research seminar | 30 May 2017 | Goldsmiths, University of London

This seminar brings together researchers from a range of disciplines with a shared interest in ethnographic research focused on mobile media and communication practices in Southeast Asia.

 

The seminar aims to explore the value of situating locally and/or nationally contextualised research on mobile technologies and practices of social interaction, communication, coordination, consumption, repair and use within a broader regional framework. The workshop proposes at the outset that a regional framing brings two distinct advantages. Firstly, it alerts us to the fact that mobile media and communication practices need to be understood in relation to deep interconnections across nation-state borders, as manifested in the trajectories and cultural/economic ties of millions of migrants within the region, and in the development of more or less ‘neoliberalised’ telecommunication infrastructures. Secondly, the region provides a valuable analytic frame for comparison that encourages critical perspectives to emerge from an exploration of convergent and divergent practices.

 

The seminar is part of a 12-month training and research exchange project on Mobile Media and Everyday Life in Southeast Asia funded by the British Academy Newton Mobility Grant scheme 2016 and conducted in partnership between the Goldsmiths Media Ethnography Group and the Centre for Contemporary Social and Cultural Studies (CCSCS), Thammasat University, Bangkok.

 

The proposition unifying the project’s training and research exchange activities concerns the need to conceptualise mobile media and agency by researching people’s everyday negotiation of the contradictory realities of mobile media infrastructure. The partnership was conceived as a context for developing methods attuned to the paradoxes of connectivity, specifically the ways that states in the region have sought to harness the economic promise of digital connectivity whilst simultaneously exercising control over the way in which their citizens use these communication tools.