ABSTRACT
The last several years have witnessed a profusion of studies related to mobile phone use across the globe. How the mobile phone dislodges space and time, upsets previously taken-for-granted notions of public and private spheres, and creates new modes of social cohesion and exclusion have all been topics raised by the diffusion of this personal and transportable device. A large portion of this research has focused on how mobile phones seem to have become part of a global youth culture, with certain similarities in their usage, appropriation, and discursive construction found across diverse cultures (see Ito et al., 2005; Katz and Aakhus, 2002; Ling, 2004). Yet while the subjects of these studies have been primarily educated, relatively affluent, urban teenagers and college students, less attention has been paid to their more economically or socially marginalized peers, and/or those not operating within familiar modes of parental and school organization and control.1 Without the assumed choices between a fixed-line and mobile phone, nor the mobility in daily life that is-rhetorically anyway-the reason for the mobile phone, and when bound by extremely imposing structural and material constraints, how do young people use mobile phones to surpass these exclusionary conditions?
