Smartphones and Everyday Safety Practices: Gendered Embodiment of Urban Space, Networked Connectivity and Risk
Topics: Feminist Geographies
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Keywords: Smartphones, Feminist Phenomenology, Urban Space, Geo-Location, Safety, Embodiment
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 62
Authors:
Hardley Jess, RMIT University
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Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which smartphones are used to manage and negotiate everyday experiences in urban public space, especially in relation to gender, safety and risk. Engaging with phenomenological work on habituation and proprioception (Merleau-Ponty 1945), alongside feminist phenomenological theories of bodily comportment and embodiment (Young 1990; Weiss 1999, 2008), I explore how smartphones have changed the way people experience cities in a geo-spatial sense, especially for those identifying as women or trans. My analysis draws on qualitative data from 100 participants (including surveys, home-visits, interviews, and tracking apps) collected in Perth and Melbourne (Australia) from 2015 to 2020 to examine how smartphones as both communicative and location-aware interfaces are used to provide users with a perceived or ‘felt’ sense of bodily safety and security, and the potential implications this has on users’ pedestrian traversal of urban space. Everyday safety practices include pretending to talk on the phone, sharing geo-location with trusted contacts, or using headphones as a proxy “do not disturb” sign. Contributing to the fields of mobile media studies, phenomenology, and feminist geography, this paper suggests that habitual geo-locative practices are increasingly significant to embodiment and gendered specificity of being-in-the-world.
Smartphones and Everyday Safety Practices: Gendered Embodiment of Urban Space, Networked Connectivity and Risk
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Virtual Paper Abstract
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