Shantambi Wamunyima among leading line-up of speakers at Congress 2025, Canada’s leading academic gathering, taking place May 30 – June 6
When someone you’ve been texting or gone on a date with suddenly ends all online communication — in other words, ghosts you — it’s easy to feel like the victim and make them the bad guy. But the complex dynamics at play aren’t quite that simple, says sociology expert Shantambi Wamunyima.
It’s more about how social media and dating platforms are designed to prioritize efficiency and control over meaningful connections, resulting in technology enabling more impersonal romantic relations in online spaces.
“When you have to swipe left or right, or pay for a subscription to date someone, you fall into the trap of commoditizing relationships,” said Wamunyima, a Master’s student at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, who is on a mission to raise awareness about the effects of ghosting, including helping people to detect warning signs.
Wamunyima will present early findings from her analysis of the underlying implications of ghosting at the upcoming Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Congress 2025), Canada’s leading academic gathering and one of the most comprehensive in the world, taking place May 30 to June 6 in Toronto.
Billed as a leading conference on the critical conversations of our time, Congress 2025 — themed “Reframing togetherness” — serves as a platform for the unveiling of thousands of research papers and presentations from social sciences and humanities experts worldwide. With more than 7,000 scholars, graduate students and practitioners expected to participate, the event will challenge attendees to model togetherness by working across differences, questioning hierarchies, and bridging divides in knowledge and experience to tackle the world’s most persistent challenges.
In her Congress presentation, Wamunyima will describe how the normalization of ghosting behaviour is affecting people’s ability to form and maintain deep relationships. She’ll also illustrate how it is preventing them from developing critical social and communication skills because they don’t have to tackle tough subjects to avoid further conflict.
“It’s affecting the way we’re developing emotionally, which is very concerning,” said Wamunyima, whose research is based on a comprehensive literature review as well as digital ethnography (detailed and in-depth observation) on popular social media platforms. “Technology creates this illusion of closeness when in reality, our online relationships are very impersonal.”
While ghosters typically gain an immediate sense of relief from shutting down an online relationship, the people who’ve been ghosted tend to become withdrawn and more self-conscious, and start to shy away from social interactions in their everyday lives as well, she found. Yet, contrary to popular opinion, Wamunyima is discovering that a ghoster doesn’t always have malicious intent when it comes to ghosting the other person.
“We tend to think of the ghoster as the perpetrator and the ghostee as the victim, but normally when someone reaches a point where they’re ghosting someone else, it’s because they don’t see a future or there’s a lack of compatibility,” she said, explaining how that can be considered a normalized evolution in modern dating.
“They’re not always trying to hurt the other person – they’re just trying to dissolve a relationship and technology makes it easy,” she added. “At the same time, the ghostee doesn’t have to listen to why their relationship is ending as they would in an in-person relationship, which some might perceive as a benefit.”
As part of her analysis, Wamunyima is identifying patterns to help people recognize pre-ghosting behaviour. Although ghosting is portrayed as a sudden end to all communication, she found that if you pay attention to a person’s ‘digital body language,’ there are early warning signs to watch out for, such as making excuses, not following up on plans, or a shift in how emojis are used when texting.
A person who’s about to ghost another may even change the frequency and length of their messages, creating a virtual distance and the illusion that they’re still there, a form of manipulation called breadcrumbing.
“My goal is to understand what’s at play here and to give people the tools they need to work through this,” said Wamunyima. “There are a thousand reasons why someone might ghost someone else and obviously we can’t address each individual reason, but we can understand the patterns and see how this behaviour is manifesting in society so that we can help people to be aware and reduce the pain that comes with ghosting,” she said.
Organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in partnership with George Brown College, Congress 2025 is sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Universities Canada, Colleges and Institutes Canada, University Affairs, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Sage, and The Conversation Canada.
Registration – which includes 100+ keynote and open Congress sessions, with a virtual attendance option for many presentations – is $30.
Visit https://www.federationhss.ca/en/congress2025 to register for a community pass and access the program of events open to the public.
