Mobile Communication in the Global South, Special Issue of New Media and Society

I am very pleased to announce our special issue of New Media and Society on Mobile Communication in the Global South. Co-edited with mobile communication scholar Rich Ling, the special issue features state of the art research on mobile communication on social networks, appropriation, language and literacy, relationships and gender in a range of contexts.  The Table of Contents are listed below:

Mobile communication in the global south
Rich Ling and Heather A. Horst
New Media & Society 2011;13 363-374
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/363

‘We use it different, different’: Making sense of trends in mobile phone use in Ghana
Araba Sey
New Media & Society 2011;13 375-390
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/375

Are mobile phones changing social networks? A longitudinal study of core networks in Kerala
Antony Palackal, Paul Nyaga Mbatia, Dan-Bright Dzorgbo, Ricardo B. Duque, Marcus Antonius Ynalvez, and Wesley M. Shrum
New Media & Society 2011;13 391-410
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/391

Mobile phone appropriation in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Adriana de Souza e Silva, Daniel M. Sutko, Fernando A. Salis, and Claudio de Souza e Silva
New Media & Society 2011;13 411-426
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/411

Texting and African language literacy
Kristin Vold Lexander
New Media & Society 2011;13 427-443
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/427

Breaking up ‘because of the phone’ and the transformative potential of information in Southern Mozambique
Julie Soleil Archambault
New Media & Society 2011;13 444-456
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/444

Mobile phone parenting: Reconfiguring relationships between Filipina migrant mothers and their left-behind children
Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller
New Media & Society 2011;13 457-470
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/457

Mobile phones without guarantees: The promises of technology and the contingencies of culture
Cara Wallis
New Media & Society 2011;13 471-485
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/471

Midwives with mobiles: A dialectical perspective on gender arising from technology introduction in rural Indonesia
Arul Chib and Vivian Hsueh-Hua Chen
New Media & Society 2011;13 486-501
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/486

New Media in International Contexts Article and Special Section

Our special section, New Media in International Contexts, has now been published in International Journal of Communication (IJOC). Featuring articles by Cara Wallis on China, Araba Sey on Ghana, HyeRyoung Ok on South Korea, Anke Schwittay on India and my own article on Brazil, the special section of IJOC looks at the ways in which new media policy and practice have been appropriated by youth and others. A brief description of the special issue is below:

This special section explores the relationship between new media practices, policies, and industries as these are constitutive of social change in five countries: Brazil (Heather Horst), China (Cara Wallis), Ghana (Araba Sey), India (Anke Schwittay), and South Korea (HyeRyoung Ok).  Each case study reveals the continued salience of the national context through highlighting how particular sociocultural, economic, and political conditions shape the use and appropriation of new media technologies. Particular attention is paid to the way youth in each country are at the forefront of such appropriation. The articles also address how other axes of identity, such as gender, class, and ethnicity, are critical in shaping uses and understandings of  new media. Read this new Special Section at http://ijoc.org 

I am particularly excited to have the special issue out in IJOC as it is open source and available for free download via a Creative Commons license. To read our introduction to the special section, please follow this link.

Money, Mobility and Migration in Haiti Project

Just over a year ago Erin Taylor (see www.erinbtaylor.com) and I began working on a new research project focused upon money, migration and mobile phones on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic funded by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. Excited by the prospect of conducting new research, Erin and I exchanged emails and set a date to begin to plan what we anticipated would be a small, one-year project that explored the movement of people, currencies and mobile phone signals across the border (and by the same company, Digicel, who radically transformed the Jamaican telecommunications market in the first half of the decade). Five days later, on January 12, 2010, a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti. Faced with the imperative to understand life in Haiti after the earthquake, we teamed up with Espelencia Baptiste, an anthropologist who was spending her sabbatical outside of Port-au-Prince, and began looking more systematically at what was happening on the ground. In the late summer of 2010, our reconfigured research team began a rapid round of interviews and discussions in different parts of Haiti. Our modest aim was to begin mapping Haitian monetary ecologies in the post-earthquake, with an eye towards the challenges facing Haitians as they sought to access and circulate money. Collectively, we began to learn amazing things about the ways in which money IS moving – just how long (and how much money) it takes to deposit $US 20 into a bank account, the importance of sea routes for moving money from distant locales to Port-au-Prince, the same unit of measurement Sidney Mintz wrote about in the 1960s being used in contemporary markets, the emergence of mobile vendors selling increments of airtime and a range of other practices. While not a shock for most anthropologists, the very fact that social networks and intermediaries are still key to economic practices represents a cautionary tale for entities looking to introduce technological solutions to social and economic problems. They remain central not only because of uneven and unreliable access to banks, computers, mobile phones and transportation, but also because sharing resources is essential to managing the chronic poverty experienced by the majority of Haitians. These connections have become all the more essential. 

