​​​

The 22nd Annual ICA Mobile Pre-Conference 2026

Mobile Communication & Inequalities in Context

​

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026

9am to 5pm

Dinner reception from 5.30pm to 7.30pm

 

University of Cape Town

Rooms 2F&G of AC Jordan Building

Upper Campus, University Ave. South, Rondebosch

​

Extending on ICA’s main conference theme, the 2026 pre-conference has a thematic focus on mobile communication and inequalities. Workshops and panel presentations will reflect on inequalities of MMC with regard to socio-economic status, social identity, geographies, scholarly approaches, and other domains. This pre-conference also recognizes that mobile media devices and technologies are becoming increasingly distributed throughout environments, bodies, vehicles, and infrastructures. Furthermore, mobile AI is reconfiguring the human-machine boundaries around agency. The sessions will address inequalities, old and new, that these transformations present at different levels of social order (e.g., individuals, networks, cultures, societies, etc.).

​​

SCHEDULE

8:45-9:00 Welcome

Scott W. Campbell

ICA Mobile Communication Division Vice-Chair

The Ohio State University

​

9:00-9:45 Opening Keynote

“Mobile Communication in an AI Age”

Tanja Bosch, University of Cape Town

 

This opening keynote reflects on how mobile communication is being reconfigured in the present moment, as mobile devices, apps, and platforms become increasingly intertwined with AI-driven and generative systems. Rather than thinking of mobile media as just tools or channels, the talk approaches these as evolving infrastructures that shape how citizenship, participation, and belonging are lived in everyday life. This talk will reflect on how mobile environments shape access, visibility, and power in uneven ways, from everyday messaging practices and platform governance to datafication, algorithmic control, and the growing presence of AI-mediated interfaces.  While mobile communication can enable new forms of connection and participation, it also reproduces and intensifies existing inequalities. The keynote invites participants to think through these tensions, and to reflect on questions of agency, intimacy, and refusal within mobile environments. It also asks what it might mean to study mobile communication in a moment of rapid technological, political, and ecological change.

​

9:45-10:45 Parallel Workshops of Choice

​

Room 2F

The Future of the Review Process: Rethinking Peer Review to Address (Ine)Quality in Mobile Communication Research

Organizers: Anisha Arenz, Veronika Karnowski, Weiqi Tian, Deepti Apte, Mora Matassi, Cecilia Uy-Tioco, Jeffrey Boase, & Keri Stephens

 

Description: Knowledge entering the field of MMC is filtered through a review system that structurally favors scholars from well-resourced Western institutions and specific research traditions. If peer review systematically disadvantages scholars from underprivileged regions, linguistic backgrounds, or methodological traditions, our field risks reproducing global academic power imbalances (Karnowski & Von Pape, 2022).

​

Several issues contribute to these inequalities, including biases, institutional privilege, language proficiency, structural aspects of reviewing across academic geographies, which can shape which topics are seen as central to MMC and can lead to persistent undervaluing of issues relevant in non-Western contexts (Mutsvairo et al., 2021).

 

Given these challenges, the workshop invites participants to critically rethink how peer review structures inequalities in mobile communication. We approach this as an open question to the community and want to use the workshop to brainstorm ideas for improving review practices. The core objectives of the workshop are to (1) identify inequalities embedded in current review practices related to geography, institutional resources, language, methodological approaches etc., and (2) collaboratively generate ideas for improving the review system, for example by diversifying reviewer pools, expanding program-planner teams or implementing open review as an alternative to double-blind review.

​

Room 2G

Title: Is Disconnection Inherently Mobile? … Through the Lens of Inequality

Organizers: David de Segovia Vicente, Alicia Gilbert, Julius Klingelhoefer, Mora Matassi, Lise-Marie Nassen, Douglas A. Parry, & Morgan Quinn Ross

