Cristina Ghita Receives Börje Langefors Award for Best Doctoral Thesis

The Prize Committees motivation:

"Technology in Absentia: A New Materialist Study of Digital Disengagement" addresses an important, interesting, and timely aspect of system use by focusing on what can be learned through the absence of ubiquitous digital devices. Using a multi-sided ethnographic approach that combines participatory observation at a digital detox camp, netnography of a virtual community centered on reducing screen time, and interviews with creators of products and services that support and promote digital disengagement, the thesis provides a rich and detailed study of digital disengagement. The monograph, with its transparent, creative, and atypical methods, offers innovative value in knowledge contributions through its focus on digital disengagement. Furthermore, it presents a theoretical concept to capture the phenomenon of digital disengagement: diffractive digital use. Focusing on digital disengagement at individual and collective levels is, therefore, a valuable contribution to the research field of Information Systems. 

"Technology in Absentia: A New Materialist Study of Digital Disengagement" – abstract and full text in Diva.

Cristina Ghita has a postdoktoral position at the Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering at Uppsala University. She presented her doctoral thesis at the Department of Informatics and Media in 2022 and had Claes Thorén, Mats Edenius and Jenny Eriksson Lundström as supervisors.

The Börje Langefors Award (Swedish Börje Langeforspriset) is an annual academic prize awarded since 2011 by the Swedish Information Systems Academy (Svenska informationssystemakademin (SISA)) for the best doctoral dissertation in Sweden in the subject areas - informatics, information systems, data and information science or equivalent. The prize aims to reward and encourage development of high standard research in Sweden, and to demonstrate exemplary research in informatics.