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Øyvind Næss

PhD Candidate

Email: oyvind.nass@inn.no
Phone number: +47 62 51 76 66

Faculty of Social and Health Sciences
Section for Public Health
Campus Elverum

Short description

My research focuses on the study of socio-technical assemblages within the context of childhood, exploring the emergence of digitalized childhoods at the intersection of politics, individual experiences, and materiality.

My PhD project is an ethnographic study centering on digitalized childhoods, specifically delving into the ways screen usage in childhood is shaped by various actors.

I hold a BA in History, and an MA in Social Science with a specialization in critical sociology and the relationship between the state and national cultural institutions - both from the University of South-Eastern Norway.

Prior to starting as a PhD candidate, I worked as a reportage photographer and lectured on digital visual storytelling and social media at Kristiania University College.

Næss, Øyvind & Broch, Trygve B (2025). A matter of logics and practicalities: How the state, parenting, and children connect in a digitalized childhood. Childhood. ISSN 0907-5682. p. 1–18. doi: 10.1177/09075682251411192. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Important contributions have been made to understanding how screens shape children’s lives, but the arrangement of the constitutive components of digitalized childhoods is not yet fully elucidated. This article draws on a mix of methods to map out how the practicalities of digitalized childhoods are induced by logics embedded in the interconnected spaces of the state and parenthood. To this end, assemblage theory is employed to help explore how the digitalization of childhoods unfolds within an arrangement of diverse scales and complexities. The article draws on ongoing debates within childhood studies concerning children’s agency and the methodological construction of childhoods.
Næss, Øyvind (2025). The desire to hold one's vessel in place; an ethnography of children anchoring up in a world of digitalized dependencies. Children's Geographies. ISSN 1473-3285. 23(5), p. 567–579. doi: https:/www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14733285.2025.2545347#d1e605. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
The article makes a relational ontological contribution to the study of children and young people's digitalized lives. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical framework, the article offers an alternative to the widely used perspectives of technological determinism and social constructivism and argues for using the theoretical concepts of orders of dependencies and anchorings to capture the arrangements of the disparate spatial forces that make up digitalized childhoods. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out with Norwegian children and their families, aiming to empirically open up new paths for research that seeks to understand how agency is spatially distributed within orders of dependencies in digitalized childhoods. The result is a relational ontological exploration that aims to contribute to new understandings of the practicalities of digitalized childhoods.

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Næss, Øyvind (2024). How do smartphones shape belonging in a digitalized childhood? uni.oslomet.no. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
https://uni.oslomet.no/belong/2024/05/30/how-do-smartphones-shape-belonging-in-a-digitalized-childhood/
Næss, Øyvind (2024). The desire to move without moving; anchorings and transactional arrangements in a digitalized childhood. Full text in Research Archive
Næss, Øyvind; Steinnes, Kamilla Knutsen & Reich, Clara Julia (2023). Digitalized childhoods: A discussion on the co-production of childhoods by humans, materialities, and discourses. Full text in Research Archive
Næss, Øyvind (2023). The co-production of subjectivities within digitalized childhoods. Full text in Research Archive

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Addresses

Postal Address

University of Inland Norway
Postboks 400 Vestad
2418 Elverum
Norway