My research seeks to elucidate the relationship between material culture and the role of objects and artifacts in mediating social relations, with particular attention to mobility and the global movement of people, objects, goods, media and capital in different national and transnational spaces. Ethnographically grounded in the Caribbean and the United States, my research interrogates the ways in which people appropriate new media and material culture for the expression and development of personhood within and between different spatial and temporal contexts. 

The Materiality of Personhood. My interest in the relationship between material culture, property and personhood began with my dissertation work in Mandeville, Jamaica which explored the imagination, construction and transformation of the meanings of ‘home’ among Jamaicans who migrated to Britain after World War II and returned to Jamaica to retire in the 1990s.  Focusing upon the interplay of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, I revealed how the very materiality of the house — its’ design, size, fortification and maintenance — worked to confound returnees’ attempts to attain a sense of belonging in Jamaica and England given the ‘English’ style of the homes’ facades and décor as well as the locality’s association with an English hill station (Horst 2006, 2007, 2008). Alongside a theoretical analysis of locality in theoretical and empirical analyses of transnationalism and migration (Horst 2007), my conceptualization of the significance of the relationship between property and personhood in postcolonial Jamaica expanded during subsequent fieldwork in 2004 in rural and urban Jamaica. As I argue in an article recently published in Social Anthropology (Horst 2008) and work with Daniel Miller on the mobile phone, property and the acquisition of homes emerged as part of Jamaica’s national agenda after independence in 1962 with the creation of the National Housing Trust. I have an ongoing interest in understanding the ways houses have been utilized to assert, recognize and negotiate personhood in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica. 

New Media, Technology and Society. Shortly after completing my dissertation, I began to examine the relationship between new media, technology and social change. My first research into this arena focused upon the global and transnational processes involved in the construction of the ‘digital divide’ as part of a multi-national comparative study funded by the British Department for International Development to examine the implications of new information and communication technologies in Ghana, India, Jamaica and South Africa. In our co-authored book, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Horst and Miller 2006), Daniel Miller and I examine the ways in which the cell phone is used in day-to-day survival strategies which includes, among other things, maintaining connections with friends and family living abroad. In contrast to many sociological accounts that correlate new communications technologies with the emergence of ego-centered networks, we argue in our book as well as in our article “From Kinship to Link-Up: Cell Phones and Social Networking in Jamaica” published in Current Anthropology (Horst and Miller 2005), that this form of social networking reflects a long-established practice of extensive social networking, exemplified in R.T. Smith’s seminal work on kinship in the Caribbean. 

My work over the past four years extends this attention to social change and the power dynamics surrounding the provisioning, access to and use of new media and technology by shifting my attention to the heart of the global technology industry. Through research with European-American and Asian-American families living in Silicon Valley, I examine how families in the region consume new media. Locating these practices in relation to education, class and the capitalist ethos of region’s technology industry, I am in the process of writing a manuscript that maps the contemporary media ecologies of young people and the ways in which new media and technology transform domestic space. In addition, the book examines the extent to which new media and technology may be shaping how autonomy between children and parents occurs and transforming the boundaries between work and home in the ‘flexible’ global economy as well as notions of community, individualism and society in the United States.