Transnational mothers working in foreign countries face the challenges of providing "intensive" mothering to their children from a distance, and risk being subject to the "deviancy" discourse of mothering. This paper investigates the role of mobile phone usage, via voice, text messages, and social networking sites, in dealing with the tensions and ambivalence arising from transnational mothering as a dialectical process. We surveyed 42 Filipina and Indonesian foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Singapore using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. FDWs addressed tensions arising out of societal expectations of motherhood and their own anxieties about children's well-being. The reluctant obsessive struggled to maintain a balance between an intensive nurturing style and a deviant mode of mothering that respected the growing independence of the children. The diverted professional had to balance the financial empowerment of being the primary breadwinner with the risk of surrogate motherhood for the employer's children subsuming the care provided to her own. The remote-control parent shared mothering responsibilities with caregivers, usually relatives, who acted as a contradictory proxy presence for intensive mothering. The incomplete union of stressed

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the discourses on migrant acculturation and migrants’ mobile phone communication, in order to examine the inclusiveness of communication-acculturation research in the recent years. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on from 102 qualitative interviews (48 Malayali, 26 Bangla, 17 Tamil and 11 Telugu) for a larger research project that investigated the role of mobile phones in migrant acculturation in Singapore. Respondents were selected using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling methods. The respondents had been in Singapore for varying amount of time: from one month to 19 years. Findings – The analysis of the discourses on migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication revealed that labor migrants were excluded on the basis of their temporary status and apprehensions on work productivity. The mobile usage prohibitions that existed in work sites were hinged on similar discourses that stereotyped the labor migrants. The emancipatory metaphor that has been at the center of research on migrants’ mobile phone usage and acculturation needs to be replaced with a critical discourse perspective. Research limitations/implications – The data were originally collected for a research project that approached the phenomena of acculturation and mobile phone appropriation from a positivist perspective, whereas this paper analyzed the data to critically examine the discourses that supported the premise of the project itself. Due to this, the findings presented in this paper have limited scope for generalization. Originality/value – The paper critiques the research trends in migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication and suggests a possible alternative that goes beyond the “transcendental teleology” that underpins discourse and practice.

Political participation has generally been evaluated among civic resident populations using the indices of voting and campaign participation. However, migrants' engagement with politics in their home country has become increasingly virtual with the advent of mobile/social media, suggesting a need to go beyond traditional theorizations. The paper tries to understand how affordances of new media are leveraged by migrants with different political orientations as they engaged politically with their homeland. Two contexts were identified to understand their transnational political exchanges: a) elections in homeland India, and b) the backdrop of various civil society movements. In-depth interviews were conducted among 31 Indian migrants in Singapore with diverse political ideologies and linguistic backgrounds. Calling, messaging, sharing of news stories/posts and commenting were the most commonly used mobile affordances. Social constructivist tradition in technology appropriation found support in the way respondents tested the affordances of mobile/social media before adding them to their usage repertoire. Due to limited political entitlements and lack of leeway in work schedules, no goal-oriented use of communication technologies was made. Political discussion hardly led to political actionsuch as demonstrations or public speechesin the host country.

Early research on mobile phone adoption among fishers followed an economistic perspective, focusing mainly on access to market price information. Researchers called for investigations into collective and cooperative uses of the technology. Responding to these calls, we explored Burmese fishers’ use of mobile phones in the realms of social life and business, mainly related to information seeking and sharing among the community. Interviews with 23 fishers in three regions in Myanmar suggested that both social and commercial, as well as individual- and community-oriented, uses were prevalent. Mobile phones helped channel information on price and market demand among a limited number of fishers, especially the boat owners and fish dealers. The other segments in the fishing labor hierarchy desisted from individual ownership of the phone, while opting for a more community-based appropriation. A nuanced picture of use and non-use of mobiles emerged alongside fishers’ socio-economic status and patterns of fishing.

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