Technologies of inclusion and marginalization: Mobile phones and multiple exclusion homeless women

Abstract

Little is known about women experiencing multiple exclusion homelessness (MEH) in the UK, and even less about their use of mobile phones. MEH describes a subset of homeless people with multiple and complex needs who experience forms of deep social exclusion. Marginalized and socially excluded women often avoid social services and survive through remaining elusive and invisible. This evasion is reflected in their mobile phone practices in which both use and nonuse are expressions of their limited agency in the face of profound structural inequalities. This study explores MEH women's agency articulated through mobile phone ownership and usage in a UK coastal city. Through “deep hanging out” participant observation and interviews, it illuminates the complex ways in which MEH women access and manage mobile phones. It highlights paradoxical tensions between connection and invisibility; for example, homeless support services provide budget feature phones to MEH clients to ensure their improved safety and connectivity; however, MEH women sell these phones to meet their immediate needs. In so doing, these women reject the provision and discourse of stripped-back, financially compromised UK homeless support services. Through their mobiles, MEH women also engage with social media in uncertain ways, an activity which rather than providing connectivity and access, reaffirms social marginalization. Thus, MEH women's deep social exclusion is both mediated and reinforced by their mobile media practices.

Keywords

Digital divide multiple exclusion homelessness ethnography digital inclusion women mobile phones affordances homeless disconnection availability

Introduction

Mobile phones are ubiquitous, but little is known about the motivations and meanings of mobile phone usage for homeless people, and even less is known about multiple exclusion homeless (MEH) women's use of mobile phones. MEH describes a subset of homeless people with multiple and complex problems (including substance misuse, compromised physical and mental health, and histories of institutional care and street culture) who engage in activities aimed at mitigating their circumstances such as begging, drinking, survival shoplifting, and sex working), and who experience deep social exclusion (Fitzpatrick et al., 2012; Nguyen, 2020). Homelessness is highly gendered, but women who occupy dangerous and precarious spaces on the street remain understudied. MEH women are among the most marginalized both in UK society and in the UK's homeless population (Bowpitt et al., 2011; England et al., 2022; Fitzpatrick et al., 2012; Mayock et al., 2015). Notions of “respectability” and assumptions about who is worthy of receiving support (Waldman & Williams, 2013; Watson & Austerberry, 1986) are deeply embedded within UK social housing provision. MEH women seldom fit these assumptions of worthiness and respectability, given their disrupted experiences as mothers and histories of drug abuse. As such, and despite a social policy emphasis on preventing homelessness, MEH women's needs are not recognized and their access to social housing remains temporary, disrupted, partial, and insecure (England et al., 2022; Theodorou et al., 2021). MEH women, like other homeless communities globally, use and rely on mobile phones (Buente et al., 2020; Humphry, 2021); however, their mobile phone practices are quite different from those found in mainstream society. These women often avoid social services and survive through remaining elusive and invisible (Bowpitt et al., 2011; Mayock et al., 2015).

This article draws on ethnographic research with 10 MEH women in a UK coastal city, hereafter called “The City.” It illuminates a range of mobile phone practices indicating paradoxical connection and disconnection that these women use to manage their visibility and availability to social services, family, and social networks. These practices include procuring, hiding, selling, sharing, and switching off their mobile phones, leaving them at home, and/or detaching themselves from phone ownership and use. This article shows how MEH women's mobile media practices allow them to negotiate connection and disconnection, and visibility and invisibility in ways that ultimately reaffirm their social marginalization.

The research was undertaken between 2021 and 2022 at a time when the UK public sector was experiencing the enduring effects of austerity policies. The UK government's radical welfare reforms between 2010 and 2015 led to homelessness numbers in England doubling between 2010 and 2020 (Fitzpatrick et al., 2020). Fiscal restraint and local-level disciplining of public services compounded “economic marginalisation with state abandonment” for those at the base of the social hierarchy (Peck, 2012, p. 650; see also Hastings et al., 2017; Tyler, 2020). This has had an impact on MEH women who struggle to maintain accommodation, who live transient lives, who experience increased hardship, and who find engagement with social services problematic. Local authority budgets are unable to meet the needs of those experiencing the harshest forms of homelessness, including “rough sleeping; sofa-surfing, squatting, living in hostels and unsuitable accommodation including cars, tents and night shelters” (Cloke et al., 2020, p. 4).

