Entangled Lives: Children and Young People in Sociodigital Relations

Dear Colleagues,

The world is becoming increasingly datafied, and our lives are enmeshed with technological devices and systems. Since the launch of ChatGPT (2022), there has been a rapid global expansion of AI tools alongside increased governmental and corporate investment and claims of ‘seamless’ integration of technologies. Children and young people are particularly impacted by these entangled sociodigital relationships (Haraway, 2016), in which new forms of play, education, leisure and friendships are embedded in and shape ways of living and learning in on-/off-line spaces as a ‘multi-species muddle’ (Haraway, 2016).

Such integration raises concerns for the potential of digital harm(s), with a burgeoning literature largely from public health and psychology raising concerns for children and young people’s mental and physical health and wellbeing in relation to the pervasiveness of technologies in their lives. At the same time, research has demonstrated the importance of children’s participation in digital life (Livingstone and Third, 2017), and recognises the ways children’s bodies, technologies, data, (un/natural) environments and realities co-mingle in knowledge and world-making (e.g., Lupton, 2017; Kumpulainen, 2022). This complexity around technological use amongst children and young people has resulted in a polarised global debate, where aspects of digital engagement have become heavily scrutinised and digital spaces are acting as sites of exclusion for children and young people, as exemplified in Australia’s recent social media ban for under-16s.

With a particular focus on the (in)justices surrounding children’s and young people’s sociodigital entanglements, in this Special Issue, we hope to move beyond reductionist binaries – such as those about risks and opportunities - to understand the diverse ways in which children and young people live alongside and with technologies. We are interested in reconfiguring children and young people as not just passive recipients of technological expansion, intrigued by empirical examples of where they contribute to shaping/ designing/ rejecting, and enhancing technologies in acts of agency, resistance and creativity.

We welcome contributions to this Special Issue that trouble assumed relationships and impacts of technologies in young people’s lives and consider wider relational entanglements that contribute to a broader remit which opens up other/alternative/potential Sociodigital futures (Halford & Southerton, 2024) for and with children and young people. It feels urgent that we move beyond simplistic debates and (re)position children and young people as knowledge makers of their own lives and futures, attuning to how agency emerges between social, technological, material and discursive relationships in ways that matter in their lives and worlds. We are open to scholarship from diverse contexts and disciplines, taking a global approach and particularly welcome work that extends the recent uptake of theoretical ideas from a more-than-human, new materialist or posthuman perspective, engaging with the notion of ‘intra-actions’ (Barad, 2007) between society and digital technologies. It is hoped that this Special Issue can highlight the contribution of such theoretical ideas to scholarship thinking about children and young people in a digitalised/ datafied society.

Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke university Press.

Halford, S; Southerton D. (2024) Sociodigital Futures? An agenda for sociological research and practice. Sociologia Italiana, 25(3), pp. 93-110. https://doi.org/10.1485/2281-2652-202426-4

Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kumpulainen K (2022) Bridging dichotomies between children, nature and digital technologies. In K. Kumpulainen, A. Kajamaa, O. Erstad, Å. Mäkitalo, K. Drotner, & S. Jakobsdóttir (Eds.), Nordic childhoods in the digital age: Insights into contemporary research on communication, learning and education (pp. 41–50). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003145257-6

Livingstone, S., & Third, A. (2017) Children and young people’s rights in the digital age: An emerging agenda. New Media & Society, 19(5), 657–670. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816686318 (Original work published 2017)

Lupton, D. (2017) Digital bodies. In: Andrews D, Silk M and Thorpe H (eds) Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 200–208.

Contributions have to follow one of the three categories of papers (article, conceptual paper or review) of the journal and address the topic of the Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Debbie L. Watson
Dr. Lisa May Thomas
Dr. Lois Peach
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as conceptual papers are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Societies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• digital technologies
• children and young people
• entanglements
• more-than-human
• harms
• agency
• creativity
• play
• learning
• social media