Friday, October 21st at 1:00 pm in Brooks Hall:
Gabriella Lukacs
Department of Anthropology
University of Pittsburgh
"Dreamwork: Cell Phone Novelists, Politics and Labor in Contemporary Japan"
Brooks Hall, Department of Anthropology, 2nd Fl Lecture Hall
Co-Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology

In 2007, the number of cell phone novels posted on the popular portal, maho no i-rando, reached one million—a figure that has puzzled observers worldwide. Critics claim that young women write these novels in transit and in transition; these women merely translate their feelings of boredom and lack of spirit into an escapist pastime. By contrast, Lukacs analyzes the cell phone novel phenomenon as one that reveals how young people respond to their incorporation into a precarious labor regime and to their exclusion from collectivities (e.g., workplace and family) that offered their parents key resources for self-determination.