Over the past couple of decades, mobile phones have penetrated Sri Lanka at an unprecedented rate. The rate of adoption of cell phones in the country has been remarkably fast, and not gradual as in other nations. Yet, examination of the developmental impact of mobile phones has drawn surprisingly little attention in Sri Lanka. Therefore, this article attempts to investigate the empowering effect of mobile phones on dependent housewives in poor households of the country by using a mixed research method. Our research found that access to mobile phones was certainly empowering for these women: mobile phones unequivocally strengthened and expanded their social circle and support networks; they led them to domesticate technology, thus challenging negative societal attitudes toward women as technologically incompetent and timid; they reduced women’s information poverty; and opened them up to a newer, non-traditional fun space, which was a clear manifestation of choice and power. However, the women’s use of mobile phones was largely controlled within the household, mainly because they did not have their own income to maintain the phones, thus underlining the need for their financial autonomy. Those women who owned their mobile phones had more control over them than those who lacked legal ownership. To conclude, mobile phones can play a significant role in empowering poor women in Sri Lanka, and can be considered as a tool in the policy agenda for women’s empowerment by the government.
The empowerment potential of transnational labour migration by women has been debated in the field of women’s migration studies. This paper examines the case of women from Sri Lanka, a key home country of low-skilled female labour migrating to the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Using the methodological approach of the case study, the survey found that labour migration does ensure that access to productive resources leads to a measure of economic empowerment in the household. Yet, many women migrants faced intra-household socially disempowering experiences that in turn downplayed their economic contributions. Empowerment as a consequence of migration rested upon a complex interplay of economic factors and contextspecific non-economic factors; the latter were found to be more powerful determinants of women’s empowerment.
This qualitative study examines the identity claims of second-generation youth of Sri Lankan origin in New Zealand on social media, a social terrain that transcends the boundaries of traditional social worlds. Research participants’ represented themselves online by three main strategies: visual (graphic), textual (narrative) and group. Participants simultaneously travelled back and forth between two virtual cultural identities, Kiwi and Sri Lankan, thus [re]constructing identity performances, in which “definition of the situation” played a key role. Their virtual identities represented only a snapshot of the self, where different versions of the self were performed and [re]produced, thus defying the essentialist or foundationalist notion of identity.
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