‘It died once at playgroup, I didn’t know what to do’: towards vital, vibrant, material geographies of the mobile phone in austerity

Abstract

Geographers have long considered mobile phones to be ubiquitous instruments and agents of globalisation, migration, commodification, and technologies for fieldwork. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research with families and communities in Greater Manchester, amidst nearly a decade of austerity cuts in the UK, this paper makes the case for revitalising, repoliticising and rematerialising the mobile phone in this socio-economic context. Drawing on concepts of vital materialism and vibrant matter, I illustrate the relationalities, resonances and recalcitrance of the mobile phone as a necessary utility, part of the fabric of everyday life in austerity, as well as a vital object and life in itself. Using a vignette approach, findings highlight experiences, mediations and material politics of companionship, indebtedness, gendered labour, financial independence, social isolation, vulnerability and durability, intimacy, sensuality and more. In the conclusions, I reflect on the everyday politics of the mobile phone during and in spite of austerity, including in a period of ongoing welfare digitalisation.