conference
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."
Program
Location: Hyatt Regency Mexico City, Regency Room F
8:30 – 9:00 AM | Coffee, Check-in, Opening Remarks
- Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
University of Pennsylvania
9:00 – 10:30 AM | Panel 1 - Mobilities and Social Architectures of Control
- Youngrim Kim, Rutgers University: "The Platformization of Emergency"
- Tupur Chatterjee, Tulane University: "Cinema, Streaming, and the Datafied Subject of Indian Middle-Class Leisure"
- Silei Zhu, Rutgers University: "The Contested Afterlife of Campus Turnstiles: Logistical Governance in Chinese Universities After COVID"
- Ressa Uli Patrissia, Muhammadiyah Palangkaraya University: "When the Emergency Moved to the Wrist: Biometric Governance and Lockdown’s Wearable Afterlife in Indonesia"
- Discussant: Nelanthi Hewa, University of Pennsylvania
10:30 – 10:40 AM | Break
10:40 AM – 12:00 PM | Panel 2 - Platformization and Infrastructural Expansion
- Brooke Erin Duffy, Cornell University: "The Pandemic Pipeline to the Creator Economy"
- Elia Cornelio Marí, Universidad Juarez Autonoma de Tabasco: "Platformized piracy: the lockdown as the starting point for disaggregation in the Mexican streaming market"
- Rahul Mukherjee, University of Pennsylvania: "Predatory Loan Apps amid (and beyond) the Pandemic: Platformed Convenience vis-à-vis Data as Collateral"
- Discussant: Kathryn C. Higgins, University of Leeds
12:00 – 1:30 PM | Lunch
1:30 – 2:50 PM | Panel 3 - Domestic Media Ecologies and the Reconfiguration of "Home"
- Maximilian Brichta, University of Virginia: "Digital Nomads and the Uneven Afterlives of Lockdown in Mexico City"
- Joel Neville Anderson, Binghamton University: "Climate, COVID, GRWM"
- Lauren Berliner, University of Washington, Bothell: "From Home Archive to AI Training Data: Children's Media-making and the Digital Afterlives of Lockdown"
- Discussant: Facundo Suenzo, Universidad de San Andres
2:50 – 3:00 PM | Break
3:00 – 4:30 PM | Panel 4 - Temporalities of Lockdown
- Isha Bhallamudi and Noopur Raval, University of California, Los Angeles: "Holding Space: Digital Platforms as Immigrant Infrastructures During the Administrative Pandemic"
- Yizhou Xu, Old Dominion University: "Delay, Disrupt and Deflect: Chrono-Affective Resistance in Times of Quiet Quitting"
- Jiaxin Yang and Dechun Zhang, University of Technology Sydney and University of Copenhagen: "Remembering Without Remembering: The Digital Afterlives of Lockdown Memes on Xiaohongshu"
- Riley Yuan Xu and Guobin Yang, University of Pennsylvania: "Locked Down to Open up:Wuhan Diaries and the Regeneration of Social Rhythms and Digital Publicness"
- Discussant: Chelsea Butkowski, American University
4:30 – 4:45 PM | Closing Remarks
- Burcu Baykurt, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Events
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