The second week of October, a large contingent of Rutgers SC&I faculty, doctoral students, and alums traveled south to Mexico City for the 27th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), held October 14–17, 2026.
This year’s conference theme was “Regenerations.” AoIR (pronounced “air”) is famous for its ethical guidelines for online research, promoting Internet research that is critical and scholarly, independent from traditional disciplines, and existing across many academic borders. The program opened with a keynote from Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, a Mixe linguist, writer, and activist from Oaxaca. Questions about power, territory, and technological autonomy ran throughout the week’s events.
SC&I colleagues participated in workshops and pre-conference activities. On Tuesday, the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at Penn Annenberg organized an AoIR pre-conference titled “Lockdown and Its (Digital) Afterlives.” Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies Youngrim Kim presented her research on the platformization of emergency governance in South Korea during the pandemic, while SC&I doctoral student Silei Zhu presented on the afterlives of campus turnstiles and post-COVID logistical governance at Chinese universities.
Wednesday featured the all-day Doctoral Colloquium. Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies Brooklyne Gipson, last year’s colloquium chair, returned as a volunteer faculty mentor. SC&I doctoral students presented dissertation and independent research projects alongside peers and senior scholars. Leeam Azoulay presented on how digital rights activists and trust and safety professionals work to protect users in the Majority World; Luis Contreras on graffiti, platform governance, and hybrid visibility in the algorithmic city; and Nayana Kirasur on tracing documents through the information infrastructures of welfare governance in India.
On Thursday, Associate Professors of Communication Yonaira Rivera and Jeffrey Lane joined a fishbowl discussion on generative AI and shifting practices and boundaries of digital ethnography. SC&I alumna Melissa Gasparotto Ph.D.’26 Deputy University Librarian at the University of Chicago, moderated a session on data sovereignty and platform power. During the session, Gasparotto presented a genealogy of Mexican and Central American Indigenous language data.
Thursday evening, the SC&I Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Working Group met up for a meal to celebrate. Colleagues gathered over traditional Oaxacan fare and enjoyed tamales de fresa and flan for dessert. We had lots of reasons to celebrate together, including honoring Associate Professor of Library and Information Science Amelia Acker, who is the 2026 recipient of the AoIR Nancy Baym Book Award for her book “Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms” (MIT Press, 2025).
On Friday, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies Youngrim Kim and doctoral student Margo Lee presented their work on the politics of data center resistance in South Korea.
On Saturday, Assistant Teaching Professor of Library and Information Science Brend Mahoney and Ph.D. student Mehedi Zaman presented work examining how users make sense of platforms' generative AI training policies and the limits of individualized consent, and doctoral student Kateryna Bystrytska presented work on Instagram and TikTok activism by the Yellow Ribbon movement in Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine.
SC&I conference attendees also ventured out and explored CDMX, too. Some visited the nearby National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico’s largest museum, and others toured the Pyramids of Teotihuacan. A few even took in the pyramids on the sunrise hot-air balloon tour of the Teotihuacan Valley.
Next year’s conference will be held in Rimini, Italy, and we expect another strong turnout from SC&I’s internet researchers!
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