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Short abstract

The paper examines smartphone bans as infrastructural inversion. Based on participatory research in secondary schools, it asks whether digital disconnection is mere solutionism or can create productive friction that challenges infrastructural entanglement and strengthens public values in education.

Long abstract

Digital infrastructures increasingly govern public sectors as they become indispensable ‘obligatory passage points’. In the public education sector, social media, smartphones, and educational technologies (edtech) are deeply embedded in everyday teaching, communication, and school organisation. While offering pedagogical opportunities, these infrastructures also raise concerns about distraction, dependency, data extraction, and the erosion of public values. In response, governments and educational institutions are introducing partial bans on smartphones and social media in schools.

This paper conceptualises such bans as a possible form of ‘infrastructural inversion’: a figure–ground reversal that renders visible the normally invisible, taken-for-granted operations of entangled socio-technical infrastructures (Simonsen et al., 2020). While current policies of digital disconnection are often no more than a purely technological fix, we examine whether banning data-driven technologies can be a step towards challenging the strategic entanglement of schools’ social infrastructures with corporate-computational infrastructures (Pierson, 2021).

Drawing on qualitative participatory research and in-depth interviews with pupils and teachers in five secondary schools in Flanders (Belgium) in early 2026, we analyse lived experiences of the newly implemented governmental smartphone ban. Our framework integrates insights from Media and Communication Studies, STS, and critical edtech studies, with particular attention to infrastructural inversion and ‘seamfulness’ as the deliberate introduction of boundaries and friction in data flows (Couldry & Mejias, 2019).

We assess whether such friction merely reproduces technological solutionism or whether it can foster responsible digitalisation by enhancing critical awareness, collective governance capabilities, and citizen agency over public values within the data-driven state.