While most research on digital cultures tends to focus on online and connected practices, a fast-expanding field of scholarship explores how people disconnect from one or more forms of digital media (Lomborg & Ytre-Arne, 2021). This exploratory study seeks to advance digital media scholarship, and to expand the scholarship on the nascent field of digital disconnection to the still underexplored context of Portugal, as most existing research in this area is predicated in Northern European countries. It proposes to do so by looking at disconnection as “embodied and affectively experienced” (Coleman & Paasonen, 2020, p. 1) across different aspects of everyday life or social situations. Our study aims to illuminate the complexities of people’s engagement with and disengagement from digital media, by focusing on micro-environments of everyday situations characterized by their affective intensity, vulnerability, and liminality. Particularly, the exploratory study posits the question: how are online and offline articulated in situations such as pilgrimage, mourning, everyday parenting, or activism with digital media? We approach the everyday encounters with digital media as atmospheres (Sumartojo & Pink, 2018), ephemeral elements of our everyday experiences and environments, that encompass the sensorial as well as affective modes of engagement. Our methodological approach is ethnography, fit to grasp the affective and sensorial complexities of situations such as pilgrimage, mourning, everyday parenting, and activisms.
CICANT Team
Ana Jorge (PI)
Sofia Caldeira (Co-PI)
Ana Kubrusly (Project assistant)
Rita Grácio (Researcher)
Francisca Porfírio (Researcher)
Ionara Silva (Researcher)
Edna Santos (Researcher)
Consultants
Aleena Chia (Goldsmiths College)
André Jansson (Karlstad University)
DOI: 10.54499/2022.01282.PTDC
Bibliographic collection on disconnection (February 2023)