Literature review: Mobile phones, homeless women, and situated agency

Scholars from disciplines such as communications studies (Ling, 2004), anthropology (Horst & Miller, 2005), and information and communcations technology (ICT) for development (Donner, 2007) began to probe marginalized communities’ use of mobile devices in the early 2000s. This formed part of a body of multidisciplinary literature on the relationship between social and digital exclusion, and the “digital divide,” which initially considered access to technology as crucial (Hargittai, 2003), then developed nuanced understandings of multifaceted barriers to technology access. Such barriers are embedded in “digital by default” service delivery (Harris, 2019; Robinson et al., 2020). However, work specifically on exploring digital inequalities from the perspective of mobile use (Marler, 2018), or research looking at “mobile only” internet users (Correa et al., 2020) does not typically explore gender and homelessness as an axis of exclusion or inequality.

Homelessness is about more than the lack of a physical structure within which to reside; it includes the unique psychological, cultural, and emotional stressors relative to different contexts of living without a secure, sufficient, safe, and affordable home (Bretherton & Pleace, 2023). Homelessness is also an acute form of marginalization affecting social networks, community participation, and engagement with social services (McGrath et al., 2023).

Media communications studies has paid some attention to mobile phones and homelessness (Galperin et al., 2021; Humphry, 2021; Marler, 2019), and to homeless communities’ use of social media platforms (Buente et al., 2020). Within the ICT for development literature and the broader field of development studies, many studies have problematized marginalized women's relationships with mobile phones (Bailur et al., 2015; Oosten, 2021; Porter, 2011; Porter et al., 2019; Ramisch, 2016; Wyche et al., 2016; Zelezny-Green, 2018), exploring the negative impacts of excessive or uncontrolled phone, social media, and internet use on face-to-face social relationships and mental health (Kim, 2017; Zhong et al., 2022). However, as it is typically premised upon a model of stable family and living arrangements, this literature stands in stark contrast to MEH people's experiences of using mobile phones, which are characterized by multiple forms of instability, including periods of disconnection, interrupted credit, phone breakages and loss, and difficulties with charging mobile phones and accessing Wi-Fi. In their work on digital exclusion in the United States, Gonzales and colleagues describe this as “dependable instability” (2016). In other U.S. and UK studies, it has been described as “access instability” (Faith, 2018; Galperin et al., 2021).

Long-standing debates about who benefits from mobile phone access and who experiences exclusion from the benefits it provides has often placed women on the wrong side of the digital divide (Hilbert, 2011). Although initially conceived as a binary split between those who have access to technology and those who do not, subsequent research acknowledged that marginalized women, particularly homeless women, often lack the necessary financial resources, skills, and relationships to ensure “meaningful access” (Humphry, 2013, p. 10). Meaningful access is determined by societal gendered norms and economic inequalities that actively deny – or limit – women's and other marginalized communities’ access to phones. Mobile phone devices, their operating systems, and the apps that run on these devices, can also impose exclusions and bias (Chib et al., 2021). However, women, including homeless women, have been able to exercise agency through their mobile phone use, and have developed inventive means of overcoming challenges to access and finding appropriate technologies to meet their needs (Nguyen, 2020; Waldman et al., 2018). This potential for women to display agentic use of mobile phones has been the principle underlying many mobile-based social development initiatives (Porter et al., 2019; Rotondi et al., 2020). Clearly, mobile phones can both empower and disadvantage people and communities; as Pei and Chib (2021, p. 578) argue, “while the phone reinforces structural constraints via facilitating access, surveillance, and intervention from those of higher patriarchal statuses, it simultaneously enables women's strategic responses.”

This tension between agentic responses and structural constraints, between connection and disconnection, and between visibility and invisibility in MEH women's mobile phone use provokes a theoretical quandary, suggesting an irresolvable tension between a purely structural view of the technology and a technologically deterministic view of the role of mobile phones. Although a mobile phone offers users a wide range of functions, the ability to use these is shaped by users’ knowledge and how they are situated structurally in society: their education, income, or residential status. The concept of affordances provides a theoretical armory for understanding the relationship between users and the functionality of mobile phones (Schrock, 2015; Wyche et al., 2018; Zheng & Yu, 2016). Originating in psychology (Gibson, 1977), this concept has been widely used in media and communications studies (Evans et al., 2017; Nagy & Neff, 2015) and information systems disciplines (Faraj & Azad, 2012; Pozzi et al., 2014). Despite suffering from “definitional confusion” (Davis, 2020, p. 39), affordances provide a means of understanding the dynamic relationship between diverse users’ access to technology, their skill in using technology, and their perceptions, attitudes, relationships, and cultural and institutional influences and how these shape their mobile phone usage (Davis & Chouinard, 2016). Simply put, “affordances refer to how objects enable and constrain” (Davis, 2020, p. 11) in ways that depend on the individual and the context they are in. As such, features on phones do not exclusively determine outcomes, because these are mediated through “affordances.”

