Since 2018, I am an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Media Studies and Journalism, University of Groningen. I have also taught at the University of British Columbia (Kelowna) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie (CREDO) in Marseille. I received my PhD in March 2017 through a joint/cotutelle programme in Social and Cultural Analysis from Concordia University, Montreal, and in Social Anthropology and Ethnology, from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.My research combines anthropologies of technologies and material culture with indigenous studies and economic anthropology. It is driven by a desire to understand how people living on the margins of global capital negotiate places of their own in a rapidly digitizing world. This quest began during my doctoral fieldwork among the Lau-speakers of Malaita Province, Solomon Islands (February 2014-February 2015). Here I completed the first in-depth study on the shifting moralities of smartphones, as capitalist technologies, in horticultural Solomon Islands, published most comprehensively in my monograph, The Digitizing Family: An Ethnography of Melanesian Smartphones (Palgrave, 2020).
I have, for example, examined how digital technologies, infrastructures and media have become integrated into reciprocal gift-giving within contexts of circular labour migration and urban diasporas (Digital Cultures & Society, 2017; Ethnos, 2020) and most recently how Solomon Islander horticulturalists have transformed Facebook’s capitalist markets (buy and sell groups) into online iterations of non-capitalist bush markets (Media, Culture & Society, in press).
Geoffrey Hobbis 