Leaping and dancing with digitality : Exploring human-smartphone-entanglements in classrooms

This chapter explores digitality as part of young people’s everyday lives in the Arctic. It is based on two ethnographic studies situated in the political context of the “digital leap”, the governmental and curricular emphasis on digitality in education in Finland. With the more formal “digital leap”, informal engagements and attachments with digitality intertwine, in which students’ own smartphones play an increasingly significant role. The analyses use the notion of entanglement (Barad) to examine how primary school and upper secondary school students emerge in their situated and specific encounters with smartphones in school. The starting points of things, bodies, affect, time and space open up insights to connectivity between young people’s digital activities and global economic networks as well as to the multidirectionality between humans and technologies: while the students access their digital devices, the digitalities also access their users. We suggest that this wilder form of “digital leap” requires reconsidering materiality, affect, and instability of space and time.Peer reviewe