Whereas the affordances of mobile phone usage have been widely explored, less attention has been paid to the nonuse of mobile phones, which can be seen as a form of “situated agency” in the face of structural barriers such as homelessness or poverty. Pei and Chib address this theoretical blind spot by exploring how mobile phone practices are enmeshed in complex personal, social, and structural relationships (2021). They identify three mobile phone practices – avoidance, accommodation, and collaboration – that migrant women workers in China use to exercise agency. Chib and colleagues also show how agentic mobile phone practices can involve nonuse as much as use and are indeed a counterpoint to a “notion of (non-)users as passive and oppressed” (Chib et al., 2021, p. 819). In the context of this study, nonuse can be seen as an expression of MEH women's limited agency. Described as “disconnective affordances” (Mannell, 2019; Schrock, 2015), nonuse and unavailability are used to manage social relationships and disconnect from unwanted communications with social services, family, and other networks. This article builds on Pei and Chib's approach to understand how “specific mobile practices enable the forces of structure and agency to simultaneously encounter and act upon each other” (2021, p. 589). It looks at how MEH women exert agency through their mobile phone use and strategic “nonuse” in the face of extreme structural challenges of poverty, violence, and homelessness. This is done through an exploration of three aspects of mobile phone use: access to technology, which explores MEH women's procurement and ownership of phones; strategic disconnection, which examines women's choices to reject certain digital affordances because of how they communicate cultural and institutional norms and stigma; and finally, enmeshed relationships, which examines how social networks influence digital affordances and vice versa, and how this has an impact on women's agency.

Methods

This article is based on a year’s worth of research conducted by the lead author, who has a 30-year professional career in supporting, researching, and learning from low-income homeless people in the UK. An intuitive, (self)-critical, and responsive approach was applied to the identification and recruitment of participants, and fieldwork, with attention being given to safeguarding¹ MEH women. In addition to the 10 MEH women introduced, with pseudonyms, in Table 1 and in subsequent vignettes, the lead author observed and interacted with many MEH people during fieldwork. Given the high-risk contexts that MEH women live in, the lead author respectfully managed participants’ expectations along with the risks to herself as a lone researcher while “hanging out” with them on the streets of The City.

Table 1.

Research Participants.

Participant	Age by decade	Number of phones for duration of fieldwork
Jazz	30s	1 phone for less than 24 h
TFlaver	30s	6
Amilie	40s	1
Caz	30s	1
Cinders	50s	1
Teabag	30s	6
Leila	30s	3
Gangsta Grandma (GG)	60s	5
Kiki	50s	1
Sugar	30s	6

Engaging the hardest-to-reach women is, in and of itself, a challenging process. Ethnographic researchers seldom find themselves shoplifting, street drinking, receiving support from the care system, or having their children placed into the guardianship of a local authority. However, they can “converse with” (Geertz, 1973) and sit alongside MEH women on the street, on the women's begging pitches, in court, at the police station, and at GP and probation appointments to hear and bear witness to MEH women's daily lives and their historical challenges, and to understand how MEH women make sense of their experiences.

Interactions and interviews, aligned with MEH women's needs, ranged from a nod of acknowledgment to one-hour conversations. Interactions were often spontaneous as MEH women prioritized their daily needs and relationships with male partners and the MEH network. Research ethics and risk assessment protocols were approved by the University of Sussex's Social Science and Arts Cross-Schools Research Ethics Committee. Data were transcribed and annotated manually, then thematically coded (Braun & Clarke, 2012).

Findings

Our findings show how MEH women exert agency through mobile phone practices to navigate the many gendered social structural constraints they face in their everyday lives. The sections below explore these mobile phone practices in relation to how MEH women ensure access to technologies in terms of their strategic disconnection and in terms of their enmeshed relationships with family, social networks, and those responsible for service delivery in the homeless community.

