Journal articles on the topic 'Feminism – Ethiopia'

This article analyzes the role of women as both contributors to and beneficiaries of the socio-economic development of Ethiopia over the past century during three divergent political regimes. Employing the social constructivist and feminist notions of doing and undoing gender, and Bourdieu’s concept of “Habitus” as its theoretical lenses, this study examines how women were able to deal with the external pressures exerted by social and institutional structures and navigated through a predominantly masculine world to negotiate their changing roles in the Ethiopian society. Based on a review of the relevant literature, analysis of government policies and strategies, and official statistics, this study traces the historical trajectories of Ethiopian women since the early modern imperial era to the present. The study also identifies policy options that have helped to overcome the deep-sited inequalities between men and women in the Ethiopian context.

The impacts of human trafficking are currently high across the world albeit different policies are designed to combat it. Yet, governments are not working hard practically and jointly as they write strategies and programs on the paper to reduce the impacts of women trafficking. Even though men are victims of human trafficking, scholars agree that women are the most vulnerable to human trafficking. This study describes the socio-economic impacts of human trafficking among the west Asia returnee young women in Ethiopia by taking Oromia Region’s West Shewa zone as a case study. The study used the mixed-method approach. A descriptive case study research design was applied for a detailed description of the socio-economic impacts of human trafficking among west Asia returnee young women. Feminism theory was employed to scrutinize the oppression of young women. The finding reveals that human trafficking caused the divorce of marriage and exposed children to the street because of unwise savings and disagreement of spouses; psychological and physical threats of young women on the way to work, at the workplace and after return; wastage of income as a result of saving money in the wrong place; economic crisis because young women had to pay back the loan to brokers – traffickers – and could not repay the money for lenders; and school dropout. From the finding, it is concluded that although young women exposed to human trafficking by the vision of having their job in the future and the income they could generate in West Asia. They had a dream to improve their lives, they could not realize their dream since they were unable to save the money thereby leading them to social and economic crises. Hence, it is recommended that issues of human trafficking should be incorporated into the school curriculum, at least at the elementary level, so that young women get better awareness about the negative consequences of human trafficking and abstain from traffickers. It is also recommended that young women who work abroad legally should open their formal bank account to save their wages to escape social and economic crises when they return.

Can there be a feminist aesthetic?” analyzes the difficulty of finding an ontological position from which to write about photography created by women. It interrogates the discomfort of inhabiting, socially, and in art and literature, the position of the embodied feminine, and seeks through aesthetic analysis to mine this discomfort. The essay argues that despite the social and intellectual discomfort of articulating a space of the feminine, in that this space is always already coded as oppressed, there is a value in interpreting photography created by women through the lens of feminist resistance. The article concedes that defining the word woman is always a risk, in that the term reflects manifold and contradictory embodied experiences. And yet, within this avowed risk emerges the only space of possible resistance to oppression, the opportunity to create a rearrangement of the visible so that the category of the oppressed woman, however phantasmatic, is re-envisioned as sovereign. However, each act of re-envisioning woman must be culturally specific. Hence, the essay concludes with an interpretation of Ethiopian photographer Aida Muluneh’s series of images Dinkinesh (or, “you are beautiful”), evoking the remains of an Ethiopian hominid that were long considered to be the oldest of human ancestors. Muluneh reclaims this distant ancestor as Ethiopian, dressing her in an extravagant red gown, using photography to re-envision Dinkinesh’s fall into history, granting this ancestor the power to haunt modernity.

Abstract In Sidaama, a Highland East Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia, the majority of nouns are feminine in the plural, regardless of their gender in the singular. We refer to this as ‘gender switch’ and we investigate how best to analyze this puzzling change in morphosyntactic behavior. We compare gender switch in Sidaama to the well-studied gender switch in Somali, arguing that Sidaama is different in that it is a true morphological syncretism unrelated to the syntax of plurality. We develop an analysis of Sidaama gender switch in the framework of Distributed Morphology and show how this analysis correctly predicts that feminine is the default gender in Sidaama. Overall, the paper provides a better understanding of gender switch in Sidaama and of the relationship between gender and number generally, it contributes to the very small theoretical-linguistic literature on Sidaama, and it offers some empirical support for Distributed Morphology.

The 68th chapter of the Ethiopian dynastic treatise Kəbrä nägäśt ‘the Nobility of the Kings’ is of considerable interest due to the occurrence of the term mädḫänit interpreted either as ‘Savior’ (in the feminine!) or as ‘Salvation’. The contents of that chapter is focused on a specific ‘essence of Salvation’ (‘ənqwä baḥrəy, literally ‘mother-of-pearl’) created ‘in the abdomen of Adam’ and transmitted from generation to generation. It should be noted that in medieval Ethiopian Christian theology the term baḥrəy ‘pearl’ denoted the Second Hypostasis represented in the unity of His nature. A parallel to such a concept of ‘Salvation’ transfer was found in Islamic tradition, viz. in legends about the emission of light from ‘Abdallāh, Muḥammad’s father, which gave evidence of his engagement in procreation of a future prophet. Similar ideas appeared to influence the early Shī‘ite doctrine.

Edward Said’s Orientalism questions the Western representation of the Eastern ‘other’, especially the Arab Muslims. A misrepresentation that has always treated the orient with inferiority; as barbaric and backward compared to the refined, reasoning and advanced Occident. This form of representation is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali embarked on in her bestselling memoir Infidel (2007). It chronicles her geographical journey from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Netherlands, and her flight from Islam to Atheism. A belief system she finds more appealing to reasoning than Islam which is (according to her) backward and barbaric. Her steadfast criticism of Islam is vividly reflected in her memoir, which ascribes the oppression and tribulations of women to Islam, irrespective of geographical or cultural influence. Such claims are tantamount to feminist Orientalism of Muslim women, whose claims of liberating Muslim women and rescuing them from the oppressive Islam cannot be overemphasized. This paper argues that the practices of misogyny are rooted in culture and not Islam. Thus, it investigates three main points which are central to the ‘Islam oppresses women’ debate: Female Genital Mutilation, Early and/or Forced Marriage and Women as sex objects. Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism as a continuation of Orientalism, propose solutions to the identified problems in Orientalism, which is to unread the misrepresentations by identifying submerged details. Through a contrapuntal reading of Infidel (2007), this study counter-narrates the distortion of Islam by drawing upon authentic Islamic sources. Karya Edward Said Orientalisme mempertanyakan representasi Barat dari “yang lain” di Timur, terutama Muslim Arab. Sebuah penyajian yang keliru yang selalu memperlakukan “orient” dengan inferioritas, sebagai biadab dan terbelakang dibandingkan dengan “Occident”, penalaran dan kemajuan Barat. Bentuk representasi inilah yang memulai Ayaan Hirsi Ali dalam memoarnya yang terlaris, iInfidel (2007). Ini mencatat perjalanan geografisnya dari Somalia ke Arab Saudi, Ethiopia, Kenya, dan Belanda, dan pelariannya dari Islam ke Ateisme. Sebuah sistem kepercayaan yang ia temukan lebih menarik untuk dipertimbangkan daripada Islam yang (menurutnya) terbelakang dan biadab. Kritiknya yang teguh terhadap Islam tercermin dengan jelas dalam memoarnya, yang mengaitkan penindasan dan kesengsaraan wanita dengan Islam, terlepas dari pengaruh geografis atau budaya. Klaim semacam itu sama dengan Orientalisme feminis perempuan Muslim, yang klaimnya membebaskan perempuan Muslim dan menyelamatkan mereka dari Islam yang menindas tidak bisa terlalu ditekankan. Makalah ini berpendapat bahwa praktik misogini berakar pada budaya dan bukan Islam. Oleh karena itu, laporan ini menyelidiki tiga poin utama yang menjadi pusat perdebatan “Islam menindas wanita”: Mutilasi Alat Kelamin Wanita, Pernikahan Dini dan/atau Paksa dan Wanita sebagai objek seks. Karya Edward Said Culture and Imperialism sebagai kelanjutan dari Orientalisme, mengusulkan solusi untuk masalahmasalah yang diidentifikasi dalam Orientalisme, yakni untuk membaca kesalahan representasi dengan mengidentifikasi detail yang terendam. Melalui pembacaan kontrapuntal dari Infidel (2007), penelitian ini membaut kontra-narasi atas distorsi Islam dengan memanfaatkan sumbersumber Islam otentik.

