Paper short abstract:

Based on a 2-year ethnography situated at a large mapping and navigation company in Berlin, this paper frames mobility software as providing a specific ordering of daily life of an urban commuter, expanding our notion of what navigation technology is.

Paper long abstract:

Today's car ride or walking route - if assisted by a navigation system - entails a multitude of computer-mediated manoeuvres and routing procedures, with a car processing probe data such as road traffic and car speed. Behind the software that helps navigate the car, sit a team of software developers who attempt to optimize a route - helping reduce the number of factors that can affect how a car gets from point A to B.

Based on a 2-year ethnography situated at a large mapping and navigation company in Berlin, this paper frames mobility software as providing a specific ordering of daily life of an urban commuter. Instead of looking at the effects of a navigation system on its users, this research uncovers the way software developers collaborate on constituting a technology, and the way in which software emerges and becomes stabilized as a 'being' that routes us around. Thus, this case study expands our understanding of our everyday navigation technologies by providing a greater insight into the sociotechnical software system that enables it. To reach this understanding, this paper highlights the temporal and normative orders inherent in the engineering of software, emphasizing the perspective of software developers in the way they build our navigation infrastructure.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I disentangle why, paradoxically, mobile technologies such as GPS sports watches seem to make exemplary mobile citizens more immobile, because people spend many hours behind electronic device screens to communicate (and seek social approval for) their mobile performances.

Paper long abstract:

Historically, recreational sports such as running arose partially with the aim of controlling the side effects of a 'seated' life, i.e. obesity and physical inactivity. This trend developed already in the 19th century, with the emergence of middle classes who had the requisite time and resources. Recreational running became very popular in the 1970s, within the context of renewed societal attention to fitness and physical health, which developed in countries such as the USA and New Zealand and spread quickly to other industrialized nations. Regular physical activities such as recreational running can be conceived of as technologies of the self, practices that are used to transform oneself (in multiple and, at times, contradictory ways). However, they do not necessarily free an individual from the domination of disciplinary ideologies. Based on (auto)ethnographic research, I discuss in this paper the crucial role that mobile tracking devices, as markers of an everyday active lifestyle, play in this process. I focus on how the data generated by GPS sports watches and the like are widely shared by amateur runners and their 'followers' on general as well as specialized social media platforms. I disentangle why, paradoxically, these technologies seem to make exemplary mobile citizens more immobile, because many hours are spent behind electronic device screens to communicate (and seeking social approval for) their mobile performances. I place my critical anthropological analysis within the context of wider societal trends related to neoliberal self-discipline and self-control of everyday life.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers a year-long citizen media project that combined indigenous language activism, translation, and technology, aimed at sharing stories about language revitalization. It provides insights on strategies in breaching the digital and language divides, engaging with mobile netizens.

Paper long abstract:

As a partner of the UN's International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019, the citizen media network Rising Voices organised a social media campaign intended to address the role of technology and internet in the promotion of indigenous languages. The coordinators of the campaign created the Twitter accounts @ActLenguas, @DigiAfricanLang, @NativeLangsTech, and @AsiaLangsOnline, and invited indigenous language activists to take weekly turns sharing about the status of their language online and offline. Profile blog posts, a newsletter on language revitalization and technology, and their translations into other languages complemented the rotating rosters of language activists.

While the campaign drew forth stories and experiences of digital language activism, this paper will focus on the very campaign as a mobile transformative space. Through which technological tools did its hosts aid the circulatory dimension of the campaign? How did language become one of these tools? What were the languages of choice that the participants used in communicating about their native tongue to the wider audience, and how did these choices impact on the translating, or non-translating, of their posts into further languages? How was this reflected in the flow of exchanges between authors, translators, and readers? By means of digital ethnography, this paper explores technological and linguistical opportunities and challenges highlighted by the participants. Looking at this campaign through a mobilities approach, it shows how online engagement resulted in the wider circulation of the featured stories. In doing so, it contributes to an understanding of how indigenous activism gains momentum online by mobilizing technology.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines digital nomads' use of technologies to construct their sociality and secure employment opportunities. The paper asks in which ways technology fosters their network capital and what are the structural constraints it puts to their claims of limitless freedom.

Paper long abstract:

Digital nomads are individuals who, taking advantage of portable computing technologies and widespread Internet access, can work remotely from any location and use this freedom to explore the world. In their globally mobile lifestyle, technology is an essential element to construct their sociality and secure employment opportunities. This paper examines the role of technology in the construction of their network capital and its commodification. According to Urry (2007) network capital is the social capital of the age of mobilities, its defining feature being the capacity to sustain relationships at a distance rather than through geographical proximity. As other forms of capital, it can be exchanged and commodified, and is of increasing importance in social stratification, namely related to privileged hypermobile groups. The access of communication technologies and the underlying infrastructure are one of the eight components of network capital. The paper asks in which ways technology fosters digital nomads' network capital and what are the structural constraints it puts to their claims of limitless freedom. The research draws on online and offline ethnographic of digital nomads' groups.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic data collected while working with state officials charged with the execution of the Indigenous Territorial Development Programme (PDTI) in Chiloé, this paper explores the role of documents, as technologies of bureaucracy, in the materialisation of the programme´s outcomes.