Ensuring access

Homeless women often lack stable access to well-maintained operating mobile phones (Nguyen, 2020) and this is particularly the case for the MEH women in this study. The means by which they procure and maintain mobile phones reinforces the structural constraints they face and seldom guarantees connectivity. Some MEH women in The City bought mobile phones but could only afford second-hand devices with limited or no capacity to connect to the internet. Teabag, for example, alternated between rough sleeping and five different emergency accommodation addresses during the fieldwork period. In her 30 s, she spent her days on The City's streets and with the MEH network. She owned six phones during fieldwork, ranging from basic handsets to a second-hand iPhone. This she purchased

in a second-hand electrical shop that sells phones, computers, and laptops. It's an old version iPhone 4 but I can’t access the internet on it. It won’t download a newer version of the operating system and I can’t get apps on it or anything.

The inferior quality of budget handsets and limited supply of SIM cards and credit results in experiences of “dependable instability” (Gonzales et al., 2016) and incomplete “digital affordances” (Pei and Chib, 2021). At a time when around 96% of the UK population were using smartphones (OFCOM, 2021), MEH women relied on basic handsets and experienced a lack of internet connectivity. As the following examples show, even access to basic phones with limited functionality could not be guaranteed:

TFlaver, a woman in her thirties diagnosed with dyslexia and experiencing “significant mental impairment” consistent with a moderate learning disability, lived in a high-support hostel. At the inception of fieldwork, TFlaver had no phone. Later, a drug and alcohol support worker provided her with two basic phones, one without credit and the other without a SIM card. TFlaver was also given two broken smartphones by friends. She uses pay as you go, and £10 lasts “about a week … if I’m lucky.”

Gangsta Grandma (GG), in her sixties, is registered disabled with complex physical and mental health needs, and so receives a high level of benefits (approx. £1,000/month). GG owned an Apple smartphone with a smashed screen, Figure 1, given to her by her daughter, stored in GG's bra for safekeeping. On “pay days” (when her benefits were paid into her bank account) and when substance-affected in public, GG repeatedly had her mobile phone, cash, or bank cards taken, used, and sometimes returned. She was always distressed about this short-term use because, if returned, inevitably all the phone's credit had been used. Sometimes GG had her SIM cards returned without the mobile phone, which was likely sold, illustrating, ironically, a sense of care because her telephone numbers on the SIM card were safeguarded by the MEH network.

“Affordances,” as Davis and Chouinard (2016) point out, are shaped by users’ thoughts, feelings, and outlook, and low-value mobile phones can easily reinforce or perpetuate stigma and exclusion. Those social services interacting with MEH women, such as homeless outreach workers, probation officers, and drug and alcohol workers, provided basic handset mobile phones (often without SIM cards and/or credit) with the putative goals of easing communication and increasing the women's safety. This limited MEH women's capacity to use their phones to meet their needs. MEH women also received “gifts” of mobile phones, but these were often of a transactional nature. As the following examples show, MEH women saw both the transactional dimension and the worthlessness of the phones, and this negatively affected their use of digital “affordances.”

Leila was given her Samsung phone by her mother during fieldwork, Figure 2. Leila did not value this phone, saying she received it “just after Christmas. She [my mother] had it spare. She didn’t go out of her way to give it to me, it was probably just lying around” and “It's just a machine you use.” Leila has contact with her mother only once or twice a year and sees this “gift” of a phone, not as a means of increasing contact, but as an affirmation of her mother’s generosity. Having the phone, but not using it to stay in touch, reaffirmed Leila's sense of isolation from her family.

Sugar, a woman in her thirties with complex physical health needs, is a transient rough sleeper who lived in three different UK cities during the fieldwork. When Sugar and her partner first arrived in The City, Sugar's phone – a basic handset supplied by homeless outreach services – had been confiscated by the police, following Sugar's partner's arrest for drug offenses. She had funded this phone through a “pay-as-you-go [contract]. Once a month, on pay day, I put £10 on it. Texts last because it’s unlimited.” Another MEH resident gave her a replacement mobile phone as a “gift,” and most likely to facilitate future drug deals (discussed below).

Figure 1.

Gg's Apple Smartphone.

Figure 2.

The phone provided to Leila by her mother.

All participants expressed frustration with the support offered by social services, exemplified in the provision of mobile phones without SIM cards or credit. Social service representatives explained that this was because they had limited time to organize fully functional phones. Despite reassurances that these mobile phones would increase access to services and the safety of MEH women, service representatives’ failure to provide working phones further devalued their support. When asked if she uses a mobile phone to contact social services, TFlaver commented:

No, because they don’t call me or return my calls when I call them about my meds. They never call me back.

