[csaa-forum] CFP: 'Cosmopolitan Intimacies & Transforming Mobile Technologies'

[Gerard Goggin]

Cosmopolitan Intimacies & Transforming Mobile Technologies: New Social Realities Under Construction’

 Call for papers for Special Issue for Mobile Media & Communication (abstracts due 31 Aug 2025)

Co-Editors: Heather Horst (Sydney), Gerard Goggin (Western Sydney U.), Larissa Hjorth (RMIT Melbourne), and Jozon A. Lorenzana (Ateneo de Manila)

Mobile media and communication have grown enormously since their early days being offered to the public in the 1980s. Their challenges to research and theory have also expanded significantly, yet among the still thorny questions to be answered revolve around what can be broadly termed intimacies – and the individual, collective, sociocultural, and political implications they raise. There are high stakes in such intimacies, which subtend the relations among different kinds of communities, nations, states, regions, diasporas, and transnational geographies and networks.

In this special issue, we call for contributions that imaginatively and critically explore, study, and reflect upon historical, contemporary, and emerging intimacies associated with transforming mobile technologies—and the new social realities they shape, embody, and project. Our framing of this problematic is inspired and oriented by the precious, rich, and multilayered work of one of the first generation of mobile communication scholars, Filipino-Australian anthropologist Raul Pertierra (1941-2024).

Pertierra’s work played a pivotal role in understanding the complex and dynamic socio-cultural dimensions of mobile technologies in everyday life. While much of the early scholarship was drew from empirical realities in Europe, Pertierra and his colleagues sought to demonstrate the distinctive significance of mobile cultures in Asia—and explore their social and cultural implications. Notably his signature work offered insightful and deep reflections on the Philippines—a location in which migration, activism and transnational intimacy was shaped in and through the mobile phone’s communicative, expressive, and political capacity.

Pertierra’s research offered deep and far-reaching questions around how the mobile phone recalibrates old and new media. It also explored transformations everyday life in rituals and intimacies across domestic and public space, highlighting the ways in which the mobile phone--and functionalities such as SMS––became a seminal cultural-social artefact. Pertierra was also a pioneer in bringing anthropology to bear on the mobile phone, opening up a rich current of research, theory, ethnography practice that has been highly influential on how we grapple with and understand mobile technologies.

As a thinker who challenged dominant ways of looking at technology and its social worlds, one of the legacies of his work is to provoke researchers to consider what do you learn from looking from the other side of things, from the non-dominant perspective and histories of technologies and cultures. He was a leading figure in work that took up the challenges of ‘glocalism’, considering the relationships between specific locations and localities and the global.

Accordingly, we invite original research papers that draw upon key themes and concepts in Pertierra’s work such as:

  *   Discursive and other kinds of intimacy
  *   Cosmopolitanism and culture
  *   Migration and diaspora
  *   Localizing, regionalising, and globalising mobile media and technology
  *   Mobiles and mobilisation
  *   The power of media in politics (old and ‘new’ media)
  *   Mobile activism
  *   Who participates in social construction in mobile-intensive, digital societies
  *   Mobile media in everyday cultures
  *   Affordances, formats, specifics of mobile technologies in transforming cultures, communities, and selves
  *   Relevance of contemporary research (mobile media and communication, social science, humanities and arts) to understanding mobile technology

We are especially interested in contributions that engage with, reflect upon, or are in dialogue with Pertierra’s work, concepts, and methods.

We invite submissions of abstracts of 500 words by 31 August 2025

Potential contributors will be contacted by 15 September 2025 and will be invited to submit articles of 8,000 words to review on/before 15 March 2026.

Important dates:

  *   Abstract submission date: 31 August 2025
  *   Acceptance/rejection feedback: 15 September 2025
  *   Authors submit full papers: 15 March 2026
  *   Peer reviews completed/expected resubmission: 31 September 2026
  *   Final acceptance expected: January 2027

Please submit an extended abstract of 500 words (including references) that states the paper’s main argument, theoretical and empirical starting points, and proposed contribution. The abstract should also clearly explain how the full submission will contribute to the aims of this special issue. Please email abstracts to Professor Gerard Goggin (g.goggin at westernsydney.edu.au<mailto:g.goggin at westernsydney.edu.au>) and Professor Heather Horst (heather.horst at sydney.edu.au<mailto:heather.horst at sydney.edu.au>)

Invited submissions should be original, unpublished works. These will undergo a blind peer-review process following the usual procedures of Mobile Media & Communication. Please note that manuscripts must conform to the guidelines for Mobile Media & Communication.

In case of further questions, please contact the guest editors:

Key contact(s) for guest editors

Professor Gerard Goggin (g.goggin at westernsydney.edu.au<mailto:g.goggin at westernsydney.edu.au>) and Professor Heather Horst (heather.horst at sydney.edu.au<mailto:heather.horst at sydney.edu.au>)

 References

Pertierra, Raul. 2005. “Mobile Phones, Identity and Discursive Intimacy.” Human Technology 1(1):23-44. doi: 10.17011/ht/urn.2005124.

Pertierra, Raul. 2006. Transforming Technologies: Altered Selves – Mobile Phone and Internet Use in the Philippines. Manila: De La Salle UP, 2006.

Pertierra, Raul. 2011. “Afterword: Special Issue Mediated Diasporas: Material Translations of the Philippines In a Globalized World.”  South East Asia Research 19(2):343-348. doi: 10.5367/sear.2011.0048.

Raul, Pertierra. 2013. “We Reveal Ourselves to Ourselves: The New Communication Media in the Philippines.” Social Science Diliman 9(1):20-40.

Pertierra, Raul. 2014. “Localizing Mobile Media: A Philippine Perspective.” In Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth, 42-52. 1st edition. Routledge.

Pertierra, Raul. 2014. “Reflections on the Relevance of the Social Sciences in the Philippines.”  Philippine Sociological Review 62:159-178.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.cdu.edu.au/pipermail/csaa-forum/attachments/20250806/08ec21b0/attachment-0001.htm>