In the face of the contemporary so-called “European refugee crisis,”' the dichotomies of bodies that are naturalized into technology usage and the bodies that remain alienated from it betray the geographic, racial, and gendered discriminations that digital technologies, despite their claims at neutrality and flatness, continue to espouse. This article argues that “young electronic diasporas” (ye-diasporas) (Donà, 2014) present us with an unique view on how Europe is reimagined from below, as people stake out a living across geographies. The main premise is that young connected migrants' cross-border practices shows they ‘do family' in a way that does not align with the universal European, normative expectations of European family life. The author draws on three symptomatic accounts of young connected migrants that are variably situated geo-politically: 1) Moroccan-Dutch youth in the Netherlands; 2) stranded Somalis awaiting family reunification in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and, 3) working, middle, and upper-class young people of various ethnic and class backgrounds living in London. Narratives shared by members of all three groups indicate meta-categories of the ‘migrant,' ‘user,' and ‘e-diaspora' urgently need to be de-flattened. To do this de-flattening work, new links between migrant studies, feminist and postcolonial theory and digital cultures are forged. In an era of increasing digital connectivity and mobility, transnational families are far from deterritorialized – boundaries and insurmountable distances are often forcibly and painfully felt.

Edward Said’s Orientalism questions the Western representation of the Eastern ‘other’, especially the Arab Muslims. A misrepresentation that has always treated the orient with inferiority; as barbaric and backward compared to the refined, reasoning and advanced Occident. This form of representation is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali embarked on in her bestselling memoir Infidel (2007). It chronicles her geographical journey from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Netherlands, and her flight from Islam to Atheism. A belief system she finds more appealing to reasoning than Islam which is (according to her) backward and barbaric. Her steadfast criticism of Islam is vividly reflected in her memoir, which ascribes the oppression and tribulations of women to Islam, irrespective of geographical or cultural influence. Such claims are tantamount to feminist Orientalism of Muslim women, whose claims of liberating Muslim women and rescuing them from the oppressive Islam cannot be overemphasized. This paper argues that the practices of misogyny are rooted in culture and not Islam. Thus, it investigates three main points which are central to the ‘Islam oppresses women’ debate: Female Genital Mutilation, Early and/or Forced Marriage and Women as sex objects. Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism as a continuation of Orientalism, propose solutions to the identified problems in Orientalism, which is to unread the misrepresentations by identifying submerged details. Through a contrapuntal reading of Infidel (2007), this study counter-narrates the distortion of Islam by drawing upon authentic Islamic sources.

Purpose Naturally women have menstruation cycle in permanent time that is once in a month, destroying eggs and leaving the body in the form of bad blood. Girls begin their periods between the ages of 10–18. The average age is 13. Through the ages women have used different forms of menstrual protection. Women often used strips of folded old cloth (rags) to catch their menstrual blood. This old cloth is not recommended for health; in these cases, infection in the body is not friendly with the environment. By considering the above issues for women, the purpose of this paper is to design and develop a feminine reusable pad without a pad holder for economically challenged people around Ethiopian rural area where they live, well supported by the baseline survey and also with different technical tests of fabric and product in order to take care of women’s health-related issues. So a reusable pad is needed to hold off the blood, and it is necessary to change the reusable pad, at least three times a day in order to maintain proper hygiene. A proper reusable pad is made of cotton to absorb the blood, and sticker to stick the pad to the panties. Design/methodology/approach The reusable pad is developed with three different types of fabrics, forming three different layers of the product, such as 100 percent white knitted cotton, which is used as a top layer attached to the skin, which acts as an absorbing fluid and creates comfort to the wearer, polywadding (non-woven) fabric is used at the middle layer, which is mainly used for absorbent purposes, easily washable, and retains cotton fabric shapes from deformation, and water-repellent fabric is used as the lower layer, which acts as a resistant for the blood to prevent from seepage. Findings This new product is developed free from different harmful chemicals and easily available in the market, and it also has good air permeability, good water absorption, comfort, cost affordable, has the best tensile strength, high capacity to hold liquid, best water repellent, and many more features. With the help of this new product, which is aimed at the middle-/lower-middle class people, it gives a lot of benefits with respect to the cost and also takes care of women’s health with all the unique features. Originality/value This is the author’s original research work, which is focused on people who lived in a rural area and were economically challenged. The reusable pad is made up of three different fabrics, such as cotton, polywadding and water repellent. Each of the materials and designs to be used is of the author’s; if it is necessary you can cross-check with other works.

