Related Data for: Reading as self-making: Using mobile ethnography to examine the contemporary literate practices of middle-class adolescent girls in Singapore

This chapter focuses on the reading practices of adolescent girls in a global, multi-mediated age of constant information flows and easy access to reading resources in print and online. As part of a larger study, twelve 14- and 15-year-old girls from one all-girls’ school in Singapore were invited to participate in a mobile ethnography study, where they used an app to share about their in- and out-of-school reading in print and on their devices (smartphones, e-readers, laptops, tablets) over four days. Descriptive survey, textual, and visual data were collected. Individual interviews or focus groups were conducted immediately after the data collection, following photo-elicitation methods, to deepen understanding of the girls’ reading. The chapter draws on Elizabeth Long’s (1993) concept of a “social infrastructure” from the original The Ethnography of Reading to examine the girls’ reading practices, highlighting how their leisure reading practices are implicated by familial, schooled, media, and peer communities of reading. Reading choices, ways of reading, means of access, and attitudes toward reading are acts of self-making that are enabled by economic circumstances and technological access. Finally, I reflect in this chapter on the possibilities of using mobile ethnography as method for understanding everyday literacy practices.