​

Description: The study of digital disconnection has increasingly established itself as a distinct subfield of communication scholarship (Ross et al., 2024). As scholarship on digital disconnection has grown, it has increasingly developed its own concepts and approaches—sometimes in parallel with and sometimes at a distance from mobile communication scholarship (Vanden Abeele & Syvertsen, 2025). Thus, a key question now comes into focus: What are the synergies between, but also distinct contributions of, the subfields of mobile communication and digital disconnection? This dynamic is particularly evident in how these (sub)fields study issues of inequality. We therefore propose inequality as a productive case study through which to explore the similarities, differences, and potential synergies between mobile communication and digital disconnection research. This leads to a second guiding question: How do mobile communication and digital disconnection approach inequality—both individually and in tandem? Overall, the goal of this workshop is to guide collective reflection on the relationship between mobile communication and digital disconnection scholarship, with a focus on inequality as a critical issue where their connections and tensions emerge. In doing so, we aim to continue the mutual invitation proposed by Vanden Abeele & Syvertsen (2025) and clarify the outlook for future research in both subfields.

​

10:45-11:15 Social Break – enjoy snacks, beverages, and each other

​

11:15-12:15 Parallel Workshops of Choice

​

Room 2F

Title: Inequalities in Mobile AI

Organizers: Caitlin McGrane and Larissa Hjorth

​

Description: This workshop will explore how we can understand the uneven, unequal roll-out of mobile AI across demographics. We are interested in creatively exploring everyday literacies, practices, perceptions and possibilities of mobile AI. We will look at AI’s impact on mobility, media and communication through a creative, play-based workshop.

​

Creative practice (arts-based and design-based) methods can help to elicit some of the complex perceptions and practices around technologies. With the increase of mobile AI through Large Language Models (LLMs) being deployed in and by everyday mobile media like smartphones, it is important to capture the hopes, desires, anxieties and imaginaries around the possibilities and limitations in this rapidly changing space.

 

The goal of the workshop is to develop a protocol for researchers interested in creatively investigating mobile AI’s impact on everyday life. Through card-based ideation activities and group discussion, we will look critically at the ways mobile AI is becoming increasingly enmeshed into everyday technologies while mobile AI literacy is both reflective and reproductive of inequalities.

​

Room 2G

Title: Mobile Media & Communication: Current Directions and Future Contours

Organizers: Adriana de Silva e Souza, Jeffrey Boase, Ragan Glover, Jakob Ohme, Yifan Xu, & Yangliu Fan

​

Description: This workshop aims to define current and future contours of the field of Mobile Media and Communication. Workshop leaders will present the findings of a comprehensive bibliometric (Kessler, 1963; Boyack and Klavans, 2010) and qualitative data analysis of the journal Mobile Media and Communication based on the shared intellectual base of published articles since the journal’s inception. Our findings revealed the main topics and general directions of research in the field for the past 13 years. Following this, a series of activities will develop participants’ understandings of the current context of the field along with brainstorming future directions and under-developed areas needing attention.

​

Participants will work in small groups to discuss what the topics in the findings reveal about existing MMC research, including abstracting from the results about the field’s boundaries, guiding questions, and priorities. Participants will also work in groups to define one major challenge and/or future direction for the field, while receiving feedback from others about research questions, empirical gaps, theoretical frameworks, or other insights that could be used to address the major challenge or future direction.

​

By participating in this workshop, participants can expect to develop a better understanding of the field’s existing scholarship along with developing ideas for future research that might challenge and/or expand the contours of the field.

​

12:15 Brief debrief (all together), followed by Lunch until 1:15

​

1:15-2:30 Mobile Methods Workshop (all together)

Organizers: Joe Bayer, Alicia Gilbert, Lee Humphreys, & Anna Schnauber-Stockmann

​

This interactive workshop addresses how mobile media are not only an object of intellectual inquiry; they are also a practical tool for collecting data for scholars across divisions. Indeed, their widespread diffusion – in combination with their always-on presence – has also led to mobile media to be integrated into the core methodological toolkit of the Communication discipline. Building upon mobile media’s unique assets and affordances, a variety of mobile-mediated tools are especially well-suited for “capturing life as it is lived” (Bolger et al., 2003, p. 579), that is, (repeatedly) gathering observations of people’s everyday lives across spaces.

