Dear colleagues,
The schedule for our AoIR preconference on October 13 is now live! Please join us at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Mexico City for a day of conversation on the COVID-19 Lockdown and its many (digital) afterlives, from a media studies perspective.
The schedule is copy-pasted below. Looking forward to seeing many of you in Mexico City next month!
Best wishes,
Eszter Zimanyi and Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
Lockdown and its (Digital) Afterlives: Media, Infrastructure, and Everyday Life in Regenerative Perspective
Date: October 13, 2026
Location: Hyatt Regency Mexico City, Regency Room F
Program
8:30 – 9:00 AM | Coffee, Check-in, Opening Remarks
9:00 – 10:30 AM | Panel 1 - Mobilities and Social Architectures of Control
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Youngrim Kim, Rutgers University: "The Platformization of Emergency"
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Tupur Chatterjee, Tulane University: "Cinema, Streaming, and the Datafied Subject of Indian Middle-Class Leisure"
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Silei Zhu, Rutgers University: "The Contested Afterlife of Campus Turnstiles: Logistical Governance in Chinese Universities After COVID"
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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
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Brooke Erin Duffy, Cornell University: "The Pandemic Pipeline to the Creator Economy"
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Elia Cornelio Marí, Universidad Juarez Autonoma de Tabasco: "Platformized piracy: the lockdown as the starting point for disaggregation in the Mexican streaming market"
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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"
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Maximilian Brichta, University of Virginia: "Digital Nomads and the Uneven Afterlives of Lockdown in Mexico City"
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Joel Neville Anderson, Binghamton University: "Climate, COVID, GRWM"
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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
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Isha Bhallamudi and Noopur Raval, University of California, Los Angeles: "Holding Space: Digital Platforms as Immigrant Infrastructures During the Administrative Pandemic"
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Yizhou Xu, Old Dominion University: "Delay, Disrupt and Deflect: Chrono-Affective Resistance in Times of Quiet Quitting"
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Jiaxin Yang and Dechun Zhang, University of Technology Sydney and University of Copenhagen: "Remembering Without Remembering: The Digital Afterlives of Lockdown Memes on Xiaohongshu"
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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
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Eszter Zimanyi, Ph.D.
Research Director
Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Pronouns: she/her