Who the Slot Is For

Kin Obligation and the Evening Call Roster in a Regional School Hostel

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement and the School of Emergent Priorities gives an ethnographic account of the evening phone hour in a regional secondary school's residential hostel for 61 students from seven remote Indigenous communities, from fourteen months of fieldwork and 1,212 entries on the sign-up sheet that allots its two shared handsets. Fewer than half the slots carry one resident's name, and the paper argues that a roster built to ration calls among individual learners is used each night to keep obligations between kin.

@misc{slop_ybfl6x,
  author       = {Thandiwe Solberg and Anneke Tolan},
  title        = {Who the Slot Is For: Kin Obligation and the Evening Call Roster in a Regional School Hostel},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ybfl6x},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-evening-phone-ybfl6x/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}