This paper examines commoning and practices of care from a feminist lens, here implying a focus on interdependencies of various spheres of life as well as social categories of difference. Through examples from two case studies of herders as commoners (the Nyangatom in Ethiopia and the Rechtler_innen in Germany), I establish connections between everyday that are inseparable when it comes to sustaining life and commons, while also highlighting conceptual challenges for feminist commons analysis.

Background: Gender refers the socially given attributes, roles, activities, responsibilities and needs connected to being men (masculine) and women (feminine) in a given society at a given time, and as a member of a specific community within specific society, while HIV is a virus that attacks immune cells called CD4 cells. Notably, disability results from the interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and effective participation in society on equal basis with others. However, the relationship between HIV and disability has not received due attention. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the cross cutting issues of gender, HIV/AIDS and disability in Ethiopia. Methods: All relevant and available documents addressed in related with gender, HIV/AIDS and disability. In the review, the obtained quantitative and qualitative data was comprehensively and comparatively analyzed using documenting analysis. Results and Conclusion: Gender inequity and inequality is a pervasive problem in Ethiopia. Still now a day, women in Ethiopia occupy low status in the society. Gender based discrimination, lack of protection of basic human rights, education and training, basic health services and employment are widespread throughout Ethiopia. The HIV/AIDS epidemic remains one of the public health challenges in Ethiopia since it was first recognized in the mid-1980s. The HIV is a life-changing illness; a person can live a long and full live with it. People transmit HIV in their bodily fluids, including: blood, semen, vaginal secretions, anal fluids and breast milk. Women represent almost half of the 40 million people worldwide living with HIV. Due to women’s greater physiological, socio-cultural and economic susceptibility to HIV infection, it is likely that the proportion of female adults and young women living with HIV will continue to rise in many regions of the world. It is estimated that 1 billion people (15% of the world’s population) have a disability. Therefore, gender and disability as cross-cutting issues in the response to HIV also calls for broader social, cultural and economic development which is person centered and disability-inclusive to addresses the unique barriers that face people with disabilities in particular women and people living with HIV.

Introduction The past decade has seen a burgeoning new field titled “night studies” or “darkness studies” (Gwiazdzinski, Maggioli, and Straw). Key theorists Straw, Shaw, Dunn, and Edensor have spearheaded this new field, publishing a recent flurry of books and other scholarly work dedicated to various aspects of the night. Topics range, for instance, from the history of artificial lighting (Shaw), atmospheres of urban light and darkness (Sumartojo, Edensor, and Pink), street music and public space at night (Reia), the experience of eating in the dark (Edensor and Falconer), walking at night (Morris; Dunn), gendered experiences of the city at night (Hardley; Hardley and Richardson “Mobile Media”, “Mistrust”), and women’s solo experiences of the wilderness at night. Contributing to this new field, this article considers some of the embodied ways mobile media have been deployed in the urban night. To date, this topic has not received much attention within the fields of mobile media or night studies. The research presented in this article draws on a qualitative research project conducted in Australia from 2016-2020. The project focussed on participants’ use of mobile media in urban spaces at night and conducted a specific analysis of pertinent gendered differences. Throughout my iterative and longitudinal research process, I engaged various phases of data collection to explore participants’ night-time mobile media practices, as well as to consider how darkness and the night impact networked practices in ways that speak to the postphenomenological concept of multistability (Ihde Postphenomenology and Technoscience). I highlight the empirical findings through a series of participant stories, exploring salient insights into embodied perceptions of darkness and various ways of co-opting mobile media practices in the urban night. Methods: Data Collection, Interpretation, and Representation My research took place in Perth and Melbourne from 2016-2020. A total of 98 individuals, aged 19 to 67 years, participated. Participants came from diverse backgrounds, including urban and rural Australia, Sweden, America, Ethiopia, Italy, Argentina, USA, and England. They were students, teachers, chefs, unemployed, stay-at-home-parents, miners, small business owners, retired, doctors, and government scientists. They identified across the sexuality and gender identity spectrums. My techniques for data collection were grouped into four main phases: (i) an initial survey; (ii) home visits, which included interviews, haptic experiments, observations, and my own situatedness in participants’ homes; (iii) geo-locative tracking and text messaging; and (iv) online follow-up interviews. The study was open to anyone who lived in Perth or Melbourne, was over 18 years old, and used a smartphone. All phases of