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'Who am I at this (st)age? Where am I and where should I be, and how and where should I live?' These questions, which individuals ask themselves throughout their lives, are among the central themes of this book, which presents an anthropological account of the everyday experiences of age and ageing in an inner-city neighbourhood in Milan, and in places and spaces beyond.Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy explores ageing and digital technologies amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including mHealth (mobile health) and smart cities, and a number of wider socio-economic and technological transformations that have brought about significant changes in how people live, work and retire, and how they communicate and care for each other. Based on 16 months of urban digital ethnographic research in Milan, the smartphone is shown to be a 'constant companion' in, of and for contemporary life. It accompanies people throughout the day and night, and through individual and collective experiences of movement, change and rupture. Smartphone practices tap into and reflect the moral anxieties of the present moment, while posing questions related to life values and purpose, identities and belonging, privacy and sociability. Through her extensive investigation, Shireen Walton argues that ageing with smartphones in this contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with and to others. Ageing with smartphones is about figuring out how best to live together, differently.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Chapter summaries -- List of figures -- Series Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- Movement and mobilities -- Introduction to Milan -- Introduction to the fieldsite -- NoLo: what's in a name? -- Methodology: urban digital ethnography -- The approach -- The people -- Notes -- 2 Experiences of ageing: policies, perceptions and practices -- Introduction: (how) does age matter? -- Ageing actively in focus -- Ageing and care -- Care responsibilities -- Badanti (care workers)

In this article we comparatively explore experiences and notions of retirement in two ethnographic sites of Milan, Italy, and Yaoundé, Cameroon, by paying attention to how grandparenting is perceived and practiced in relation to kinship roles and responsibilities. The paper draws on comparative insights from the ASSA project and focuses on Walton's research in Milan and Awondo's in Yaoundé, carried out between 2018–2019. The paper explores how both retirement and grandparenting can be embedded in social and moral narratives, gendered distinctions, and various idealisations, while also reflecting individual positionalities and economic roles and responsibilities. Our discussion moves beyond the family context as a unit for analysis, considering how grandparents enact care in urban communities and related online environments such as WhatsApp groups. After a brief introduction to the two field sites, the first section of the paper addresses retirement in Milan and Yaoundé, before turning to consider how grandparenting and retirement is linked to wider conceptions of obligation and freedom in these two different urban neighbourhood contexts.

"This volume comprises a curated conversation between members of the Material Culture Section of UCL Anthropology. In laying out the state of play in the field, it challenges how the anthropology of material culture is being done and argues for new directions of enquiry and new methods of investigation. The contributors consider the ramifications of specific research methods, and explore new methodological frameworks to address areas of human experience that require a new analytical approach. The case studies draw from a range of contexts, including digital objects, infrastructure, data, extra-terrestriality, ethnographic curation, and medical materiality. They include timely reappraisals of now classical analytical models that have shaped the way we understand the object, the discipline, knowledge formation, and the artefact"--

This volume comprises a curated conversation between members of the Material Culture Section of University College London Anthropology. In laying out the state of play in the field, it challenges how the anthropology of material culture is being done and argues for new directions of enquiry and new methods of investigation. The contributors consider the ramifications of specific research methods and explore new methodological frameworks to address areas of human experience that require a new analytical approach. The case studies draw from a range of contexts, including digital objects, infrastructure, data, extraterrestriality, ethnographic curation, and medical materiality. They include timely reappraisals of now-classical analytical models that have shaped the way we understand the object, the discipline, knowledge formation, and the artefact.

This volume comprises a curated conversation between members of the Material Culture Section of University College London Anthropology. In laying out the state of play in the field, it challenges how the anthropology of material culture is being done and argues for new directions of enquiry and new methods of investigation. The contributors consider the ramifications of specific research methods and explore new methodological frameworks to address areas of human experience that require a new analytical approach. The case studies draw from a range of contexts, including digital objects, infrastructure, data, extraterrestriality, ethnographic curation, and medical materiality. They include timely reappraisals of now-classical analytical models that have shaped the way we understand the object, the discipline, knowledge formation, and the artefact.

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The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young. The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide 'perpetual opportunism', as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an 'app device' and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them. The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland – all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people's lives around the world.

Sl Se c'è una cosa che abbiamo sempre, letteralmente, sotto il naso, è lo smartphone. Ed è normale credere, dunque, che sappiamo cosa sia. Ma è davvero così? Per scoprirlo, 11 antropologi hanno trascorso 16 mesi in varie comunità in Africa, Asia, Europa e Sud America per osservare il modo in cui gli anziani utilizzano lo smartphone, e la loro ricerca ha rivelato che si tratta di una tecnologia rivolta a tutti, non solo ai giovani. Lo Smartphone Globale presenta i risultati frutto di questo progetto di ricerca comparativa di respiro globale. Gli smartphone sono diventati tanto un luogo in cui viviamo, quanto un dispositivo di 'opportunismo perpetuo' da cui non ci separiamo mai. Gli autori hanno dimostrato che lo smartphone è molto più di un 'contenitore di app', concentrandosi sulle differenze tra ciò che le persone dicono sugli smartphone e il modo in cui li usano. Nessun dispositivo aveva mai raggiunto un tale livello di 'trasformabilità' – trasformabilità che si concretizza nella capacità di assimilare rapidamente i nostri valori personali. Per poterlo comprendere, dunque, dobbiamo tener presente un'ampia gamma di sfumature nazionali e culturali, quali la comunicazione visiva in Cina e Giappone, i trasferimenti di denaro sotto forma di credito telefonico in Camerun e in Uganda, e l'accesso a informazioni mediche in Cina e Irlanda, oltre alle diverse traiettorie della terza età ad Al Quds, in Brasile e in Italia. Solo allora potremo sapere davvero cos'è uno smartphone e capire appieno l'impatto che ha sulla vita delle persone in tutto il mondo.