Contemporary Cultures and Societies seminar seriesIn this seminar Professor Tacchi explores broad questions of development, gender and technology through a focus on mobile phones and their everyday use by women in India, in particular focusing on rural and less affluent populations. He introduces ways in which technologies might be thought about in terms of "meaningful mobilities", using examples from fieldwork in India. Professor Tacchi considers the complex nature of everyday lives to contextualize the role of mobiles in these examples. He will conclude by discussing the limits of modernizing approaches to understanding technologies and social change and the importance of holistic approaches. Mobiles are presented as an active agent in complex and evolving gendered relationships that must be understood within their everyday uses and settings, in order to understand their meanings.Professor Jo Tacchi is Deputy Dean, Research and Innovation in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. She is a Centre Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. A media anthropologist with a special interest in radio and digital media, her research has focused both on ethnographic understanding of media and communication for development in a range of contexts, and on developing ethnographically informed participatory and mixed method approaches to understanding social change.