Homelessness and Mobile Communication: Seminar and Book Launch

The home of today is a basic requirement of digital citizenship. Homes perform as a site and support for a growing number of media platforms, sensors, screens and networked infrastructure. They provide the contexts and conditions for accomplishing many everyday activities and responsibilities. Homelessness, or the lack of secure and affordable housing, diminishes possibilities of digital participation and positions people as vulnerable and precariously connected. Nevertheless, mobile communication – and especially the smartphone – plays a special and vital role as a ‘lifeline’ for a range of groups experiencing homelessness.

To launch Dr Justine Humphry’s book, Homelessness and Mobile Communication – Precariously Connected, published by Palgrave MacMillan, this seminar profiles research carried out from 2014 to 2018 with over 100 young people, adults and families in Sydney, Melbourne and New York City, of how mobile communication and processes of digitisation mediate people’s lived experience of homelessness. The research featured helps to expand our understanding of the distinctive digital needs and challenges of unstably housed groups, the impact of digital welfare on marginalised consumers, and the role of datafication in accelerating digital and socio-spatial inequalities. There is an urgency to tackle these issues and develop new approaches, centring housing as a prerequisite for just and inclusive digital societies and cities.

Professor Gerard Goggin, inaugural Professor of Media and Communications and author of the book’s foreword, and Professor Nicole Gurran, Chair of Urbanism and Director of the Henry Halloran Research Trust, will speak to the book’s themes.

After the seminar and book launch, refreshments will be available.