Digital mediation of uneven space-times: international students’ negotiation of wellbeing

This study contributes to post-phenomenological digital geographies by examining how digital technologies mediate international students’ space-times and shape their everyday experiences of wellbeing. Drawing on qualitative research with 30 international students in Australia, this paper explores how digital technologies actively shape how time is organised, experienced, and negotiated in everyday life by international students to manage wellbeing. Findings demonstrate that digital practices are influenced by uneven access to material resources, privilege, and temporal flexibility. Students experiencing greater time scarcity and material constraints positioned digital technologies as essential tools for managing compressed temporalities and sustaining their wellbeing practices. Meanwhile students with greater temporal flexibility described technologies as complementary to their existing wellbeing practices. These findings demonstrate that inequalities in financial and material resources, and differentiated access to temporal flexibility, shape uneven patterns of reliance on digital technologies among international students for managing wellbeing. They raise new questions about digital mediation, data justice, and the changing relationships between mobile populations and technological infrastructures.