Suchergebnisse

Over the past two decades, increasing attention has been drawn to gender impacts arising from adoption and usage of information and communication technologies (ICTs), the mobile phone especially, by marginalized women in the Global South. Grounded in the theory of structuration, our study challenges techno-determinism and structural functionalism embodied in a prevailing gender (dis)empowerment dichotomy, and instead reveals the contextually situated and dynamically negotiated techno-socio relationships. It allows for examination of the mobile phone in the interactions between agency of women to get empowered and their situated gendered social power structures. While the phone reinforces structural constraints via facilitating access, surveillance, and intervention from those of higher patriarchal statuses, it simultaneously enables women's strategic responses involving avoidance, accommodation, and collaboration. The constraining yet empowering processes conceptually make the functioning of the mobile phone as socially catalyzing the development of self-consciousness by women, and furthermore, the clustering of awakening individuals toward emergent female collective power.

"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"--