ABSTRACT
This chapter examines “location” as it emerges in relation to technologies such as the mobile phone. It explores the ways in which location helps to determine how, where, and why particular mobile technologies operate in particular locations. Through a case study of the southernmost border of Haiti (Anse-a-Pitres) and the Dominican Republic (Pedernales), it highlights how “location” is made and unmade through state and regulatory infrastructures. Stressing the importance of “the border” as a particular kind of location, it explores concepts of “bordering,” “disembordering,” and “infrastructuring” as forms of placemaking with and through technologies. Bringing together ethnographic research with Haitian migrants and the broader history of telecommunications liberalization, the chapter examines the ways in which these infrastructures are made, unmade, and stitched together by consumers and companies. The aim is to make “ethnographically visible” the immaterial ways in which mobile phone companies and state agencies shape the everyday lives of Haitian migrants who cross the border between the two countries in the global south in order to challenge the taken-for-grantedness of location in studies of location technologies.
