Dr Katrin Langton is a media and communications scholar with a keen interest in digital inclusion, data safety, and user agency in everyday digital media use. 

Katrin completed her doctoral studies at QUT. Her Thesis explores how the design and affordances of mobile applications for infant feeding and baby-tracking reflect and shape understandings of ‘good’ parenting, and parents’ experiences and practices of caregiving in the context of family life. Her background in nutrition science brings a cross-disciplinary perspective to her work, that allow her findings to meaningfully contribute to knowledge in other disciplines such as the health sciences, specifically in the context of digital health technologies.

Her current research builds on her doctoral studies. It focusses on defining the emergent field of baby app studies, on situating this field within, and in relation to, the multi-disciplinary study of digital childhoods, and on informing a new research agenda that centres the themes of care and relationality in the everyday use of digital tools. Additionally, Katrin is contributing to related research on children’s data flows in the home environment, to better understand the trends, practices and implications of the datafication of childhoods and family life. 

Katrin’s work aims to contribute to a more user-centred, ethical approach to the design of digital technologies, based on digital inclusion and data protection principles. Placing these considerations at the centre of technological design has the potential to increase user agency, reduce potential harms, and provide families with an enhanced sense of self-efficacy and connection – both online and offline.

https://linktr.ee/katrinlangton

Supervisor
Professor Julian Sefton-Green

Earliest digital memory
Playing Solitaire and Minesweeper on my Dad’s computer (which still had a floppy disk drive!).