ABSTRACT
The study of the mobile phone, as one of the most evocative signifiers for contemporary debates around mobility today, raises potentially far-reaching questions. One of the dominant questions arising in the social sciences is the role of mobility – what it means to be ‘mobile’ in an age of globalisation, and the impact mobility is having on work, life, locality, and nationalism. The paradigm is characterised by British sociologist John Urry as the ‘mobility turn’ (Urry 2003). For some, contemporary globalisation is marked by mobility (Urry 2003; Castells et al. 2007), for others it is characterised by immobility and the re-creation of borders and enclaves (Turner 2007).
