Atmospheric Approaches to Mobile Media: Reconceptualizing Youth–Smartphone Relations

Trafi-Prats, Laura ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3468-1073, Castro-Varela, Aurelio and Wargo, Jon (2025) Atmospheric Approaches to Mobile Media: Reconceptualizing Youth–Smartphone Relations. Children's Geographies. ISSN 1473-3285 (In Press)

Accepted Version File not available for download. Available under License In Copyright. Download (336kB)

Abstract

Drawing on Celia Lury’s methodological concept of problem spaces, which highlights how conceptual frameworks shape the constitution of problems, this article critically argues that current education research on youth–smartphone relations is limited by the problem formulations it inherits from current policy. These formulations predominantly focus on behaviour, attention, well-being, and academic performance, producing a risk/benefit discourse that narrows how youth–smartphone relations are conceptualised. In response, we offer an affective-atmospheric approach that reconfigures the research problem itself, positioning young people’s embodied, affective, and ambient engagements with mobile media as central to their personal and collective negotiation of school life. We develop this approach through a conceptual review of studies at the intersection of youth geographies and mobile media, showing how smartphones operate as affective and technical interfaces embedded in young people’s spatial and relational worlds. From this, we propose four conceptual orientations to guide education research and policy toward more nuanced perspectives that centre youth experience in space and place and recognise the contributions of interdisciplinary work. The four orientations are: (1) the circulation and spatialisation of affect, (2) participating in the wireless atmosphere, (3) the ambiguity of affect in mobile media, and (4) the technicity of youth's collective life. A key insight is that even when devices are put away, the affective relations they enable continue to circulate, shaping school experiences in ambient ways that are overlooked by the technodeterministic framings currently embedded in policy.