[Air-L] New book - Technomobility in China

[Wallis, Cara]

Dear Colleagues,

Please excuse the shameless self promotion but I wanted to announce the publication of my new book, Cara Wallis, _Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones_ (New York: NYU Press, 2013) http://www.amazon.com/Technomobility-China-Critical-Cultural-Communication/dp/0814795269

Please see below for a short abstract and table of contents.

Best.

Cara Wallis
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
Texas A&M University


As unprecedented waves of young, rural women journey to cities in China, not only to work, but also to "see the world" and gain some autonomy, they regularly face significant institutional obstacles as well as deep-seated anti-rural prejudices. Based on immersive fieldwork, Cara Wallis provides an intimate portrait of the social, cultural, and economic implications of mobile communication for a group of young women engaged in unskilled service work in Beijing, where they live and work for indefinite periods of time. 

While simultaneously situating her work within the fields of feminist studies, technology studies, and communication theory, Wallis explores the way in which the cell phone has been integrated into the transforming social structures and practices of contemporary China, and the ways in which mobile technology enables rural young women—a population that has been traditionally marginalized and deemed as "backward" and "other"—to participate in and create culture, allowing them to perform a modern, rural-urban identity. In this theoretically rich and empirically grounded analysis, Wallis provides original insight into the co-construction of technology and subjectivity as well as the multiple forces that shape contemporary China. 



Table of Contents

Introduction: Mobile Bodies, Mobile Technologies, and Immobile Mobility 
Ch. 2 Market Reforms, Global Linkages, and (Dis)continuity in Post-Socialist China 	
Ch. 3 “My First Big Urban Purchase”: Mobile Technologies and Modern Subjectivity 
Ch. 4 Navigating Mobile Networks of Sociality and Intimacy	
Ch. 5 Picturing Self, Imagining the World 	
Ch. 6 Mobile Communication and Labor Politics	
Conclusion: The Mobile Assemblage and Social Change in China