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Chinese Migrants Families in the Information Age: Intensive Technology and Digital Urbanism
This is my dissertation project. As China radically changes, one of the most surprising developments has been the heavy use of ICT (information communication technology) by highly marginalized and economically deprived citizens. In particular migrants are heavily incorporating communication technology into their lives to manage dislocation and reconnection to home. Using ethnographic methods I will uncover the processes that rural to urban migrant families engage in to make their new city their home. more info.
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China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC)
I received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant to be a visiting scholar at the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) during the summer of 2009. CNNIC is overseen my the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and Chinese Academy of Science (CAS). I went in with the goal to better understand how Chinas internet policies and digital architectures influenced the communication practices of two important and growing populations of new usersyouth and migrants. I examined how the inter-personal communication patterns of youths and migrants were affected by these factors: (1) recent internet usage policies set by the Chinese administration and (2) cellphone and internet digital architecture. By the end of the summer, I visited several Chinese internet regulation agencies, spent time with the CNNIC research staff, and spoke to migrant youth and families. Although investigating internet policy-making is not a my research focus, a central aspect of my dissertation seeks to understand how youth and migrants use ICT's to communicate. Therefore, I thought it was very important for me to have a more authentic comprehension of how government led policies play a role in supporting the communication networks of the population I am studying. I am still sorting through fieldnotes and will be updating this section soon with links to papers. In the meantime, I will be posting on my fieldnotes blog, Cultural Bytes.
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Emerging Communication Practices in a rural village in Oaxaca, Mexico
I started conducting ethnography in Bicuhini, Oaxaca, in 2007. I first went with Leah Muse-Orlinoff, a graduate researcher on entrepenueral migration networks at the Center of Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS). We were funded the first year with a University of California Institute for Mexico and United States (UC MEXUS) grant and support from CCIS's multi-year Mexican Migration Field Research Project (MMFRP) project. After the first year I became fascinated by how the caseta telefonica, the only landline into the village, played a central role in how families communicated with their loved one in the US. I also found out on the first trip that youth were the first adopters of cellphones and they always kept the phone on them even though if they were not able to use it. This was a surprise because the cell signal was not strong in the village and there was very little regional economic opportunities. I then teamed up with Barry Brown from UC San Diego, Jesus FAvela from Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada, BC (CICESE), and Gloria Marks from UC Irvine for a larger grant from UC MEXUS. This time we wanted to explore the possibility of co-creating relevant mobile technologies with the youth in the village. During our second field work visit, we discovered that cellphones were abandoned by youth. Cellphones were no longer carried around with the youth every where that they went. Many of the youth had switched over to MSN as a primary medium of digital communication. We will now be making our third field visit over a period of three years. We are in the process of preparing several papers for publication from this project. Tanya Menendez has also played a significant research role on this project.
Unreachable Cellphones: Limitations of Collect Calls for Immigrant detainees in Federal Detention Centers
Undocumented immigrant detainees in federal detention centers are experiencing great difficulties in reaching their family or relatives in their home country. As cellphone ownership in less evenly developed countries becomes more ubiquitous, many people are only reachable via their cellphones. Collect calls to landlines, however, are the only communication option for immigrant detainees. The billing infrastructure for collect calls is set up so that the recipient of the phone call incurs the costs, and these costs can only be tracked and billed through landlines. more info
Internet as a Social Right: Implications for Social Citizenship
Emerging information technologies such as the Internet challenge us to think about whether access to the technology should be a privilege or a right. In recognition of the emergent social demand for broadband access, this paper urges a reconsideration of Internet access as a social right. more info