Social service workers seldom actually rang MEH women on the phones that they provided. For example, participants on probation had to report to their probation officers at a women-only breakfast club, but were not phoned or texted when a winter storm caused the club to be cancelled. The participants arrived, despite the risks posed by extreme weather, to find no service workers present. The irony of social services supplying phones to increase the safety and connectivity of MEH women and not using them in circumstances such as these left MEH women feeling marginalized and abandoned by the social system. MEH women like Teabag were critical of social services’ motivations for giving them the phones:

[Services give you phones] to try to help you, but you can’t access anything on the phone. You can’t claim for benefits or do anything online with it. A £10 phone is a waste of time. They [social services] are not serious about helping you. They give you a phone and then they leave you on the street. … Workers are always on annual leave anyway … you can’t see them when you need them.

People’s experiences of technologies’ affordances can be enhanced through their innovative use of objects in ways that reveal new functions not intended in the initial design of the object (Davis & Chouinard, 2016). One way in which MEH women demonstrated their “agentic mobile practices” (Pei and Chib, 2021, p. 579) was by selling the phones given to them. As shown in Jazz's experience below, in so doing, they translated social services’ wish for MEH women to “be connected” into short-term financial gain.

Jazz, addicted to Class A drugs and at increased risk, had no fixed address, finding a place to sleep at the courtesy of different “friends.” At the start of fieldwork, she had no phone. Subsequently, a drug and alcohol service worker provided a Nokia 105 basic handset, Figure 3. Described by Jazz as “a cheap phone with no internet,” it was sold that same day for £11. Jazz explained that, despite really needing a phone, she could “rely on using other people's phones.”

Figure 3.

The phone provided to Jazz by social services.

Selling these “bricks” or “burner” phones (as MEH women called them) further demonstrates the transactional value of mobile phones, with implications for MEH women's connectivity, safety, agentic resistance, and social marginalization. Teabag's words above illustrate how little MEH women valued these handsets, which were easily sold or exchanged for substances on the street. In doing so, MEH women actively resisted service providers’ interventions. The motivation behind selling mobile phones is complex. Distrust of authorities plays a part, and many MEH women like TFlaver, Jazz, and Teabag have active addictions, which they prioritized over connectivity. Moreover, “burner” phones offered only limited connectivity and undermined how MEH perceive themselves.

As this section has demonstrated, mobile phone ownership affordances are shaped both by users’ agentic mobile practices and their structural situatedness. There are ways in which mobile phones amplify MEH women's agency; however, this is often limited by phone functionality and the cost of connectivity. The following section explores how and when women choose not to take advantage of affordances, strategically disconnecting instead.

Strategic disconnection

Davis and Chouinard (2016) remind us that the affordances of technologies can also promote established cultural and institutional norms, reinforcing MEH women’s marginalized position in society. In response, MEH women use agentic disconnection to establish boundaries in difficult relationships and to ensure a degree of safety. Chib and colleagues argue that mobile phone users express their agency by choosing when and how to disconnect and disengage; however, such “strategies of disconnection” (Chib et al., 2021, p. 834) are linked with users’ social context, influenced by power disparities, and may not be motivated by a desire to be disconnected. As the following examples show, MEH women used disconnection strategies to protect themselves and their mobile phones, despite the phones’ low value and limited functionality.

TFlaver and GG hide their mobile phones in their bras for safekeeping. However, keeping their phones hidden means they cannot risk using them. This effectively renders the phones useless and disconnects MEH women during periods of heightened economic and social activity in the MEH community. In such periods of increased risk, other MEH women, like Kiki, safeguard their phones and funds by distancing themselves from the MEH network.

Kiki's “strategic disconnection” involved accepting a mobile phone for sex work, but always leaving the phone in her hostel room to lower the risk of theft. Although this results in temporary disconnection, Kiki explained that she was protecting the credit on the phone, rather than the phone itself.

I hardly ever take my phone out with me. I only really leave the room to go to the cashpoint or the shop … It wasn’t a problem keeping a phone [when spending days on the street]. People are more interested in stealing the credit than the phone itself.

Although distressing, phone and phone credit theft is tolerated within the MEH network, and as discussed below, there are attempts to return SIM cards and phones. When asked about MEH associates who steal credit from other MEH women's phones, Kiki says she feels “empathy. I’ve been there. I know what it's like.”

