Overview of the ASSA Project

Watch the video above to gain a sense of who we are and our range of fieldsites. In the video, each ASSA team member introduces her or his fieldsite, highlighting one of their main findings.

The ASSA project began in 2017. We have been blogging about the project ever since we started, with team members reflecting on their fieldwork and findings. You can read our blog here.

Each member of the team carried out simultaneous 16-month ethnographies. Following this period, we are now writing monographs about each fieldsite, as well as publishing comparative studies. The first three books were launched on May 6th, 2021. All of our books are open-access and freely downloadable from the UCL Press website under the ‘Ageing with Smartphones’ series. We are currently translating the main comparative book, called The Global Smartphone, into several languages: Arabic, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, and French and Thai.

We also have a YouTube channel that shows a range of short films from the fieldsites. This is linked below. The videos on the channel are grouped by region and theme.

As you watch the video above, you might want to think about the following questions:

Is there a fieldsite that you are particularly interested in and why?

How do you think your own region might be distinctive in respect to the use and consequences of smartphones?

You can also consider how you might apply the ideas of this course to the region where you live.