​

These more “mobile” approaches to data collection – or what might be called mobile (media) methods – can include a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques. We deliberately adopt an inclusive view of methods for collective elaboration on the wide spectrum of ways mobile media (and their mobilities) can facilitate knowledge. Such methods thus range from established in situ social science methods (e.g., experience sampling, mobile sensing) to techniques employed by qualitative scholars focused on seeing everyday mobilities (e.g., ethnography, observation). By bringing the toolkits of diverse mobile media researchers together – and interrogating what makes each tool “mobile” – this workshop helps advance our understanding of what mobile methods are and why their mobileness matters.

​

2:30-3:45 Parallel Panels of Choice

​

Room 2F

• Title: Mobile Inequalities at the Margins

  • Presenters: Justine Humphry and Maren Hartmann

​

• Title: Connected but Not Empowered: Digital Skills and Inequality in a Mobile-First South Africa

  • Presenter: Carlynn Keating 

 

• Title: From Headlines to Handhelds: Migrants’ Mobile Home-Making Under Unequal Platformed Visibility in Italy

  • Presenters: Francesco Vigneri

​

• Title: Mobile Homeland: Consuming Philippine Media in the Diaspora

  • Presenters: Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco, Petronilo D. Figueroa III, Jonalou S. Labor, Mariam Jayne M. Agonos

​

• Title: Democratizing Cultural Heritage

  • Presenters: Ken Harper, Mohau Monaheng, Mohau Monaheng,T. Makana Chock

​

Room 2G

• Title: Smartphone Prompting: A Taxonomy of Mobile LLM Use Practices

  • Presenters: Justin Grandinetti and Ragan Glover

​

• Title: Understanding the Dynamics of Adolescents’ Perceived Digital Well-Being in Relation to Parental Mediation

  • Presenters: Jasmina Rosič, Lara Schreurs, Jana Vereecke, Lise-Marie Nassen, Robyn Vanherle, Kathleen Beullens, Steven Eggermont, Laura Vandenbosch

​

• Title: Leveraging Mobile Communication and Messaging Systems to Address Maternal and Child Health Inequalities: Evidence from Northern Ghana

  • Presenter: Eliasu Mumuni

​

• Title: Mobile Health Technologies between the Reduction and (Re)production of Inequalities

  • Presenters: Anna Wagner and Liza van Lent

​

• Title: Paradoxes of Modernity

  • Presenters: Tatenda Chatikobo and Lorenzo Dalvit

​

3:45-4:15 Social Break – enjoy snacks, beverages, and each other

​

4:15-5 Closing Keynote

“Before the World Caught Up: Mobile Media as Everyday Infrastructure in South Africa”

Douglas A. Parry, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

 

In this closing keynote I will reflect on three South African mobile innovations that shaped everyday life over the past 20 years, long before many similar practices became commonplace elsewhere: Mxit, SnapScan, and EskomSePush. These cases trace a history of mobile communication in which the phone became part of everyday infrastructure under conditions of high communication costs, unequal access, and recurring infrastructural disruptions.

 

Mxit made social connection possible at a fraction of the cost and became a key gateway to online life for many young users; SnapScan enabled mobile payments through low-cost QR-based transactions, reducing barriers for small merchants and informal sellers; and EskomSePush transformed the phone into a coordination tool for navigating load-shedding and, increasingly, for hyperlocal community communication.

 

Using these cases, each of which I have a personal connection to, I will reflect on what it means to study mobile media in contexts where cost, mobility, and infrastructural instability are features of everyday life. These examples position mobile media as tools for coordination, payment, and adaptation, embedded in how people manage attention, resources, and uncertainty in daily routines. I will conclude by considering how these histories can challenge assumptions in mobile communication research, inform the kinds of questions we ask about mobile communication, and open up new ways of thinking about everyday technology use.

​

5:30-7:30: Dinner Reception

Uber to “Athletic Club & Social”

35 Buitengracht St, CBD, Cape Town (near the convention center)

​

Organizing Committee

• Scott W. Campbell (Division Vice-Chair, The Ohio State University)

• Adriana de Souza e Silva (Division Chair, Northeastern University)

• Cecilia Uy-Tioco (California State University San Marcos)

• Douglas A. Parry (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

• Francesca Ieracitano (Sapienza University, Rome)

• Morgan Quinn Ross (Oregon State University)

• Local liaisons: Tanja Bosch & Nicola Davies-Laubscher (University of Cape Town), Wanelisa Xaba (University of the Western Cape)

