Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

How can scholars explore social implications of technologies or research methods without accounting for the meanings that people embody through the narratives of their lives? This paper will explore questions of meaning making and narrative as embodied language performance through the lens of the presenter’s five-year project exploring mobile phone use among businesswomen, small farmers, and miners in Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. What started as a seemingly straightforward question about how people could use cell phones in their businesses became an exploration asking how people express their personhood and social connections through language practices. After the formal project ended, questions arose concerning how I could express my participation with my African colleagues. How did disciplinary boundaries constrain available options for communicating my lived experience? How did racial identities confound my story? How did the lived experience of politics in the DR Congo prevent this project from continuing? After encountering one roadblock after another in conducting, reporting on, and discussing this project, I came to realize that all I could claim as my own was my story about my lived experiences, whether I was able to tell the story or not as a communication professional.