I gave a presentation titled: "Reimagining Digital Disconnection: ADHD Narratives of Digital Life". This was part of a plenary session called Disconnection and Digital Wellbeing.

Digital wellbeing research has become increasingly preoccupied with measurement and self-regulation: weekly screen-time reports, app-limit dashboards, and a growing ecosystem of tools designed to help users manage their digital lives. Yet many of these interventions assume a particular kind of user: someone who responds predictably to metrics, nudges, limits, and routines. For many disabled and neurodivergent people, including people with ADHD, this model of the user is not simply incomplete. It can actively misrecognise adaptive practices, forms of care, and alternative relationships with technology as failure, distraction, or lack of self-control. In this seminar, I argue that digital wellbeing research has been shaped by an overly narrow understanding of the user. Drawing on work in disability studies, human-computer interaction, and crip technoscience, I explore what becomes visible when we instead begin with non-average users. Disabled and neurodivergent people are often positioned as edge cases within technology research, yet their experiences can reveal hidden assumptions embedded within dominant models of digital wellbeing, attention, and disconnection. I introduce crip technoscience as one way of moving beyond the average user. Drawing on Hamraie and Fritsch's (2019) manifesto, I present crip technoscience not only as a political framework but also as a practical approach to research and design. The seminar focuses on three key commitments: treating disability and neurodivergence as sources of expertise; asking "access for whom?" when evaluating technologies and interventions; and understanding digital wellbeing as a relational practice of care and interdependence rather than individual self-regulation. Drawing on examples from my Saving Screen Time project with people with ADHD, I demonstrate how non-average users can generate different questions, methods, and interventions for digital wellbeing research. Participants will also be invited to identify the non-average users in their own research contexts and consider how centering those users might reshape their assumptions, methods, and designs. The session is aimed at researchers working in media and communication, science and technology studies, disability studies, HCI, and related fields who are interested in more just, reflexive, and imaginative ways of studying digital life.

Debates about young people's screen time and digital wellbeing are usually framed as if they were universal: how much is too much, at what age, on which devices. This seminar starts somewhere else: in Aotearoa New Zealand, and with the problem of what it means to be a Pākehā (white settler) researcher working on digital wellbeing in a place marked by colonisation. I sketch how the proposed social media ban in Aotearoa New Zealand reproduce older moral and colonial logics, even when they present themselves as neutral responses to risk. Rather than treating this as a technical policy issue, I ask what becomes visible when we read these debates through histories of moral regulation and through the specificity of Aotearoa New Zealand. From there, I turn to indigenous and locally grounded approaches, not to offer them as a toolkit I can hand over, but to show how they unsettle my own assumptions. I contrast imported metaphors for children and flourishing with thinking that starts from local ecologies and Mātauranga Māori (indigenous knowledge) concepts such as manaakitanga (respect and hospitality), and consider what they suggest about care and digital parenting. Throughout this seminar, I am explicit that the only “how‑to” I can offer is the set of tensions that come with being Pākehā in kaupapa Māori (research) spaces: how to name colonial logics in digital wellbeing without recentring Pākehā authority, how to work with Māori ideas without treating them as metaphors‑for‑hire, and how to let place and partnership change the questions we ask about harm and care. The aim is to invite participants to think from their own places about what digital wellbeing could be, once universal screen‑time prescriptions are no longer taken for granted.