the data collection were conducted during the day or at night, depending on participant availability. My focus on darkness and the night, in relation to mobile media, evolved over time. The first question regarding mobile media and the night was posed in 2016 during initial data collection, using an online survey to cast a wide net to gather insights on networked functionality afforded by mobile phones and perceptions of safety and risk in urban and domestic space. Participants frequently referred to the differences between day and night. During home visits and face-to-face interviews in 2017, as well as online interviews in 2020, I sought to gain deeper insights into participants’ sensory experiences of darkness and the night. My interpretation and representation of the data adopts a similar approach as vignettes, which are described by Berry in her book on creative practice and mobile media. For Berry, vignettes are a way of “braiding” (xv) accounts of participant experience together. My particular use of this approach has been published in detail elsewhere (Hardley and Richardson “Digital Placemaking”). Postphenomenology, Multistability, and Mobile Media Throughout this article I frame engagement with mobile media as a particular kind of body-technology relation. As the founder of postphenomenology, Ihde, writes, “technologies transform our experience of the world and our perceptions and interpretations of our world, and we in turn become transformed in this process” (Postphenomenology and Technoscience 44). Ihde adapted phenomenology (from Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Heidegger) by shifting away from an essentialist body-subject to non-essentialist contextualisation. As Ihde explains (he uses archery longbows and arrows to make his point), all tools are the “same” in an abstract sense; however, “radically different practices fit differently into various contexts” (Postphenomenology and Technoscience 16). In other words, tools (including mobile media) are never neutral and are always multiple and variable depending on context and practice. All tools are therefore situated and embodied in culturally specific ways. Postphenomenological scholarship can, thus, be said to capture the cultural specificity of all human-technology relations. The following examples help illustrate this defining characteristic of postphenomenology, as distinct from phenomenology. It could be argued that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological description of the blind man with his cane is an essentialist notion of what it’s like to experience blindness. On the other hand, Wellner’s postphenomenological description of using a mobile phone describes how the same technology can be used by different people in multiple ways, as people assign different meanings to the technology. This notion is best captured by the term multistability, which suggests each technology has numerous uses, applications and purposes. As Irwin explains, the term multistability—one of Ihde’s central concepts within postphenomenology—conveys the inherent adaptability and mutability of both bodies and media engagement, depending on the context or situatedness of a tool’s use. In the following sections, I first explore embodied perceptions of darkness and the night, and then explore how mobile media have modified participants’ embodied perception of darkness and how it informs their situated awareness of their urban surroundings. In terms of my research, this concerns how mobile media users embody their devices in an array of different ways, especially at night. “Feeling” the Night: Embodied Perceptions of Darkness Darkness, and the night, are not simply about the lack of vision. Indeed, while sensory perception in the dark, such as obscured vision and the heightening of other senses, comes into play, we also encounter the night through an enmeshed cultural relationship of darkness and danger. Shaw describes this relationship in the following way: darkness has been equated with danger: the night was a time when demons, criminals and others who presented a threat were imagined to be present in the landscape. Darkness was thus imagined as a space in which both real and mythical dangers were present. (“Controlling Darkness” 5) Chris, a young gay man living in a medium-sized town close to Melbourne, leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and laughed when I asked him if he has ever been scared of the dark. He responded: [Silence] Yeah! I have! Wow, what a funny question. [Laughter] I remember always checking my closet as a child before getting into bed. And the door had to be closed. I could not sleep if the closet door was open. When asked what he thought might be in the closet at night, he laughed again and shared: I have no idea. I don’t think I ever thought it was a person, just the unknown. How funny to think about that now—as a gay man I was scared of what might come out of the closet! [Laughter] Chris’s observation of his habitual childhood behaviour illustrates an embodied cultural imagery of darkness and the role of fear, anxieties and the unknown in the dark. He also spoke of “growing out of” his fantastical fear of the dark as he entered adulthood. This contrasts with what many women in my study described, noting their transition from childhood “fears of the dark” to very real and “felt” experiences of darkness and danger. This opened up a major finding in my research, and uncovered navigational and connectivity strategies often deployed by women in urban spaces at night (Hardley and Richardson “Mistrust”). For instance, Leah (a woman in her late 40s living in Perth), revealed her peripatetic engagement with the (sub)urban night when she described her cycling routes with her 8-year-old daughter. While talking with me via Zoom in 2020, she explained: I have an electric bike—it’s great. I can zip around the city and I have a kid’s seat on the back for my daughter. Sometimes I feel like a hybrid pedestrian—I can switch quickly between being on the road or the footpath. Recently, my daughter asked why we always take the long way home at night. I had to think quickly to come up with a response because I think she’s too young to know the truth. I told her that parks are often empty at night, so if something happens to us then there will be no one to help. In a way that’s true, but really, it’s because as a woman and a child it’s safer for us to remain on well-lit streets. Leah’s experience of the city and her mobility at night are distinctly gendered; she reflects on her experience as a “hybrid pedestrian” in relation to what could happen to her and her daughter if they were to ride through the park at night instead of remaining on the well-lit bike path. Overwhelmingly, the men who participated in my study did not share similar experiences or reflections. Introducing the embodiment of darkness and the night, along with associated fears and anxieties, in a general sense sets the atmospheric scene for a postphenomenological analysis of embodied experiences of the urban night and how users co-opt mobile media functionalities to manage their embodied experiences of the dark. Chris and Leah’s stories both suggest how we “feel” at night has important implications for the practical way(s) in which we engage, navigate and curate our experiences of the dark. In the following section, I consider how mobile devices are literally “handled”, particularly by women in the urban context, to mitigate fears and anxieties of the night. I contend that our embodied experience of the urban night is mediated by, and through, our collective and individual fears, anxieties and perceptions of danger in the dark. Co-opting Mobile Media: Multistable Experiences of the Urban Night Reflecting on his own practices of walking at night, Dunn writes, walking at night, however, offers something different, having the capacity to alter our ingrained, seemingly natural predispositions towards the urban surroundings, and our perceptions along with it. (9) Indeed, the night can offer a “capacity to alter”; however, I suggest that it can also reinforce anxieties and fears of the dark (both real and imagined). As such, walking at night can also reinforce “ingrained, seemingly natural predispositions”. Postphenomenology is useful here, as it offers a way to think through practices of what Ihde calls “amplification” and “reduction” of the corporeal schema. Through both actions, mobile media users habituate themselves or take up residence in the urban night by and through their use of smartphone functionalities, as well as their sense of networked connectivity. In the context of this article, the corporeal schema undergoes an amplification and reduction via the co-opting of mobile media, such as an embodied sense of networked connectivity or a tactile prop, to generate a “tele-cocoon” (Habuchi), “shield” (Verhoeff), or “bubble” (Bull Sounding). The corporeal schema can be understood as our lived experience of the world (Merleau-Ponty), whereby our “perceptual reach and bodily boundaries, is always-already extendible through artifacts and technologies” (Hardley and Richardson “Mistrust”). The digital cocoon afforded by mobile media is often gendered and overtly concerned with issues of personal safety and privacy, especially at night. For many women, generating an imagined boundary between the self and others in shared urban spaces is an important function of mobile media. As one Perth participant reflected, my phone’s a good distraction when I’m alone in a public place, especially at night if I’m waiting for someone. Sometimes guys will come up and try to start a conversation—it’s so annoying. If I focus on my phone, it’s like telling them to leave me alone. This tactical use of mobile media to carve out one’s own space in crowded social places was especially common among the women I interviewed. Yet, such practices are also deployed by men, albeit for different reasons. In Melbourne, Dane described the strategic use of his mobile phone as both a creative tool of connection and a means of communicating—especially to women at night—that he was non-threatening. As a proud late-adopter of smartphones, he explained to me that his main reason for buying one had been the camera function; he refers to his smartphone as “a camera that rings”. He particularly enjoys taking photos at night, during which time his familiar streets become “moody and strange”. He spends many hours walking in his neighbourhood, capturing shadows and uploading the images to his public Instagram account. Referring to his dark skin and shaved head, he joked, “I’d look great in a line-up” and added: sometimes I feel a bit self-conscious on the bus or train, particularly late at night, I think maybe I could seem like a threat or something. So, I’ll play a game or chat to friends about my photos via Instagram. I figure it works both ways—I don’t notice anyone and people don’t notice me. As these participant stories reveal, the personal privacy bubble offered by our mobile devices is co-opted differently. Turning to Ihde’s notion of multistability, these examples can be analysed and understood as mobile technologies’ potential variabilities