Lunch Hour Lecture | Smartphone Free Childhoods?

About the lecture:

Smartphone Free Childhoods? Are social media regulations and bans undermining young people's rights and voice

Digital media has become omnipresent in the lives of teenagers and young people. They avidly use gaming platforms, streaming media, AI, and represent the largest user demographic on social media. However, while digital environments can have positive connotations for young people, social media platforms also enable tech facilitated violence and promote harmful gender norms. The department for education has issued guidance to restrict mobile phone use and schools are implementing policies nation-wide. This lecture reports on a research project on teachers, parents and young people's views on smartphone restrictions. I explore how smartphone policies intersect with RSE, digital literacy, safeguarding and other behavioural policies in schools. I also discuss child rights focused approaches to Smartphone guidance focused on supporting ethical and consent based mobile phone use to prevent tech facilitated violence for young people.

UCL's popular public Lunch Hour Lecture series has been running at UCL since 1942, and showcases the exceptional research work being undertaken across UCL. Lectures are free and open to all and since 2020 have been held online.

About the speaker:

Professor Jessica Ringrose (she/her) is co-Director of the Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity at IOE UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, London Her research explores young people’s gender and sexual cultures and activisms, and sex education and digital literacy in school settings. She has worked with a wide range of stakeholders and academics to shape policy and practice in areas of education, gender, media and communications, crime and justice. Her recent projects focus on developing educational interventions to prevent tech facilitated gender based and sexual violence, online misogyny and transphobia, with findings informing the UK 2023 Online Safety Act. She was the co-chair of Gender and Education Association from 2015-2020 and the recipient of The American Educational Research Association (AERA) Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Education Award in 2020. Her latest book, Teens, Social Media and Image Based Abuse is out with Palgrave in 2025.

About the chair:

John Potter is a Professor of Media in Education at the IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education & Society, based at the UCL Knowledge Lab. He is the Director of the ReMAP research centre (Researching Media Arts and Play), formerly known as DARE (Digital Arts Research In Education), and Associate Director (Media) of the UCL Knowledge Lab. His research, teaching and publications are in the fields of media education, new literacies, play on and offscreen, theories of curation and agency in social media, and the changing nature of teaching and learning in the context of digital media culture. He is particularly interested in the co-production of research with children and young people and uses a variety of participatory, ethnographic and multimodal research methods. He has taken part in a number of research projects using these methods and most recently led the ESRC funded project, the Play Observatory, exploring children's play during the pandemic. Before that John was a co-investigator on the EPSRC funded project, Playing the Archive, based on researching contemporary children's games in the light of the Opie archive. He is co-director of the Opie Childhoods and Play Project, funded by the British Academy.