Smartphone Cultures: Transnational Online Symposium (30 & 31 January 2025)

In this semester, the Cultural Studies Colloquium (CSC) takes up the uses and effects of the smartphone as an ubiquitous accompaniment of contemporary life, but expands common Western European and North American frameworks for analysis to consider smartphone practices and impacts in Eastern Europe and India. Our transnational investigation of smartphone cultures examines how the phone and the technologies it mediates impact individual as well as collective lives, agencies, and imaginaries in different settings. We further ask how such technologies might transform social, economic, natural, and, hardly least, political environments. Is the smartphone a conduit for misinformation, a low-threshold tool and portal of democratic participation, or all of the above and more? 

The online Study Days offer the opportunity to explore such questions with a wider audience.

For further information and the link for participation, please contact JMU Cultural Studies at culturalstudies@uni-wuerzburg.de.

An overview of JMU Cultural Studies can be found here.