Due to their internet connectivity and intensive data collection about users and their environments, smart speakers extend the datafication of the domestic environment, while contributing to the normalisation of data relations as an integral part of family everyday life. Our study extends the analysis of the domestication of smart speakers into the domestic context, family relations, practices and imaginaries. In particular, we provide theoretical and empirical insights into the study of datafication as a diverse, situated and embodied experience. In order to analyse the emergent and situated relationships (through and with smart speakers), agencies and power structures mobilised in the domestication of smart speakers, we conceptualise families as communicative figurations comprising actors (family members), culture (including technological and surveillance imaginaries), communication practices, and a specific digital media ensemble. Drawing on mixed-method data, our findings show that communicative figurations involve a reconfiguration of power and agency relating both to traditional axes (status, class, gender and age) and new forms of power enabled by the progressive colonisation of the domestic environment by data colonialism. We propose and discuss a typification of households along a continuum of positions in family relationships with data between two opposite poles: data-resistants and data-normalisers. Households can negotiate, resist and oppose datafication practices and imaginaries by mobilising various strategies, discourses, meanings and practices. Ultimately, our theoretical approach and typification allow studying how data practices materialise – and are (partially) accepted, negotiated or rejected – as a specific communicative figuration in each family.

In the past 2 decades, reflections on video games’ ideological and political aspects—and their overarching media ecosystems—have grown. Despite this, few contributions focus on environmental issues, mainly empirically-oriented studies or ecocritical contributions vis-à-vis shared models and systematizations. Starting from the “To The Last Tree Standing” campaign carried out in 2017 for Greenpeace Poland to stop the deforestation of the Białowieża forest, this research sets out to elaborate an analytical model to outline the constitutive dimensions to be taken into account in analyses of how video games and environmental activism can intersect in a specific intentional communicative instance. The results, which relied on semi-structured interviews with executives and designers ( n = 3) and inductive thematic analysis and sentiment analysis of the YouTube comments, delineate three initial categories ( controversy, campaign network, and game ecosystem). This evidence highlights new development trajectories for studying the intersection between the gaming world and ecological activism.

Datafication of childhood and family life (Barassi, 2020; Mascheroni & Siibak, 2021) represents one of the main expressions of data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). Indeed, data relations are pervading the practices and imaginaries of parenting and childhood to the point of being taken for granted. This poses significant epistemological and methodological challenges. This contribution sets out to advance some methodological proposals to study such phenomena through hybrid methods. Adopting a longitudinal mixed methods research design within a sample of 20 families with young children (0-8 y.o) which combines interviews, observational and visual data (Pink & Leder-Mackley, 2012) and drawing upon the concept of families as communicative figurations (Hepp et al., 2018) we argue that network methods and constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014) appear suited as analytical tools to capture the interactions between data (generated by the media practices of each household’s member) and each family figuration with the goal to foreground the power relations at play and bring to the surface taken for granted practices and imaginaries. The first empirical application showed that these techniques allow to map each family’s constellation of actors, their data practices and imaginaries, and the digital media ensemble highlighting patterns of spatial differentiation and the media-related structure of relationships that unveil household’s power relations and norms. Moreover, the resulting visualisations emerged as worth-experimenting means to foster participants’ reflexivity. These results suggest that CGT methodology and hybrid network methods may represent a way to materialize data relations and disentangle data colonialism in family life.

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