The book explores the varying experiences and engagement of youth with smartphones and digital technologies in India and South Africa. It examines the process of meaning-making (identity construction) garnered through smartphone technology specifically relating to notions of love, sex, and sexuality.
The book explores the varying experiences and engagement of youth with smartphones and digital technologies in India and South Africa. It examines the process of meaning-making (identity construction) garnered through smartphone technology specifically relating to notions of love, sex, and sexuality.
A keen reappraisal of the smartphone revolution, the essays underline the constant negotiations between technology and social institutions such as, family, schools, colleges\universities, religious groups, traditional community leaders, media, police, law, and governments. The volume looks at new forms of digital-based surveillance on girls, women and gender minorities and maps the responses of state, civil society and womens movements in tackling the divergent narratives of freedom versus control; empowerment versus violence. It specifically looks at how concepts of privacy, agency, autonomy and consent are being framed in the legal arena regarding young women, which may or may not be empowering of their agency and choices.
Challenging notions about gender, technology and society, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology and social anthropology, politics, gender studies, and Global South studies.
1. Smartphones, Surveillance, Power and Digital Lives: Connecting India
and South Africa Part I: Social Media & Digital Apps: Technology of the Self
2. Living the #blessed life: Compensated relationships and social media in
Johannesburg
3. Ladies first? How Heterosexual Women Navigate the Gendered
World of Online
4. Public Displays of Affection: Experiences of Youth as they
Negotiate Private and Public Love
5. Mobility, mediation and multiple men: an
exploration of the role of mobile phones in young womens sexual partnerships
and social networks in Khayelitsha, Cape Town Part II: Production of good
girls within the Context of Disruptive Technologies
6. Mobile phones and
"Good Muslim Women": Narratives of young women from the old city of
Hyderabad, India
7. Good girls and smart boys: Mobile Phones and the
Social Reproduction of Gender
8. Mobile Phones, Control and Violence:
Experiences from Gujarat Part III: Surveillance, Gendered Negotiations and
Legal Meanings
9. Young Womens Engagement with the mobile: Meaning in the
family justice world
10. Gendered Surveillance, Family Connections and
Conflicts: An Ethnographic Perspective on Mobile Phone Usage by Migrant
Brides in North India Part IV: Unpacking Digital Natives, Policy and
Technology-supported Interventions
11. Between Panic and Protection: Children
and Young Peoples Encounters with Online Pornography
12. Gendered Use of
Mobile Technology among Young Children in Urban India: Is there a Difference
between the Haves and the Have-Less?
13. Kishor Varta: Using Information
Communication Technology (ICT) for changing gender discriminatory social
norms among boys and young men in Rajasthan, India
Lakshmi Lingam was the Dean and Professor of the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, till February 2023, when she superannuated after working at the Institute for nearly 35 years. Currently, she is a Chair Professor with the School of Public Health at the D Y Patil University, Navi Mumbai, India. Lakshmis research interests lie in researching gender, employment, health, public policies, social movements, sexualities, social inequalities and digital citizenship.
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi is a Professor of anthropology and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Nolwazis research focuses on youth sexuality, sex education, and sexual health interventions. Her current project is called Reimagining Reproduction: Making Babies, Making Kin and Citizens in Africa.