​

Session Participants

1. Mariam Jayne M. Agonos, mariam.agonos@monash.edu

2. Deepti Apte, University of Mumbai, deepti@kessc.edu.in

3. Anisha Arenz, University of Amsterdam, a.r.arenz@uva.nl

4. Joe Bayer, The Ohio State University, bayer.66@osu.edu

5. Jeffrey Boase, University of Toronto, j.boase@utoronto.ca

6. Tanja Bosch, University of Cape Town, tanja.bosch@uct.ac.za

7. Kathleen Beullens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, kathleen.beullens@kuleuven.be

8. Scott W. Campbell, The Ohio State University, campbell.2844@osu.edu

9. Tatenda Chatikobo, University of Warwick, tatendachatz@outlook.com

10. T. Makana Chock, Syracuse University, tmchock@syr.edu

11. Lorenzo Dalvit, Rhodes University, l.dalvit@ru.ac.za

12. David de Segovia Vicente, Ghent University, David.deSegoviaVicente@ugent.be

13. Adriana de Silva e Souza, Northeastern Univ., a.desouzaesilva@northeastern.edu

14. Steven Eggermont, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, steven.eggermont@kuleuven.be

15. Yangliu Fan, Freie Universität Berlin, yangliu.fan@weizenbaum-institut.de

16. Petronilo D. Figueroa III, WR Numero Research, pdfigueroa@alum.up.edu.ph

17. Alicia Gilbert, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, gilbert@uni-mainz.de

18. Ragan Glover, University of Michigan, rlglover@umich.edu

19. Justin Grandinetti, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, jgrandin@charlotte.edu

20. Ken Harper, Syracuse University, kharpe01@syr.edu

21. Maren Hartmann, Berlin University of the Arts, marenhartmann@gmx.net

22. Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University, larissa.hjorth@rmit.edu.au

23. Justine Humphry, University of Sydney, justine.humphry@sydney.edu.au

24. Lee Humphreys, Cornell University, lmh13@cornell.edu

25. Veronika Karnowski, University of Technology Chemintz, veronika.karnowski@phil.tu-chemnitz.de

26. Carlynn Keating, University of the Western Cape, ckeating@uwc.ac.za

27. Julius Klingelhoefer, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, julius.klingelhoefer@fau.de

28. Jonalou S. Labor, Aarhus University, jslabor@up.edu.ph

29. Mora Matassi, University of San Andrés, mmatassi@udesa.edu.ar

30. Caitlin McGrane, RMIT University, caitlin.mcgrane@rmit.edu.au

31. Lise-Marie Nassen, University of Amsterdam, l.j.m.nassen@uva.nl

32. Mohau Monaheng, Reitumetsi Information Technology, mtmonaheng@gmail.com

33. Eliasu Mumuni, University for Development Studies, meliasu@uds.edu.gh

34. Jakob Ohme, Weizenbaum Institut, jakob.ohme@weizenbaum-institut.de

35. Douglas A. Parry, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, d.a.parry@vu.nl

36. Jasmina Rosič, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, jasmina.rosic@kuleuven.be

37. Morgan Quinn Ross, Oregon State University, rossmor@oregonstate.edu

38. Anna Schnauber-Stockmann, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, anna.schnauber-stockmann@uni-mainz.de

39. Lara Schreurs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, lara.schreurs@kuleuven.be

40. Keri Stephens, University of Texas, keristephens@austin.utexas.edu

41. Weiqi Tian, University of Amsterdam, w.tian@uva.nl

42. Cecilia Uy-Tioco, California State Univ. San Marcos, cuytioco@csusm.edu

43. Robyn Vanherle, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, robyn.vanherle@kuleuven.be

44. Liza van Lent, Radboud University, liza.vanlent2@ru.nl

45. Laura Vandenbosch, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, laura.vandenbosch@kuleuven.be

46. Jana Vereecke, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, jana.vereecke@kuleuven.be

47. Francesco Vigneri, Università Mercatorum, francesco.vigneri@unimercatorum.it

48. Anna Wagner, Radboud University, anna.wagner@ru.nl

49. Yifan Xu, Northeastern University, yif.xu@northeastern.edu