Switching off offers MEH women a means of keeping their phones and credit as well as resisting mobile phone ownership and connectivity. This is a strategic choice made by some women because the practice both protects their available resources and avoids stigmatization. As Nguyen (2020) points out, women are more frequently associated with homes and homeliness than men, and homeless women are often cast as socially deviant. Having a mobile phone can impose constructions of womanhood and motherhood on MEH women that they deliberately choose to avoid.

As mothers who have not always been able to raise their children, GG, Teabag, and TFlaver experienced hostility and gendered stigma on social media, and from the wider MEH network, family members, and their friends. For example, after a serious self-harming incident, GG refused to attend hospital, accepting treatment from an ambulance paramedic instead. On the street shortly afterwards, she explained why:

It's my son. Look at the messages that he has been sending me. I won’t go to hospital because of him and his partner. His partner works in the hospital, and she knows my business from every time I have gone there before. He chats [on social media] shit about me from information he gets from her.

Cinders maintained a mobile phone, but deliberately limited her use:

I’ve never been on the internet or sent an email … I have never used Facebook or social media. Someone might have taken a photograph of me and put it on there, but I won’t see it. I’ll communicate by other means: write a letter, smoke signal, send a pigeon.

The stigmatization and personal distress that mothers experience via mobile media and on the street is significant. Jazz, one of the hardest-to-reach MEH women, was too distressed to discuss the loss of her children. This experience shaped Jazz's deep distrust of authorities, which, in turn, influenced her engagement and connectivity with institutions and her decision not to have a mobile phone.

Although MEH women strategically choose temporary disconnection and going offline, the outcomes were often paradoxical. As shown above, mobile phones could promote stigmatizing messages, which many wished to avoid. However, simultaneously, MEH women's agency and “strategies of disconnection” reinforced their marginalization and powerlessness, cutting them off from their phones, from services, and from conventional forms of communication. As Chib et al. (2021) remind us, these disconnections are not necessarily motivated by a desire for digital isolation. Rather, given MEH women's location in ambiguous and precarious spaces, it is one of the few ways of both coping with stigma and expressing agency.

Enmeshed relationships

“Affordances operate at the intersection of artifacts, actors and situations” (Davis & Chouinard, 2016, p. 245). This means that in addition to users’ access to technology, and cultural and institutional influences, social relationships and networks affect and shape how people use their mobile phones. In the MEH community, access to phones and to the contacts stored therein are often shared, and in so doing, mobile phones extend this community's personal relationships in ways that both increase and decrease MEH women's agency. The sharing of mobile phones was commonplace among most MEH participants, with implications for their connectivity when phones were borrowed and not returned for days, sometimes not at all.

Sharing phones with partners had a negative effect because it enabled partners’ “digital coercive control” (Woodlock et al., 2020) in violent relationships. This introduced further risks and challenges for Leila, TFlaver, and Sugar because their coercive partners controlled these women's phone access. When sharing mobile phones with male partners, MEH women had to manage their partners’ heightened distrust of who they were communicating with and why. They reported arguments about phone use and instances when their partners rendered their phones dysfunctional.

It's because we are vulnerable and we have jealous boyfriends that smash your phone, he … [Leila's partner] hasn’t got glasses to read my texts so he just regularly smashes it up.

Leila believed that her partner's jealousy stemmed from the way the MEH social network “interfered” in their relationship, rather than from her phone ownership. As a form of control, and to ensure the phones’ availability for drug-related communications (see below), MEH women's male partners also hung up on phone calls from social services or participants’ family members on the rare occasions when these occurred. This further marginalized participants from their families, friends, and services.

Sharing phones with male partners had other risks because these men were often arrested on suspicion of drug possession, dealing, and violent acts, and if their partners were detained, MEH women's mobile phones were unavailable to them. For example, as Caz and Sugar explained, their partners managed their phones, took responsibility for meeting dealers, and purchased drugs, while Caz and Sugar raised funds for their and their partners’ drug use through begging. If their partners were arrested, then Caz's and Sugar's shared phones were at risk of being confiscated by the police. Thus, MEH women faced temporary, and at times prolonged disconnection from their phones and their social relationships.

