What it means to me to be selected as a Childhood & AI Lab Fellow

In February of this year, following a rigorous application process,I was selected as a fellow and researcher at the Childhood & AI Lab. 

For more than 20 years I have studied how digital technologies shape children’s learning, wellbeing and development, particularly in under-resourced and global majority contexts.  The  work I’ve done to date matters to me deeply, but there is a more specific question that has been pulling at me for a while now, and the fellowship gave me the space to chase it properly.

What, if anything, does AI actually do for neurodivergent teenagers?

As a researcher, and as someone who thrives  with ADHD myself,I know what it feels like to navigate systems, classrooms and tools that were never designed with my brain in mind. So when I look at the question of AI entering children’s lives, I am not asking the question from a distance. I am asking it from within.

My emerging research focuses on how AI tools affect the wellbeing and mental health of neurodivergent teenagers aged 14 to 18, with particular attention to young people with ADHD in under-served communities. My goal is to generate rigorous, equity-centred evidence on whether AI can act as an enabling tool for these adolescents, reducing barriers to participation, learning and belonging, rather than deepening them.

This research is grounded in Black feminist theory, the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and the DAIS Model. Most importantly, I am centring young people’s own voices in assessing whether the AI tools in their lives actually support their attention, their self-regulation and their sense of belonging, or whether they introduce new risks that adults have not been paying attention to.

This research deliberately requires centering Global Majority contexts, and deliberately asking who these tools are actually built for.

That is the work I am doing as a Fellow at the Childhood & AI Lab. I will be sharing more as it develops.