Culture's Calling: Mobile Phones, Gender, and the Making of an African Migrant Village in Lisbon

In this article, I explore how immigrants from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau living in Portugal use mobile phones in their daily lives in Lisbon. Whereas one might assume that mobile phones and other new information technologies facilitate transnational communication between Africa and Portugal, the ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Lisbon from 1999 to 2003 revealed a different scenario. Instead, mobile phones as imagined and used by the Guinean immigrants I met in Lisbon revealed less about transnationalism and globalization than they did about constructing community and identity in a new locale. As Guinean immigrants in Portugal reconfigured their relationship to their former colonizers and struggled to make their way in a new, multicultural Europe, they used their mobile phones to engage local networks, shape local identities, and transform Lisbon's sprawl into an African migrant village. Here, I highlight the gendered dimensions of this process and contend that Guinean men's and women's varied uses of mobile phones in Lisbon underscore contrasting experiences of migration, mobility, and belonging.

Culture's Calling: Mobile Phones, Gender, and the Making of an African Migrant Village in Lisbon

In this article, I explore how immigrants from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau living in Portugal use mobile phones in their daily lives in Lisbon. Whereas one might assume that mobile phones and other new information technologies facilitate transnational communication between Africa and Portugal, the ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Lisbon from 1999 to 2003 revealed a different scenario. Instead, mobile phones as imagined and used by the Guinean immigrants I met in Lisbon revealed less about transnationalism and globalization than they did about constructing community and identity in a new locale. As Guinean immigrants in Portugal reconfigured their relationship to their former colonizers and struggled to make their way in a new, multicultural Europe, they used their mobile phones to engage local networks, shape local identities, and transform Lisbon's sprawl into an African migrant village. Here, I highlight the gendered dimensions of this process and contend that Guinean men's and women's varied uses of mobile phones in Lisbon underscore contrasting experiences of migration, mobility, and belonging.

Marginal Return of Infrastructure Investment on Bilateral Trade Performance

Investing in transport infrastructures such as roadways, airports and seaports has proven to improve a country's trade performance through reduction of transportation costs and providing access to production and market. This research investigates the diminishing return of infrastructure investment and also the rate of return of two types of infrastructure investment strategies on trade. An augmented gravity model is used with econometric analysis methods in this study. The results have shown that as roadway and airport densities increase, the marginal returns on trade decrease. Empirical evidence from the United States and China with all their trading partners from the past twenty years has also suggested existence of diminishing return of infrastructure investment on roadways and airports. Infrastructure investment strategy that focuses on increasing roadway and airport density experiences smaller diminishing return on trade. In contrast, seaport investment that focuses on port quality and efficiency generates higher return on trade. A trade benefiting infrastructure investment strategy that best utilizes financial resources must balance between quality and quantity based on a country's current level of infrastructure asset.