Mobile Networked Creativity: Transforming Precarity into Localized Power

A fresh new exploration of creativity as a strategy for surviving in a mobile and networked world.

Mobile Networked Creativity is a new approach to understanding what it means to be creative in today’s world. Though creativity is often viewed as an artistic or individual process, Adriana de Souza e Silva and Mai Nou Xiong-Gum define mobile networked creativity as the ongoing collaboration between people and technologies that occurs in situations of hardship and precarious mobilities. At a time when “creativity” is marketed as a corporate skill or national resource, Mobile Networked Creativity exposes its deeper role within the struggles over power, mobility, and justice.

Moving beyond familiar stories of individual genius, innovation labs, and corporate brainstorming sessions, this book reveals creativity’s transformative power. Drawing from examples across the globe—from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to refugee camps—this book shows how marginalized communities use mobile technologies and everyday networks to survive, resist, and negotiate their relationships with their environments. Rather than treating creativity as a distinction of the few, the authors redefine creativity as a collective and relational process shaped by the interactions among people, technologies, and spaces.