1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Mobile Socialities
This is a state-of-the-art survey of an emerging area of study in media, communication and cultural studies, mobility studies and mobile communications.
‘Mobile socialities’ demarcates a new area of research that captures people’s various and contrary experiences of media in relation to their mobilities and socialities. The chapters in this volume are written by a range of international scholars offering a comprehensive overview and source of inspiration for a diverse range of topics on the contingent practices and finite resources of people and media on the move. The book demonstrates through empirical and theoretical research how mobile socialities is a generative concept for thinking through power, identity and the contexts of media in public and mediated spaces, work and everyday life, addressing a spectrum of mobile socialities and lived politics. The research and various cases make visible previously hidden, or obscured, social practices and allow us to rethink the meanings of mobility, digital media or the home in these examples of people living within the centre and peripheries of society.
The Handbook establishes mobile socialities as a new area of academic enquiry, ideal for advanced undergraduate students and scholars across the disciplines of media, communication and cultural studies, anthropology, cultural geography and sociology.
Introduction: Mobile Socialities
Chapter 1 Annette Hill, Maren Hartmann, Magnus Andersson
Part I: Understanding Mobile Socialities
Introduction Part I
David Morley
Chapter 2 Mobile Socialities: Communities, Mobilities and Boundaries
David Morley
Chapter 3 Media and mood work: Routines, daydreams and micro-moves
Orvar Löfgren
Chapter 4 Investigating "Communities of Co-Movers": Motricity, spatiality and sequentiality in social life
Shaun Moores
Chapter 5 Sociality on the Move
Leopoldina Fortunati
Part II: Valuing Mobile Socialities
Introduction Part II
Lynn Schofield Clark
Chapter 6 Anchoring narratives: Placing narrative in dialogue with the mobile socialities framework
Lynn Schofield Clark
Chapter 7 Dating app logic and geo-enabled mobile socialities
Deborah Chambers
Chapter 8 Representing mobile socialities in the Sino-Japanese Context: A keyword approach
Jamie Coates
Chapter 9 Digitizing Desires: Immobile mobility and social media in Southeast Turkey
Elisabetta Costa
Chapter 10 Mobile socialites in Beijing: Young adult Chinese WeChat users’ management of social relations between tradition and modernity
Shuhan Chen and Peter Lunt
Part III: Working With Mobile Socialities
Introduction Part III
Erika Polson
Chapter 11 The Sociality of #Solotravel
Erika Polson
Chapter 12 Time for representation: Mediating the moment in a mobile space
Roger Norum
Chapter 13 The food courier and his/her mobile phone
Magnus Andersson
Chapter 14 On Day Laborers’ Digital Mobile Memories
Carlos Jiménez
Chapter 15 From social media to media socialities in mobile work: Aspiration in the cases of Australian mining and Everest tourism industries
Jolynna Sinanan
Chapter 16 Workaway: cultivating conviviality within mobility, sociality and daily living
Deniz Neriman Duru
Part IV: Contrary Mobile Socialities
Introduction Part IV
Anna Reading
Chapter 17 I can’t breathe: Metabolising (im)mobile antisocialities
Anna Reading
Chapter 18 Mobile figures in current times: on the Walz
Maren Hartmann
Chapter 19 Transported Immobility
Annette Hill
Chapter 20 Immobile Socialities? Historicising Media Practices in Refugee Camps
Philipp Seuferling
Chapter 21 Socialities of practice: Stuckedness, accountability and mobile imaginaries among Kenyan migrant fisherpeople descendants
Anna Lisa Ramella
Biography
Annette Hill is a Professor of Media and Communication at Lund University and Visiting Professor at King’s College London. Her research focuses on audiences and popular culture, with interests in media engagement, everyday life, genres, production studies and cultures of viewing. She is the author of eight books, and many articles and book chapters which address varieties of engagement with reality television, news and documentary, television drama, entertainment formats, live events and sports entertainment, film violence and media ethics.
Maren Hartmann is professor for communication and media sociology at the University of the Arts in Berlin and a member of the Academia Europaea. Her research focuses on media appropriation in everyday life, but also on cyberculture, the urban, mobile media and mobilities. She recently finished a research project on time and (mobile) media and is now conducting one on homelessness and media use (DFG, 2019-2022). Her most recent book is the edited collection on Mediated Time (2019, Palgrave).
Magnus Andersson is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Media at Lund University. His research is within the field of media and cultural studies with a particular interest in questions related to mediation, media practices and spatial practices in the context of everyday life. He has conducted research projects on transnational migration, digitalization of work life and within rural media studies.
'This excellent collection develops the timely concept of mobile sociality, which synthesises temporal, socio-spatial, and political economic approaches to the mediation of lived experience. The contributions provide nuanced and critical accounts of emergent forms of sociality without losing sight of their connection to deeply embedded structures of power, inequality and meaning. The book will no doubt become a key reference point for critical scholarship at the nexus of digital media and communications studies and cultural geography.'
Emily Keightley, University of Loughborough, UK
'Until very recently, it has been tempting to think that we live in an era that is defined by mobility: aspirations for a life beyond the here and now, imagined escapes from the ordinary. This substantial new collection reminds us of the many ways movement can be constrained as much as liberated. It shows the persistence with which people form meaningful connections in spite of distance. A book that consolidates and extends the field of mobile media studies globally.'
Melissa Gregg, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation
