Mitrea, Oana | Romania

I am a Sociologist with strong interests in Communication Studies and STS. After graduating at the University of Bucharest, I had worked for five years as a Research Project Manager at the Romanian Institute for Public Opinion (IRSOP), Bucharest, where I was mainly responsible for qualitative research on political and advertising communication, and quantitative studies on consumption. Particularly the work carried out at this institute about the introduction and impact of mobile communication technologies in Romania has introduced me to the field of Science and Technology Studies, which has quickly become one of my favourite domains.

Between January 2001-December 2003 I had been a fellow of the Graduate School “Technification and Society”, at the Darmstadt University of Technology. Since January 2004 I have been continuing the research as an associate fellow of the same group. My thesis, called “Understanding the Usage Patterns of Mobile Telephony - The Rise of the Mobile Communication Dispositif”, focuses on the intertwining between technical frames of mobile telephony and the interlaced communication and mobility behaviour. Following a general orientation of the Darmstadt School, “Technification and Society”, the relation between wireless communication technology and the human subject as user is explained through the concept of the dispositif that “arranges” the spatial context of communication, enables specific social contacts, transmits particular contents, and structures affective reactions and perceptions. The analysis is based on the results of an explorative quantitative study conducted in 2002 on users and non-users of mobile phones.

Some results of the dissertation are presented in: Configuration of the Mental Spaces in Mobile Telephony, (together with Georgeta Cornita, online publication of the conference Transforming Spaces, Darmstadt, March, 2002), and The dispositif model of wireless communication technology (Umbria, Baia Mare, 2004).

Project at IAS-STS: The Gendered Patterns of Localization and Mobility in the Usage of Wireless Communication Technologies

The current project aims to develop a research direction opened by the Ph.D. thesis about the influence of gender on the usage and perception of wireless technologies. The main objective is to refine the theoretical model of the dispositif with the particular consideration of the impact of this variable.

The doctoral thesis has already confirmed that gender influenced various dimensions of wireless technology usage such as: the transmitted contents, the affective perception of mobile communication, the image of the technology and communicators. In this project, the impact of the gender variable will be further examined in what concerns the physical mobility of users during communication, processes of localization, and perception of the environmental risk of the technology.

To examine the suppositions, two types of procedures will be used. First, an in-depth analysis of several variables already included in the empirical study of the doctoral thesis will be performed. Then, a secondary analysis of data in various European countries about mobility and the usage of mobile communication technologies will be conducted.