Women living alone in emergency and hostel accommodation could remove themselves, and their phones, from their partners’ company, sometimes for prolonged periods of time. As such, they were paradoxically privileged, and able to agentically resist their partners’ coercive behaviors in ways not available to other MEH women. However, these women's isolation within their accommodation could lead to social disconnection in the following circumstances: if they had no credit; if their partners kept their mobile phones; or if their phones had been borrowed or stolen. This further marginalized MEH women from family/friends and social services, as well as from the MEH network. For example, Leila spent five days in her room to punish her partner, during which time he retained her mobile phone. Leila and her partner are co-dependent in their substance use and share their incomes from begging or shoplifting. In withdrawing her presence, Leila also withdrew her support for her partner, refusing to help him meet his daily needs. MEH women often refused to replace mobile phones broken by their partners as an implicit protest against their partners’ actions.

However, this agentic response prolonged the women's disconnection and forced them into sharing other MEH members’ phones. As Sugar explains below, such sharing was always associated with a transactional price. The sharing of mobile phones with nonpartners was most common among MEH women with active substance addictions, partly because of an inability to manage relationships and property when under the influence of substances, and partly because mobile phones comprise an active part of the process of procuring drugs:

I lend it [my mobile phone] to someone and they don’t give it back when we are all scoring [purchasing drugs from a dealer] and I forget who I gave it to.

When questioned about how she manages without a mobile phone, Sugar responds that “I’m not bothered about it, but it means I’ve got to ask someone else to phone to score for me and then I have to sort them out, so it costs me more.” “Sorting someone out” is parlance for securing and using substances (most commonly opiates); it can also mean “getting well,” illustrating the understanding of withdrawal from substances as a sickness that needs to be remedied.

In addition to sharing mobile phones, MEH participants shared the data stored on them. SIM cards include names of family, social workers, and perhaps most usefully for those with active substance addictions, drug dealers. When a phone changes hands, new (temporary) owners dial the numbers stored on the SIM card, seeking to identify and make use of the previous owner's contacts. In this way, the lead researcher received a call on her research phone from a male attempting to identify her relationship with an MEH study participant from whom he had acquired a phone.

When a mobile phone is lost, stolen, or controlled by someone else, MEH women experience a temporary loss of data. Sugar's words below illustrate the value of the data, which are not exclusively hers, on her mobile phone, and how mobile phones enable social connections.

The other [stolen] phone had 350 people's numbers on it from all over the country. If you call it, you get the Tesco mobile voicemail. Someone is using the SIM card. It had the numbers of all the women [including drug users] he's [Sugar's partner] got around the country.

Mobile phones are clearly deeply enmeshed in MEH women's social relationships and networks, significantly influencing how “digital affordances” operate for these women. The sharing of phones through male partners’ control, borrowing, and theft facilitates a process that disseminates networks and knowledge of drug procurement throughout the MEH community and affirms members’ place within the community (returning phones or SIM cards). Women also strategically use their phones to reinforce their connections or make demands on their partners or the MEH community. However, such agentic action is often paradoxical, resulting in the isolation of individual MEH women from both their partners and the community.

Discussion

The use of mobile phones by marginalized communities who “live in a state of mere survival and have a higher possibility of experiencing poor health” can be contradictory, offering limited communication and some connectivity alongside declining mainstream social involvement (Zhong et al., 2022, p. 2). MEH women's mobile phone use is paradoxical, because their phones have no value and are not necessarily utilized for communication or remaining connected, but are vital for MEH social cohesion and solidarity. In this sense, phones do not offer communication, but do provide social connection.

The cheap mobile phones provided by social services, and their very disposability, further entrenches this message, reinforcing MEH women's experience of “access instability” (Galperin et al., 2021). The practice of selling mobile phones shows how little MEH women valued “brick” or “burner” phones and indicates their rejection of discourses of safety and connectivity promoted by social services. In so doing, the boundaries of physical access are embedded within and reinforced through mobile phones both in daily life and in the virtual world (Dourish & Bell, 2007). For MEH women, “access goes beyond getting hold of the technologies” (Humphry, 2013, p. 9) as the digital divide takes new and subtle forms and because affordances are both structural and relational (Davis & Chouinard, 2016).

