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_Preconfer... *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 by April 1st, 2026. Contact person: francesca.ieracitano@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