Antti Paakkari (Tampere University) will give an online presentation titled Living with data: Parents negotiating invisible data labour in childhood institutions on October 28 9:00-10:00 (EET).

Attend the session via Zoom: https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/5176679542

REPAIR Dialogues is an informal online series where researchers and collaborators from the REPAIR project share their ongoing work, ideas, and findings. Each session features a short presentation followed by an open discussion. All are welcome!

Living with data: Parents negotiating invisible data labour in childhood institutions

Nordic countries have sought to position themselves as datafied welfare states  (Andreasseen, Kaun & Nikunen 2021), actively introducing digital infrastructures into many childhood institutions. While these institutions have always posed implicit and explicit demands on parents and produced ideals of parenthood, there now appears to be a level of data proficiency expected from families. This can be seen as a new kind of parental professionalisation (Hartong & Manolev 2023), as the ability to understand relevant data infrastructures and manage the data produced on your children becomes a central parenting skill. Our interviews with families having to engage frequently with childhood institutions suggests that managing the data systems is demanding and parents are increasingly exhausted. Constant data management can be seen as invisible data labour that is becoming part of the ideals of good parenthood. The families also speak of a generalized suspicion with regards to data inscriptions: you can never be sure about what gets inscribed or how data moves around in the infrastructures.

The presentation discusses parents’ experiences of engaging with childhood institutions based on findings from DataChild research project.

Antti Paakkari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University. He has investigated platformisation and educational technologies in schools and Early Childhood settings and is currently interested in movements that challenge or refuse digital education. Antti works in DataChild project funded by Kone Foundation. The project investigates families’ experiences of engaging with the data infrastructures of childhood institutions, and emergent possibilities of data activism.