Paper long abstract:

The PDTI is a state-led agricultural extension programme that seeks the transfer of knowledge and technology to indigenous farmers in order to improve their productivity and their livelihood. To carry this out, and in addition to delivering technical advice, state officials in charge of the implementation of the programme must capture external resources through application processes for the consequent execution of projects and activities. To bring this process to fruition, the officials have to deal with a large number and variety of documents in their everyday activities. The collection and officialisation of these technologies would allow them to apply for resources on behalf of the farmers taking part in the programme. Accordingly, in my paper I describe how the documents necessary to capture resources act as socio-material technologies with the ability to create, hinder or prevent the relocation of resources and the execution of projects and activities.

By focusing on the relationship between the officials and these bureaucratic technologies my paper shows how officials proactively allocate time and resources to gather, produce, officialise and mobilise documents, having to face obstacles and processes that, in the long term, will allow them to translate resources into material outcomes. Similarly, through a focus on the practices around the production and circulation of official documents and the flows they enable, I stress the role of these technologies as key mechanisms for setting in motion the gears of the PDTI, making its decentralisation and materialisation possible.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the ways in which technologies - broadly understood - mediate the experience of the present and imaginings of the future among transnationally mobile early career researchers in two research contexts: Japan and Latvia.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past few decades, science policy makers and research institutions around the world have embraced the rhetoric of research excellence, with the transnational mobility of research workers as a major component of this drive towards excellence. Recent scholarship, however, has brought attention to the increasing precarity of academic knowledge workers, with the current patterns of research mobility emerging as one of the facets of the inequalities, insecurities and uncertainties embedded in the contemporary knowledge regimes across the globe.

My paper, in conversation with this literature, examines the ways engagement with technologies - broadly understood - engenders particular imaginings of (im)mobile futures among early career researchers. In the paper, I discuss the ethnographic data collected in the Kansai region of Japan in 2012-1014 and in Riga, the capital city of Latvia, in 2020. In both locations, my research participants are foreign researchers working for the academic institutions of both countries. Despite the different research settings, my paper aims to highlight the multitude of ways technologies - from research equipment to media technologies, to the passports researchers are holding - mediate early career scholars' understandings of their present and (dis)allow for specific dreams in the future. My paper thus brings to the fore

the seemingly mundane yet profound ways in which the young researchers' anxieties and hopes, engendered by contemporary knowledge regimes, are enabled, mediated and made visible through a plethora of devices, tools and gadgets.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how communication technologies, currencies and border control policies have shaped the community of speakers of the Esperanto language. Based on the ethnography of an Esperanto bookshop in Rotterdam, I argue that international mobility is what constitutes this speech community.

Paper long abstract:

A language created in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire, Esperanto was designed to encourage communication between people from different national and linguistic backgrounds. Sometimes conveyed as 'the language of the future' that would bring humankind together, or, alternatively, 'a language of the past' that failed to become global, Esperanto is, for most of its speakers, part of their everyday practices. Through an ethnography of the Universal Esperanto Association's bookshop, in the Netherlands, I argue that the effectively international use of this landless language relies on technologies that enable the circulation of people and things.

Following the packing and shipping of books for the 102nd Universal Congress of Esperanto, held in South Korea in 2017, this paper outlines how Esperanto books are written by authors from all over the world, translated from and into several languages, and, in this case, packed into boxes that 'have travelled more than many people.' While the practices of accountability deployed by the main person responsible for the bookshop aim at providing Esperanto literature to an international readership, this attempt to reach and map out this readership coincides with the circulation of people who travel annually to attend these annual international Esperanto meetings. Through shipping books abroad with the use of different communication technologies and currencies and passing through border control, the bookshop salesperson is not only making materials available to a certain public but, mostly, partaking of the labour that continuously (re)create and (re)produce the community of those who speak this non-compulsory, non-national language.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the implications of a project of urbanization of a group of indigenous families. In order to benefit from a state subsidy, they organise their lives around two locations, strategically travelling back and forth to tend to their fields without losing the rights to a new townhouse

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the implications of a case of urbanization of 150 indigenous families from insular Chiloé that were offered to be part of a subsidized housing project. Those who applied were given a small house in a high-density town settlement, in exchange for a small amount of money and the commitment to live in the house for 5 years, without renting it out or selling it. The new house owners are forced to live in a minute dwelling, with no front or back garden, with no space or permission to raise domestic animals, and in close proximity with neighbours. This contrasts dramatically with their traditional way of living, the wide spaces surrounding their rural homes, their practical use of the landscape, the crucial distance between neighbours, the availability of their cultivated gardens and firewood. The new house owners however argue they enjoy their new life, to which they adapted thanks to the recently enhanced transportation technology: due to the frequency of boats with powerful engines, partially funded by the state, they organize their livelihood around transportation. Being able to travel regularly, they keep their cultivated fields and traditional homes on the island, and move back-and-forth constantly, bringing firewood and produce to the town. Thanks to the technology of transportation - unthinkable only 10 years ago - they simultaneously inhabit two places, dramatically stretching their lifestyle, social principles, and cosmology. This strategic mobility however enables their social project to become more like middle-class citizens while keeping their indigenous resources active.