Webinar – Online Childhoods: Voice, Visibility, and Care in Digital Culture
Wednesday 18 November 2026, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm GMT, online (UK)
The Childhood, Law & Policy Network (CLPN) is pleased to invite you to the first of two webinars exploring the theme of digital childhood.
Bringing together Dr Ylva Ågren, Professor Natalie Coulter, and Professor Lisa Lazard, this webinar examines how children and families navigate voice, visibility, care, and power in digital culture. The speakers will explore young influencers’ experiences of being seen and heard online, the corporate infrastructures shaping childhood under digital capitalism, and the complex pressures surrounding mothers’ sharing of family life on social media. Together, the talks will consider what it means to grow up, participate, and care in online environments — and the new opportunities, tensions, and responsibilities these spaces create for children, parents, and society.
Presentations:
Ylva Ågren, ‘Being Seen, Being Heard? Voice and Visibility among Young Influencers’
What does it mean to be heard when you are seen? Drawing on interview studies with young influencers in Sweden, this talk explores how they understand their public presence and negotiate the boundaries of what, when and to whom they make themselves visible. It examines how visibility circulates across audiences and into physical public space, often in ways that are difficult to anticipate or control. Against this backdrop, the talk asks what having a voice means when being seen does not guarantee being heard on one’s own terms.
Natalie Couler, ‘Childhood Under Digital Capitalism’
Drawing from her new book Kids, KidTech, and Digital Capitalism: The Fight for Our Digital Futures, Coulter explores how the meaning and experiences of childhood are shifting under the oppressive weight of digital capitalism. Using Roblox as a primary example, she illustrates how understanding children’s digital lives requires greater attention to the corporate infrastructures that shape their digital environments and how these influence what it means to grow up in a digital society.
Lisa Lazard, ‘Showing You Care: Sharenting and Mothers’ Digital Sharing Practices on Social Media’
With the increased hybridity of everyday life for many, sharing about one’s children and family has become a well-established and routine parental practice on social media. The term sharenting has emerged in popular discourse as a pejorative which was initially rooted in negative characterisations of parental posting as repetitive, incessant and banal. Alongside these criticisms, sharenting has become heavily associated with parental digital narcissism, humblebragging and pretension. The term sharenting has increasingly reflected concerns about children’s digital rights, privacy, information security and the potential for cyber harms. While sharenting has often been presented as a largely gender-neutral practice both in popular and academic arenas, gendered patterns have been observed with mothers’ reportedly engaging in the practice with greater frequency than fathers. Thus, it is mothers who are largely, if not explicitly, the subject to sharenting social censure. Drawing on both psychological and intersectional feminist perspectives, this paper will examine sharenting in the context of the rise in maternal engagements with digital technologies and environments dedicated to family and child raising. The paper explores how families, particularly mothers, negotiate competing demands around mothering, caregiving and social media practices to meet expectations of what it means to be a ‘good’ mother, a ‘good’ woman and to raise a ‘good’ family. This talk draws on analysis of data from mothers’ and families’ talk about posting to articulate familial sharing online as a complex practice within an accelerated technological terrain that produces new considerations, opportunities, risk and parental responsibilities.
Speakers:
Dr Ylva Ågren is an Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research focuses on children’s digital lives, exploring visibility, participation, rights, cultural production and work in online environments. Taking an interdisciplinary and critical approach, her work is grounded in critical childhood studies and emphasises children’s perspectives and child-centred methodologies.
Prof Natalie Coulter is a Professor in Communication and Media Studies at York University, Canada. She is the author of Kids, KidTech and Digital Capitalism: The Fight for our Digital Futures (2026) and co-author of Media and Communication in Canada (10th edition). She is the series editor of Mediated Youth with Peter Lang. She is the Co-Director of the Digital Futures, Digital Literacies Lab, and is currently leading a SSHRC funded grant on Roblox. Prof Lisa Lazard is a social psychologist in the School of Psychology & Counselling in the Open University, UK. Her research broadly focuses on gender in digital spaces, including mothers’ and family digital practices on social media. She has published widely on the phenomenon of digital mothering and the issue of sharenting in particular. She is currently the Co-Lead for the Human Behaviour stream of the Centre for Protecting Women Online focusing on a wide range of issues including, young people’s digital practices, deepfake gender-based violence and parental engagements in this context. She is also a Co-Director of the Open Psychology Research Centre.
Prof Lisa Lazard is a Professor in the School of Psychology and Counselling at the Open University. She has a long-standing interest in gendered power dynamics in everyday life. This interest has led her to her current role as co- lead for the Human Behaviour stream of The Centre for Protecting Women Online which aims to understand and address challenges to women’s safety online. It has also been the basis for her co-leading roles in Research Groups, including Networking Families which explores how gendered power relations shape the digital lives of families.
She has been an active member of Psychology of Women Section of the British Psychological Society and has had the privilege to serve as Chair of this section. She has also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Psychology of Women & Equalities Section Review.
Chaired by Dr Hedi Viterbo—Reader in Law at Queen Mary University of London and the Founding Director of the Childhood, Law & Policy Network (CLPN). Among his publications are Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine (2021) and ‘Youthwashing: The Co-Optation of Young People—and How Child Rights Enable It’ (2025).
Find more information and book your free place here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-childhoods-voice-visibility-and-care-in-digital-culture-tickets-2003664327942