This year, the Center for 21st Century Studies aims to activate “Slow Care”—a practice that places deliberate attention on the beings, things, and sites, which together foster long-term visions of collective life across generations and communities of humans and non-humans, as well as ever-evolving technologies and ecologies. In line with this theme, the Digital Cultures Collaboratory are excited to announce the 4th event in its annual online symposium series, organised around the theme of “Time & Digital Relations.” 

The increasing presence and accelerating pace of the digital in our everyday lives creates an open and ever-evolving challenge for scholars of all disciplines to critically respond to in their work. Be it social media, gaming, streaming, remote working, or the normative uptake of AI, all things “digital” now inform the ways in which people receive information, form and maintain social relationships, and come to imagine the world beyond their immediate engagement with it. 

At the same time, the boundaries between ontological categories – design and use, rules and architecture, presence and pattern – grow less distinct amid these shifting forces, and social actors experience them always in and through unfolding time. They implement new rhythms in their relations with others, at times synchronizing with increased pace, at others aiming to (re)establish slowness. This compels us to revisit core questions about what it means to relate with and through technologies that have become intrinsic to the very texture and tempo of experience. 

The Digital Cultures Collaboratory (DCC) is an interdisciplinary research collaborative at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that brings together graduate students with common interests across emerging fields of digital studies. 

The DCC's annual online symposium is a semi-formal environment for graduate students, as well as early career researchers, to present and develop concepts close to their areas of interest. We invite scholars in anthropology, digital media and other interrelated disciplines to participate in 15-minute presentations hosted online via Zoom, simulcast to Twitch, and archived on YouTube. 

The symposium will be held over two days at the end of April 2026. Abstracts of around 500 words, as well as a short biography of the presenter(s), should be sent to: jhirt@uwm.edu before February 27th, 2026. 

Focus for Presenters 

We want to allow for engagement with a broad range of interests, phenomena, and methodologies, where multiple disciplines — from anthropology and information studies to media theory, environmental humanities, and beyond — can come together to engage analytically with the digital in all its nuance, texture, and complexity. While the questions below offer ways to respond to the prompt, submissions are not limited to them. 

• How can we analyse the relationship between temporality and materiality intrinsic to technologies which give rise to digital relations, such as our everyday engagements with phones and computers, the underlying algorithms of the internet, fibre optic cables and data centres, and opaque proprietary software? 
• How can we assess the way we and our digital tools change each other over time, especially through the specific temporal demands those tools introduce (speed, lag, rhythms, deadlines, 24/7 availability, etc.)? 
• How are the relationships we hold with others — human and nonhuman — predicated on the affordances and constraints of screens, channels, and interfaces in ways that transform our understandings of embodiment, intimacy, cognition, and tempo? 
• How should user-centric research rethink the analog foundations of knowledge organization, information retrieval and system design? What strategies can ensure that digital objects remain interpretable, retrievable, and accessible to users with diverse information needs? 
• How are distinctive aspects of digital relations, virtual experiences, and the intimately human, being explored through newly emerging media or narrative forms? 
• How temporal tropes of spans, cycles, durations, or attentions, both enable and constrain the relations we maintain — whether already established or newly emerging? 
• How do digital infrastructures inflect our connections with distant communities, ecologies, and more‑than‑human actors, and under what conditions do they deepen participation or foster disconnection? 
• Cycles of research, writing, thinking, and publication are increasingly aligned with the intrinsic pace of digital networks through which we work. What strategies can we imagine or implement to revise these relationships?