Technomobility in China

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.

I study the social and cultural implications of new media technologies and issues of power, difference, and subjectivity, particularly in China. My work examines how uses and understandings of technology both reproduce inequitable power relations and open up spaces for individual and collective agency and thus, social change. I am the author of Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones (NYU Press, 2013), which is an ethnographic exploration of the use of mobile phones by young rural-to-urban migrant women working in the low-level service sector in Beijing. I am currently working on a manuscript based on my recent research in China, where I examined the use of social media by different groups of people - white collar workers, college students, migrant workers, and rural entrepreneurs - and how such usage is articulated to issues of voice and empowerment, trust and risk, and lifestyle and aspirations.