In-person event.

Please register your attendance here.

In November, the Digital Intimacy Gender and Sexuality (DIGS) Lab will be hosting Dr Łukasz Szulc (University of Manchester) for a talk on the Glocal Political Economy of Queer Dating in Poland. The public talk will be followed by a more intimate graduate seminar with the author (more information below).

About the talk: Dating is increasingly mediated by digital technologies most of which are developed by US companies despite their global reach. This concentration raises critical questions about the standardisation of intimacy and the implications of entrusting personal relationships to a small number of for-profit platforms. Against the backdrop of rapid technological change large-scale migration and intensified cross-cultural exchange this talk explores the evolution of transnational dating cultures through the lens of Polish queer experiences. Szulc traces the development of dating media over the past four decades beginning with personal ads in community magazines and queer chatrooms on mainstream Polish portals. This is followed by the emergence of both national and international queer dating websites—such as Poland’s Queer.pl and Germany’s Romeo.com—and later the global dominance of mobile apps like Grindr and Her. Alongside this historical trajectory he analyses the ownership structures business models and governance frameworks that shape how these technologies operate. These media histories are situated within broader geopolitical transformations particularly Poland’s shift from state socialism to democracy and capitalism after 1989. By centring Polish queer perspectives Szulc highlights how intimacy is mediated by intersecting cultural social and political contexts challenging Western-centric accounts of digital dating.

The talk will be followed by a graduate seminar on November 6 from 10:00am-noon. The seminar has limited capacity so please sign up by sending an email indicating your name, study level and department to digslab@concordia.ca. Upon sign-up, you will receive a reading to prepare in advance.

Speaker bio: Dr Łukasz Szulc is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on critical and cultural studies of digital media particularly at the intersections of gender sexuality and transnationalism. He co-edited the 2024 Special Issue of Communication Culture and Critique on ‘Transnational Queer Cultures and Digital Media’ (with Yener Bayramoğlu and Radhika Gajjala) and is the author of the book Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines (2018).