Our interim report, Haitian Monetary Ecologies and Repertoires: A Qualitative Snapshot of Money Transfer and Savings, provides a qualitative snapshot of Haitian monetary ecologies six months after the earthquake, focusing upon the challenges that many Haitians face in their efforts to send, receive, exchange and store money, and the role of mobile phones and other conduits in this process. Specifically, we address three key challenges that shape everyday Haitians’ attitudes towards money, trade and exchange and the potential for social change through new financial services: bureaucracy and Power, time and cost, and security. The report concludes by providing a series of recommendations concerning the importance of social networks and intermediaries in moving money, the incorporation of the Haitian diaspora into financial inclusion models and the broader need to address Haitian values concerning savings, time and forms of exchange. 

Digital Anthropology Worshop at EASA

In late August of 2010, Danny Miller and I will be co-convening a session on "Digital Anthropology" at the European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference held at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth. The workshop is focused on the following:

A key component of many peoples sense of crisis today is the impact of digital technologies that appears to constitute a loss of control over the world. For example, one theory of the recent financial crises is that too many financial instruments were set to automatically sell when shares reached a certain level so the crisis was an integral effect of digitisation itself. People's imagination of the digital seems to bifurcate as something that, on the one hand, lies at the keyboard at the tip of their fingers but at the same time appears as an abstraction from traditional analogue modes of representation. This bifurcation is often what makes the digital appear to be either the cause or the solution of impending crises. Often this imagination is fed from science fiction and images of humans losing control of the planet to the new technologies themselves.

This is perhaps the moment when anthropology has to choose how to respond to digital technologies. Whether to demonise them as a form of alienation, to romanticise them as open-source utopias or get to grips with the way they speedily become part of everyday life. To resist this bifurcation we need to link the study of ordinary people's consumption of social networking sites and Google Earth with an appreciation of deeper infrastructural developments such as the digitalisation of financial systems, geographical positioning systems and the impact upon both state and commerce. This is the task to which this workshop will be dedicated, beginning with an introduction by the co-conveners.

We are very excited to have panelists, ranging from Julie Archimbault, Bart Barendregt, Andrew Bowsher, Gabriella Coleman, Lane DiNicola, Adolpho Estallela, Lee Komito, Sirpa Tenhunen, Sabra Thorner and Paula Uiomen, and for the follow up discussion to be held on the Media Anthropology mailing list at the end of September.

Update: A Summary of the Session has been published on the Material World Blog:
http://blogs.nyu.edu/projects/materialworld/2010/10/digital_anthropology_an_easa_w.html

The Material World Blog

In June I joined Haidy Geismar (Department of Museum Studies and Anthropology, New York University), Daniel Miller (Department of Anthropology, University College London), Graeme Were (University Museum Collections, University College London), Patrick Laviolette (School of Visual and Material Culture, Massey University) and Aaron Glass (Bard Graduate Center/American Museum of Natural History) as one of the Chief Editors of the Material World Blog. Originally created by Haidy Geismar and Danny Miller, the blog is a hub for work in material and visual culture and one that bridges theoretical and empirical work happening among material culture scholars around the world. The blog itself is designed to be a "digital framework to post exhibition, book and other reviews; discuss key topics; develop online reading groups and symposia; post links to images, objects and collections; highlight cutting edge research and fieldwork, conferences, meetings and other events; develop teaching resources and syllabi; and encourage student participation." In my role as an editor, I will be bringing to the fore some of the best work I hear, see and read around new media and technology - see, for example, Dan Perkel's recent post on digital art theft and Tyler Bickford's work on music and children's material culture. I will also be publishing the occasional book review. Should you like to join in and contribute to the blog, please send me an email.