Overview
- Provides timely insights and evidence on an understudied population in mobile communication scholarship
- Reveals new understandings about contemporary homelessness and inequality in a society premised on digital connectivity
- Contributes to existing theories of precarity and to research on the dynamics of digital inclusion and exclusion
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About this book
This book examines how mobile phones and the internet have become a vital part of the everyday lives of people experiencing homelessness. But the access mobile phones provide is costly, insecure and limited, producing an experience of being precariously connected. Drawing on findings of research conducted with over one hundred young people, families and adults experiencing homelessness in Australia and the United States, this book analyses homelessness as a mediated condition and explores the underpinning processes that shape digital disparities. It contributes to scholarship on mobile communication and inequality, highlighting the digital patterns, issues and difficulties of a group disproportionately affected by service reform and developments in digital citizenship, smart cities and algorithmic governance.
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Keywords
- digital geography
- communication studies
- qualitative research
- critical design studies
- media and communications
- digital cultures
- cultural studies
- mobility studies
- migration and disability studies
- development studies
- urban studies
- urban design
- community informatics
- digital inequalities
- homelessness
- smart city planning
- telecommunications policy and product design
- e-governance
- social work and welfare
- housing and health
Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
"This book offers us a compelling, empirically grounded account of the central role of the smartphone in the precarious connectivity of marginalised groups such as the homeless. It offers a sophisticated analysis of the complex ways in which digital technologies, far from transcending social inequalities, now enshrine and reproduce them in ever more hierarchically differentiated forms."
— David Morley, Emeritus Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
"With the rise of smart cities and algorithmic governance, digitalization is placing a greater burden of risk and uncertainty on the unhoused. It’s therefore time to shift our conversations about homelessness from concerns with digital inclusion to issues of data justice, and this book provides an indispensable foundation for that discussion."
— Lynn Schofield Clark, author of The Parent App: Understanding Families in a Digital Age and Distinguished Professor, University of Denver, USA
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dr Justine Humphry is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney (Australia). Her research examines the cultural and political implications of digital media in everyday life and the lived realities of techno-marginalisation. A key concern of her research is the consequences of mobile, smart and datadriven technologies for under-represented and excluded communities.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Homelessness and Mobile Communication
Book Subtitle: Precariously Connected
Authors: Justine Humphry
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3838-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-19-3837-5Published: 21 October 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-19-3840-5Published: 22 October 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-981-19-3838-2Published: 20 October 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 215
Topics: Human Geography, Urban Studies/Sociology, Anthropology, Sociology, general, Media and Communication