Mobile networked creativity is an emergent practice that arises from the ongoing relationships among people and people with technologies—or networked resources. In this article, we propose a concept of creativity as emerging from networked connections, (im)mobility, and situations of hardship. We, thus, make a connection between mobility and space as networked elements of creativity as opposed to individual agent models. We focus on how unplanned or emergent uses of digital technologies reveal how creative practices emerge, particularly in the context of mobile technology use where people are physically mobile and yet connected via the Internet. We define the concept of creativity as a constant process of becoming, a “recursive organization” that can be seen in groups such as migrants, or people living in disenfranchised communities that survive in make-shift locations such refugee camps or slums. Contrary to the affluent and capitalistic-embedded traditional ideas of creativity, mobile networked creativity is a practice that is found mostly in situations of economic hardship, power imbalances, and (im)mobilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic may soon be coming to its end, but COVID-19 still kills thousands of people every single day (at time of writing). Even if COVID-19 now represents less of a health risk, and less disruption to our personal lives, we know this won’t be the last pandemic. Preparing for the next pandemic includes understanding the past and planning for the future. It includes rethinking “normal” ways of interacting with others, our technologies, and the spaces in which we live. In this introduction, we show how the pandemic has challenged the role of mobile communication in our everyday lives, making us rethink the very meaning of mobile communication—from simply communicating while on the move, to a networked resource that supports emotional and personal connections. During the pandemic, mobile communication practices and the development of new mobile technologies, such as contact-tracing apps and mobile mapping, was strongly tied to the infrastructural politics that took place through government and private companies’ interventions. In addition, mobile technologies became a primary source of support for those who became immobile, or were forced to move. However, mobile communication is not only enabled by end devices; it happens at the intersection of both end devices and the infrastructures that enable them to work. The articles in this special issue reflect some of these themes, and address how the pandemic has shaped and rearranged our mobile communication, sociability, and networked urban mobility practices around the world. Although each article engages with the challenges of the pandemic in its unique and original way, in this introduction we highlight some overlapping topics and methodologies that run across multiple articles, namely historical perspectives on the pandemic, urban and transnational networked mobilities, the use of mobile apps and interfaces for community and self-care, pandemic context in the Global South, and networks and infrastructures.

Understanding creativity from a decolonial perspective means removing the focus from the individual as innovator (as well as its profit-oriented goal), and instead highlighting the ongoing networked relationships among people, technologies, and spaces that often occur with creative practices. This creative process is not concerned with the creation of new things. Rather, it is about the mobility and networking of resources that can improve lives and facilitate survival strategies. In order to understand how creative practices occur in non-traditional contexts outside the colonial Global North perspective, we have developed a PubPub repository to crowdsource examples of creativity. PubPub is an open-source, web publishing platform that prioritizes community-generated and knowledge sharing. It is a low-barrier entry method to share information and knowledge within one's community of learners—in our case, individuals interested in creative practices that occur outside traditional corporate and profit-oriented domains. In this presentation, we will describe the conceptualization and development of our online repository, focusing on how open science knowledge and crowdsourced information can help decolonize creative processes. Our project will accomplish four main goals: (1) explain this concept of creativity for a broad and non-academic audience, (2) share previous research and materials about this topic, (3) ask the audience to contribute to the collection, and (4) display the crowdsourced examples from the audience. In building our PubPub housing, we were especially interested in collecting publicly-identified instances of creativity to support the development and accessibility of a broad collection of examples found across the world.

Together, our projects pose the question of what else can be possible as a way to rearrange the power relations that have contributed to the asymmetric flows of information and resources to some instead of others. We are inspired by indigenous scholars’ claim that “decolonization is not a metaphor” because liberation should not be a metaphor: it should be a possibility. We, panelists, hope to engage conversations that address the future of the internet, especially the future of mobile communication with the lessons learned from studies. Panelists offer a close reading of four scenarios: in South Korea among residents whose locative data tell a story about their comings and goings, among International Exchange Students mobile media use during the on-set of travel bans, in China among rural-to-urban female migrant workers, and in Brazil among those who used the Unified Slum Dashboard to called attention for proper government intervention. Among our research methods are interviews, observations, content analysis, and case study to bring attention to and make institutional space for voices and accounts of community engagement that have been marginalized or overlooked. Our findings share a common theme that mobile media simultaneously can liberate and complicate our mobility choices, especially during a global pandemic, but that it can be a civic media in which liberation can be possible through more careful policies that take minoritized experiences into consideration for future policies.

Mobile networked creativity is an emergent practice that arises from the ongoing relationships among people and people with technologies—or networked resources. In this paper, we propose a concept of creativity as emerging from serendipity and mobility. We focus on how unplanned or emergent uses of digital technologies reveal how creative practices emerge, particularly in the context of mobile phone use where people are also physically mobile and yet connected via the internet. This concept of creativity as a constant process of becoming is a “recursive organization” that can be seen in groups such as migrants, or people living in disenfranchised communities that survive in make-shift locations such refugee camps or slums. Contrary to the affluent and capitalistic-embedded traditional ideas of creativity, mobile networked creativity is a practice that is most often found in situations of economic hardship, power imbalances, and immobilities.