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.
"1. Introduction: Mobile Socialities ; Part I: Understanding Mobile Socialities ; Introduction Part I ; 2. Mobile Socialities: Communities, Mobilities and Boundaries ; 3. Media and mood work: Routines, daydreams and micro-moves ; 4. Investigating ""Communities of Co-Movers"": Motricity, spatiality and sequentiality in social life ; 5. Sociality on the Move ; Part II: Valuing Mobile Socialities ; Introduction Part II ; 6. Anchoring narratives: Placing narrative in dialogue with the mobile socialities framework ; 7. Dating app logic and geo-enabled mobile socialities ; 8. Representing mobile socialities in the Sino-Japanese Context: A keyword approach ; 9. Digitizing Desires: Immobile mobility and social media in Southeast Turkey ; 10. Mobile socialites in Beijing: Young adult Chinese WeChat users’ management of social relations between tradition and modernity ; Part III: Working With Mobile Socialities ; Introduction Part III ; 11. The Sociality of #Solotravel ; 12. Time for representation: Mediating the moment in a mobile space ; 13. The food courier and his/her mobile phone ; 14. On Day Laborers’ Digital Mobile Memories ; 15. From social media to media socialities in mobile work: Aspiration in the cases of Australian mining and Everest tourism industries ; 16. Workaway: cultivating conviviality within mobility, sociality and daily living ; Part IV: Contrary Mobile Socialities ; Introduction Part IV ; 17. I can’t breathe: Metabolising (im)mobile antisocialities ; 18. Mobile figures in current times: on the Walz ; 19. Transported Immobility ; 20. Immobile Socialities? Historicising Media Practices in Refugee Camps ; 21. Socialities of practice: Stuckedness, accountability and mobile imaginaries among Kenyan migrant fisherpeople descendants"
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.
Reviews for The Routledge Handbook of Mobile Socialities
'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
