Homelessness and Mobile Communication: Precariously Connected

This book examines how mobile phones and the internet have become a vital part of the everyday lives of people experiencing homelessness. But the access mobile phones provide is costly, insecure and limited, producing an experience of being precariously connected. Drawing on findings of research conducted with over one hundred young people, families and adults experiencing homelessness in Australia and the United States, this book analyses homelessness as a mediated condition and explores the underpinning processes that shape digital disparities. It contributes to scholarship on mobile communication and inequality, highlighting the digital patterns, issues and difficulties of a group disproportionately affected by service reform and developments in digital citizenship, smart cities and algorithmic governance.
"This book offers us a compelling, empirically grounded account of the central role of the smartphone in the precarious connectivity of marginalised groups such as the homeless. It offers a sophisticated analysis of the complex ways in which digital technologies, far from transcending social inequalities, now enshrine and reproduce them in ever more hierarchically differentiated forms."

— David Morley, Emeritus Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

"With the rise of smart cities and algorithmic governance, digitalization is placing a greater burden of risk and uncertainty on the unhoused. It’s therefore time to shift our conversations about homelessness from concerns with digital inclusion to issues of data justice, and this book provides an indispensable foundation for that discussion."
— Lynn Schofield Clark, author of The Parent App: Understanding Families in a Digital Age and Distinguished Professor, University of Denver, USA