with multiple outcomes (Ihde Postphenomenology and Technoscience). To explore and explain this further, I consider the following participant story in which Britta, an American living in Melbourne, reflected on her night-time pedestrian practices across two cities, sharing: at night, in Australia, my phone would be in my bra. In Philadelphia, it would be in my hand. It's totally different because of safety. When at University in the U.S., I would always talk to a friend while walking from one place to the next. It doesn't even cross my mind to do that in Australia. In Philadelphia, I would call one of the girls I lived with and if someone approached me, I could say, "Oh shit, I'm about to get mugged, this is where I am” and they could call the cops. It's a sense of being on guard. I would never walk using headphones in Philadelphia. In Australia, if I go running at night I listen to music with one earphone in. In this vignette, Britta has habituated an acute awareness of her corporeal schema. As Wellner suggests, “the world is always a negotiation between humans and their tools, their artifacts, their technology, and their devices” (5). In this context, Britta has an amplified awareness of her situatedness, and uses her mobile phone to listen to music in different ways depending on her geographical location. There is a direct connection to her use of headphones to listen to music and her embodied perception of personal safety at night. Turning to Ihde, this participant story can be explained through the term “non-neutrality”, which describes how “no technology is ‘one thing,’ nor is it incapable of belonging to multiple contexts” (Ihde Technology and Prognostic 47). Such an example points to the non-neutrality of mobile media, and how “our perception and environment are mediated by the technology” (Wellner 15). This analysis can be extended further to consider the use of headphones (as an extension of the mobile phone) and geographical location in relation to the concept of multistability—that is, the specificity of use. As Irwin writes, “how is it to be an earbudded body in the world? ... Earbuds are non-neutral and they are becoming deeply imbedded in daily life” (81). Indeed, Bull’s influential work on how personal stereos and iPods change users’ experiences of public spaces (Sound Moves) is useful here in understanding the background of what Irwin refers to as “keeping sound in and sound out” (81). It is, according to Irwin, “about privacy and isolation” (81); however, as Britta’s vignette shows, mobile media practices of privacy and isolation in urban spaces can be impacted by geographical location and urban darkness, and are also distinctly gendered. Applying the concept of multistability allows me to consider how, in some instances, mobile phones are often deployed as a proxy Do Not Disturb sign when alone in public (Hardley and Richardson “Mistrust”). While, in other instances, one’s embodied experience of being an earbudded body in the world can increase their perceptual sense of risk based on various factors, such as geographical location. Beyond this, it also speaks to the relational ontology between body and technology and the mutability of perception. In Britta’s example, her corporeal schema in the urban night is amplified by and through her personal and situated embodiment of mobile media use, particularly her decision to use headphones in specific ways depending on her geographical location. In 2017, I conducted a home visit with Dominique, a woman in her 30s living in Perth. During this visit, she reflected on her use of a Bluetooth earpiece, especially at night, sharing: I use a Bluetooth earpiece to talk over the phone. I also sometimes wear it at night even if I'm not on the phone or expecting a call as I can quickly request that Siri call someone for me without having to actually dig out my phone, unlock it and make the call. I prefer having my hands free. It can make me feel safer at night. Dominique’s description of having her mobile phone on standby can be understood as a habituated practice to overcome her anxieties of being alone at night in urban space, as well as to apprehend her sensory experience of the urban night by remaining “hands free”. Similar to Britta, Dominique’s embodiment in the urban night had become habituated and sedimented over time—or, in other words, “[a] force of habit” (Rosenberger and Verbeek 25). In this way, Dominique’s embodiment is configured depending on her contextual specificity, such as being alone in public spaces at night. Conclusion This article contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of “night studies” and “darkness studies” by focusing on the relationship between mobile media practices and the urban night. I based my methods, including data collection, interpretation and representation, in a postphenomenological framework, and detailed how this framework is useful in reflecting deeply and critically on mobile media use at night. Drawing from the framework’s key concept of multistability, I suggest a particular analysis of how users co-opt mobile media functionalities in situationally unique and personal ways in the urban night. The ways in which users co-opt these functionalities are often gendered. I unpacked how some of my research participants deploy mobile media functions as a means of managing their fears and anxieties of darkness and the urban night, and suggest that such uses are always dependent on the users specific situatedness, both within urban spaces and toward other city dwellers. 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