Communications and Mobility: The Migrant, the Mobile Phone, and the Container Box

The Geopolitics of Communication asks what communication means if we are talking about the movement of human capital, commodities, and services in a hyper–linked, ultra–connected world. This unique and alternative examination of the subject enables Morley to offer a new history of the concept, by drawing on and synthesizing examples from geography, media, and sociology, as well as drawing on insights from a range of disciplines, including the now long–neglected field of transport studies. Only then, Morley argues, can we understand the changing articulations of the virtual and material geographies within which we now live. In putting forward his new approach, Morley offers new theoretical perspectives on questions of mobility, network geographies and de– territorialisation, sedentarism, nomadology and the modalities of containment, alongside issues of transportation, connectivity and exclusion.

In order to focus these complex theoretical and conceptual issues around concrete examples, a substantial part of the book is dedicated to extended case studies of three of the most significant icons of our era – the mobile phone, the migrant and the container box. The result is a broad ranging approach that offers an important alternative perspective through its emphasis on the material history and the material geography of communication.

David Morley is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, London University. He has held Visiting Professorships at universities in Australia, China, France, Mexico, Spain, Sweden and the United States. His work has been translated into 22 languages and his publications include Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (1992), Home Territories (2000); and  Media, Modernity and Technology: The Geography of the New (2006). He serves on the Editorial/Advisory Boards of a number of journals, including Cultural Studies,  European Journal of Cultural Studies, Inter–Asia Cultural Studies and Television and New Media.