1st Edition
Women’s Agency and Mobile Communication Under the Radar
This volume maps the role of mobile communication in the daily lives of women around the globe, shedding light on “under-the-radar” use of mobile communication to display a nuanced understanding of social impacts that may affect the gender construction processes of women at the individual, institutional, and societal levels.
A global team of authors focus on the use of mobile communication by women in the lower rungs of their respective societies, as well as those who migrate with marginalized statuses within and across the national borders, to demonstrate how “under-the-radar” use of mobile communication is deeply inscribed within diversified social, cultural, historical, and political milieus. Illuminating the social structural constraints faced by women under their dynamic negotiation of agentic mobile phone use for self-empowerment, the chapters cover women’s economic activities, health care, well-being, migration, gendered identity, and the practices of different gender roles.
This comprehensive and interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to scholars and students of media and communication, new and digital media, mobile communication, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and cultural studies.
Part I Introduction
Chapter 1. Introduction
Xin Pei, Pranav Malhotra, and Rich Ling
Part II Gendered mobile (ex)inclusion across sociocultural milieux
Chapter 2. Chores, mores, and digital doors: computer and mobile pathways to digital skills
Araba Sey, Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh, and Marcia Abonie
Chapter 3. The hidden colonialities of mobile communication: phone uses by women in a South African rural community
Lorenzo Dalvit
Chapter 4. The digital divides in Hong Kong: a small stories analysis of older women’s use of smartphones and mobile technologies
Margo Turnbull and Alice H.Y. Yau
Chapter 5. Mobile telephony and identity expression of the Senufo women farmers in Côte d'Ivoire: a socio-anthropological reflection on the production and marketing chain of néré
Kabran Aristide Djane, Portia Mureille Kone, and Aminata Bamba
Part III Economic (dis)empowerment and mobile communication
Chapter 6 Economic potentials of gendered mobile communication: digitization communication and financial independence in East Africa
Leah Jerop Komen
Chapter 7. Gender and the social impacts of rural mobile finance
Erin B. Taylor, Isaac Lyne, and Rida Akzar
Chapter 8. Secrets in the marketplace of intimacy: heterosexuality and mobile phones in Dar es Salaam
Laura Stark
Part IV Migration of women and mobile-mediated mobility
Chapter 9. Bonding, bridging, and belonging: smartphone practices of migrant women from the Global South resettling in Rural-Norway
Wenche Nag
Chapter 10. Smartphones, shopping, and the technomobility of migrant mothers
Tom McDonald and Holy Shum
Chapter 11. Expectation asymmetries in mobile communication of Chinese "study mothers (Peidu Mama)": long-distance intimacy, gender positionality, and emotion work
Yang Wang
Chapter 12. At the intersection of multiple systems of power: a systematic review of gender, migrants, and mobiles
Gabrielle C. Ibasco, Mengxuan Cai, and Arul Chib
Chapter 13. Climate change-induced displacement, gender, and mobile telephony in West Bengal, India
Sirpa Tenhunen
Part V (C)overt resistance and self-expression in negotiated mobile spaces
Chapter 14. “Invisible people have no politics”: becoming middle-class working women with rural roots in a mobile assemblage
Troy Zhen Chen and La-Mei Chen
Chapter 15. Mobile Kasambahay: digital inclusion and the transformation of everyday life of live-in domestic workers in the Philippines
Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco and Hannah Faith P. Saab
Chapter 16. An Instagram of one’s own: young Indian women’s use of mobile technologies for skilling and work
Nayana Dhavan, Elisa Oreglia, and Anushri Israni
Chapter 17. Lower-class women and their use of mobile communication in Italy
Leopoldina Fortunati
Chapter 18. Imagining and performing the agentic self: an ethnographic exploration of Muslim teenage girls’ mobile youth culture in Flanders
Tom De Leyn, Mariek Vanden Abeele, and Ralf De Wolf
Chapter 19. Feminist resistance on Chinese social media: guerrilla warfare under the hashtag
Aizi Chang
Biography
Xin Pei is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne. Her research focus lies in examining the social consequences of adopting information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of marginalization.
Pranav Malhotra is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on how the affordances of social and mobile media intersect with relational and cultural norms to influence how people engage with information and each other in mediated spaces.
Rich Ling recently retired from the Shaw Foundation Professorship of Media Technology, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. For more than three decades, he has studied the social consequences of mobile communication.
