[Air-L] CFP: Digital (Un)wellness: Power, Health, and Screen Time - 4S Open Panel

[Alex Beattie]

Dear AoIR colleagues,

We hope you're holding up in the endless endlessness. We're writing to
invite you to submit abstracts for papers to our 4S Open Panel,
<https://www.4sonline.org/58-digital-unwellness-power-health-and-screen-time/>
 *Digital (Un)wellness: Power, Health, and Screen Time.* The deadline for
abstracts is March 8 and the conference is ostensibly taking place in
Toronto, October 6-9. No matter what, there will be options for distance
participation. The panel description is below, and of course please feel
free to send this CFP to anyone who might be interested.

Sincerely,
Laura Calloway*, Indiana University*
Alex Beattie*, Victoria University of Wellington*
Hannah Zeavin*, UC Berkeley*
Chad Valasek*, University of California at San Diego*

*Digital (Un)wellness: Power, Health, and Screen Time*
In recent years, an emerging concern over the amount of time that people
spend in front of screens has led to pathologizing models of digital device
use (i.e., “digital addiction”). Scientific research and corporate
programs, such as Google’s Digital Wellbeing app or Apple’s Screen Time
app, have constructed digital wellness, positing an ideal amount of digital
device use, while also generating new understandings to expertise of
“healthy” productivity, digital forms of parental supervision, and
combating physical fatigue, depression, and burnout.

Although engineers and psychologists have turned toward descriptions of
digital overuse and addiction, other scholars have turned toward the
so-called attention economy. While both groups of scholars may be critical
of tech industry exploitation of users, they also tend to reinforce akratic
models of users. In addition, the entanglements between digital wellness
and health remain wedded to surveillance–especially through infrastructures
for data collection and body tracking.

We seek papers that reevaluate digital wellbeing from a critical STS
perspective and center aspects of social inequality inherent in digital
wellness discourses. Topics may include: discourses surrounding home
surveillance, children, and screens; the relationship between COVID-19 and
screen time debates; digital labor and its relation to the possibilities
and limits of political futures; how digital wellbeing experts and the
psy-disciplines construct digital addiction; the relationship of digital
wellness to the gig economy, platform labor, digital inequalities and
global divides; or how digital wellbeing could be politicized and
collectivized as a form of mutual aid and good relations.

Potential topics include: Digital health, wellness, surveillance, labor,
mutual aid, "digital addiction"

-------------------------------------------
*Alex Beattie*
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Centre for Science in Society | Pūkenga, Pūtaiao ki te Pāpori
Victoria University of Wellington | Te Herenga Waka
lxbt.co
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