Rosenberg and Vogelman-Natan (2022) draw attention to mobile phones as a form of resistance and refusal. MEH women used their phones to exercise agentic resistance against social services, and their coercive partners. Switching off mobile phones enabled MEH mothers to present a detachment or “disconnective affordance” from societal expectations of motherhood and respectability, as well as to escape and practice self-preservation from mobile media stigmatization (Mannell, 2019). For others, resistance manifested itself in their determination not to be parted from their phones, or in their refusal to replace stolen or broken phones. This strategization and agentic resistance through mobile phones (Faith, 2018; Schrock, 2015) was often at increased personal cost and social marginalization. As Mannell (2019, p. 77) argues, “connection is being maintained and at times withheld.”

MEH women's severe social isolation and lack of support from host communities are enhanced through mobile phones (Zhong et al., 2022). In contrast to mainstream interpretations of how mobile phones facilitate inclusion and service provision for homeless residents (Buente et al., 2020; Lemos & Frankenberg, 2015), MEH women's connectedness was not through cheap calls or texts, or to families, host communities, or service providers. Rather, and paradoxically, it was the very cheapness of the phones that facilitated social connectedness within the MEH community. Mobile phones became forms of payment, facilitated drug deals, and enabled storage and circulation of useful phone numbers within the MEH network. As Buré (2006, p. 19) points out, mobile phones were “used in ways that become incorporated into, and facilitate various activities prevalent in homeless culture.” However, mobile phones facilitated social inclusion in ways that went beyond their digital potential. Phones were stolen and shared, phone credit was consumed, and names stored on phones were used, sold, and given away. The very cheapness of these phones enabled them to be used as commodities that circulated through the MEH community. As respondents indicated, they “needed” their phones, not to make calls or go online, but to participate in the social and economic rituals of daily MEH life. Having a phone stolen invoked support and commiseration from the MEH network, thus affirming and making visible the victim's place in this community. The returning of a SIM card with important phone numbers was a recognition of MEH women's social connections. As such, MEH women appropriated and domesticated mobile phones to fit in with and strengthen their everyday processes and experiences (Buré, 2006). Mobile phones provided social support, helped MEH women to maintain social connections, and created a sense of belonging (cf. Zhong et al., 2022). Thus, despite their vulnerability on the street, MEH women exercised agency and mitigated risk by hiding a phone or leaving it at home and by relying on the wider MEH network's understanding of their lives and context. However, the cost of social inclusion within this community was exclusion from host communities and other social networks, and also personal, social, and structural disconnection.

Conclusion

Mobile phones have emancipatory power for many marginalized and excluded populations. However, “meaningful access” is neither straightforward nor automatic. Awareness of the challenges faced by low-income and socially marginalized groups in terms of mobile phone ownership and use is growing; however, those who are the hardest to reach remain understudied. This article explores the paradoxical and fluid nature of MEH women's mobile phone practices and the implications for their connectivity, relationships, safety, risk, resistance, and agency. MEH women have significant practices of procuring, hiding, sharing, and selling mobile phones, and switching off or detaching from mobile phone ownership and use. Their phones did not guarantee connectivity, and were often inadequate for participants’ needs, thus reinforcing a lack of self-worth and limiting their agency. This, in turn, led MEH women to reject the discourse promoted by social services that mobiles phones would enhance their safety, connectivity, and social inclusion in mainstream society. Paradoxically, MEH women's agentic decisions and experience of the affordances of mobile phones were ultimately shaped by – and in turn shaped – women's locations in ambiguous and precarious spaces.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Heather Williams

Becky Faith

Linda Waldman

Notes

Author biographies

Heather Williams is a PhD researcher at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Heather's professional experience and research interests span homelessness, social housing and health, gender, asbestos diseases, and digital inclusion for healthcare for marginalized people. She has a 30-year professional career working in homeless, social housing and research settings. Her PhD focuses on the role of gendered social stigmas in the lives of women experiencing multiple exclusion homelessness.

Becky Faith is Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Her professional experience and research interests encompass gender and technology, mobile communication studies, human computer interaction and technology for social change. Her PhD focused on the use of mobile phones by young women and she is an international expert in research and strategy on the use of mobile phones in marginalized communities.

Linda Waldman is the Director of Teaching and Learning at the Institute of Development Studies, and a research Fellow in the Health and Nutrition Cluster. As a social anthropologist, her research has focused on gender, civil society, ethnicity and identity in relation to poverty, pollution and health. She has published research on indigenous hunter-gatherer identities, farm workers and adolescence, environmental policy processes, environmental health and social housing with research experience in Africa, India and the UK. Her most current research focuses on environmental health, peri-urban sustainability, zoonotic disease, digital health, gender and accountability.

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