 Photo by □□ Janko Ferlič on Unsplash I am very delighted to announce that my book is coming out soon. I feel very proud of what I have achieved. Truth be told, I have never really thought that I will be able to produce and publish a book. I didn't expect that moving to Brunei Darussalam for work would pave the way for an embodied experience of being an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW), and eventually lead to developing a PhD research project on examining the role of digital media and technologies in shaping transnational family life. I migrated to Australia in 2012 to start my PhD journey. So after many years of hardwork and dedication, I wrote a thesis in which contents were presented in several conferences and published in journals and edited book collections. The book encapsulates my journey, growth and positioning as a scholar in the field of digital media, mobilities and migration. I couldn't thank enough the people and institutions that have become part of my journey. More importantly, I will be forever indebted to the transnational families who welcomed me into their homes and entrusted me their stories, hopes, dreams, and even frustrations in navigating a mobile world. Their words, affective narratives and motive and personalised photos are carefully mapped, analysed, and incorporated into the volume.  My book is titled "(Im)mobile Homes: Family life at a distance in the age of mobile media". It will be published as part of the Studies in Mobile Communication Series of Oxford University Press. I will speak more about the book when it's launched. For now, if you're interested to get a copy, you can pre-order via Amazon. Here is the blurb: The home has been on the forefront of rapid economic, political, social, and technological transformations for many individuals and families across the world. As a country reliant on the exportation of human labor to sustain its national economy, the Philippines exemplifies a valuable case study of the impacts of a globalized and networked society on the everyday dynamics of a transnational family arrangement. Despite ranking among the heaviest Internet users in the world, Filipino citizens are often left with no choice but to navigate digital and transnational environments orchestrated by the uneven distribution of both national and international resources and opportunities. (Im)mobile Homes investigates the role of smartphones, social media channels, and various mobile applications in forging and sustaining intimate ties among dispersed Filipino family members. Examining the digital lifeworlds of transnational Filipino family in Australia, this volume draws on rich ethnographic study to explore the benefits of digital communication as well as the tensions enabled by the influences of socio-cultural structures, socio-economic conditions, technological affordances, and institutional policies and processes on mobile practices. It portrays the physically distributed yet virtually connected nature of the transnational Filipino family through diverse contexts, such as observing family rituals, performing intimate care, and managing crises, and foregrounds their unique strategies in addressing the interruptions of connecting at a distance. Ultimately, this volume underscores how mobile practices of the transnational Filipino family negotiate the pre-existing and broader structural systems that (re)produce marginalization in a digital and global era. Enriched by moving stories of transnational families, (Im)mobile Homes offers a critical lens towards interrogating the possibilities and politics of a home from afar in the digital era.
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