I was fortunate to be invited to present my research at the 2026 conference for the European Communications Research and Education Association in Brno, Czech Republic.

The title of the presentation is A Tale of Two Adolescences : Problematising the epistemological orbit of ‘Adolescence’ on Netflix, and it reflects a work-in-progress article co-authored with Professor Elisabeth Staksrud that undertakes an analysis Adolescence, building on previous research to show how its representations of contemporary life are constituted in/constitutive of popular and problematic narratives concerning youth, adulthood, gender, and most importantly internet media. This is what we term the epistemological orbit into which the series has emerged, where such narratives inform key assumptions which go on to establish what is perceived as universal knowledge concerning young people and the internet, and where a fictional television show created by adults to be viewed by adults can be received as documentary evidence of the ‘actual experience’ of adolescents. Contrasting this to empirical accounts from qualitative and quantitative research with young people in Norway, we problematise the assumptions that underwrite the epistemological orbit of the series as being adult-centric and reflective of a powerfully affective paradigm of fear, rather than the empirical reality of teenagers using the internet.