Networked Mobilities Lab

My disciplinary educational journey is rooted in Communication - I have a BA in Advertising (PUC Minas, Brazil), a MPhil in Contemporary Communication and Sociability (UFMG, Brazil), and a PhD in Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media (NC State, USA). While grounded in Communication, my research agenda sprouts within the cracks between the fields of critical and cultural media studies, media arts, and mobilities. I am fortunate to have been able to have an educational journey mostly built in Brazilian universities where interdisciplinarity and creative experimentation were highly encouraged. This led me to expand my understanding of communication interactions beyond transmission efficiency and consensual meaning-making, and to explore the richness of noise and glitches for interactive, interventionist communication interactions. During my doctorate studies, my interests in media arts shifted from web-based, graphic interface experiments to mobile cultures. I was initially intrigued by the creative potential of mobile interfaces in producing places for artistic and political intervention, and then became really invested in different scales of spatial territorialization. The rise of datification and pervasive computing fed our human desire to map everything, from the body to physical spaces. The desire to quantify and categorize reifies normative understandings of bodies and territories as healthy, normal, deviant, safe/unsafe. I use creative technology-making as a way to explore my research questions. Right now, I am invested in translating these creative actions as pedagogical approaches to my courses. I am also invested in reconciling my educational experience in Brazil with my experience in the U.S. to explore how a Brazilian perspective on Communication studies decenters Western-white forms of knowledge and technology production.

I have some works in progress that I am very excited about. One looks at "gambiarras" as a caring technology and a model of decolonial innovation. "Gambiarras" are temporary, makeshift , alternative technical solutions. The most common imagery for a gambiarra is of the illegal tangled connections of electric wires on a light pole, waiting for an accidental fire to happen. This is a spin off of my work in Street-Smart Cities. I argue that gambiarras reveal ways to appropriate media technologies that are marked by improvisation, DIY, and creation through/despite the scarcity of resources. My argument is that these modes of appropriation can inform a decolonial theoretical framework of media appropriation that can define a unique perspective on technological innovation. I am also very invested in my work with Marginalia Making at NC State. We are a collective of conscientious troublemakers who engage with critical making as critical care, and since Spring 2023, we have offered 11 workshops and interventions to over 100 students.

My current work relates to the scalar perspectives of mobilities as forms of exercise of power and how forms of technology appropriation resist and propose alternative infrastructures to facilitate access and profit. My research interest in technology appropriation often resides at the brink of illegality, and I have often looked at these practices of hacking, repair, circuit bending, for example, as forms of counter-culture and activism that are tied to political ideals of social betterment and universal access. I am now starting to look at assumedly illegal forms of technological appropriation (i.e., counterfeiting) and the mobility practices they put in place to ensure individual insertion into a neoliberal capitalist society. 

Emma Stanley: My BA and MA are in English literature, and during the process of earning those degrees, I met a variety of individuals in the electronic literature field, and more broadly, digital media scholars. I became intrigued by the intersection of philosophy, narrative, digital/mobile media, and more, and ended up taking a class at Clemson University with Dr. Jordan Frith that allowed me to explore all of these intersections during my MA years.

Jordan had studied under Dr. Silva at NC State in the CRDM Ph.D. program, and he felt it would be a great fit for me as well. Out of many Ph.D. offers, I chose State because I was excited to work with Dr. Silva-- coming here was my top choice!--, and I've enjoyed every moment of it. I'm now a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the CRDM program, and I study mobile & locative media, specifically with regard to urban spaces and how our interactions with GPS-enabled items and applications impact our relationship and engagement with those physical spaces.

Emma Stanley: I've had the opportunity to work on many exciting projects regarding GPS-enabled applications, but I'm honestly most excited about my current dissertation research. It focuses on urban nightlife in Raleigh, and how it is impacted by GPS-enabled applications and governmental ordinances. I find this to be interesting and exciting because it's a significant contribution to academic research, but hopefully will also benefit individuals beyond the academy. I'll talk more about this in the future, but I hope that this research will eventually become a book project that appeals to the general public.

Emma Stanley: Read, read, read-- examine the literature from some of the best folks in the field (Dr. Silva!!! Dr. Frith!!! + more!), and reflect on your own usage of mobile/locative media, as well as the developing technologies in the field of mobilities. This includes things like the usage of Uber, Lyft, or new modes of transportation... and so much more. There's a lot out there-- find your niche and explore! P.S.-- getting a dog (or multiple dogs) definitely helps with getting outside and doing mobilities research. That's probably the most important advice.

Manushri Pandya: I’m currently a third-year PhD student in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM) program at NC State. My past educational background has certainly shaped my present academic career. I completed my B.A. in English Literature from India, which is when I started thinking about how language and communication can design different experiences for everyone. I was always fascinated by the connection between technology and communication, and I wanted to pursue a field that articulated how these two genres can be seen working adjacently. I then pursued my M.S. in Technical Communication from Missouri University of Science and Technology, which served as a stepping stone for me to think about advancing my career into a PhD program. Being a CRDM student has enabled me to understand the role of technology, digital media, networks, mobilities, and social justice in the bigger picture of communication studies.

Manushri Pandya: My scholarly work so far has been focused on risk communication, digital interface design, technical communication, communication networks, and data visualization. I have recently been working on the geospatial mapping of mobile networked creativity examples hosted on the Mobile Networked Creativity (MNC) website. I use the ArcGIS StoryMaps platform to create a visual and interactive mapped representation of where certain instances of MNC unfolded, who was enacting them (or enacted by them), and what was their specific intent and purpose. It has been very interesting to work on this project because it reveals various geo-political insights on mobile networked creativity and making do. These examples highlight how MNC is a culturally diverse endeavor occurring – in most cases – as a result of unequal access to resources.

Manushri Pandya: I’d highly encourage students interested in mobile communication research to check out the various ongoing projects at the Networked Mobilities Lab (NML). Another great avenue for students would be to engage with the lecture series featured on the NML website to gauge their interests and see how mobile communication research would be meaningful for their specific goals.

DR. XIONG-GUM: As an undergraduate, I was a double major in French and Political Science. While this start to my educational journey might seem distant from communication studies at first glance, it was actually quite useful in helping me add to scholarly conversations in the field. This background helped to shape my interest in rhetoric, mobilities, networks, and issues of power, although, I do admit I didn't see this as clearly back in those days. I always loved language and saw it as a source of power, but there are limitations to social constructivism that I couldn't start to resolve until I started engaging with actor network theory and networks in general. In social constructivism, the basic idea is that language constructs our realities and experience of the world, and that language has power. So, if most people have the capacity to use language, or to communicate, then why is there such a differential distribution of power? With a background in postcolonial francophone literature, political science, and rhetoric, I saw how language can be weaponized upon people, to campaign, to erase their identities, or to create new spaces of social encounters. But it isn't language alone that is able to create these spaces. For instance, colonists didn't only go in to take over people's languages and way of life, they went in with a network of resources like doctrines, policies, vehicles, guns, tools, and foot soldiers. There was an entire system of political power that enabled language to be a source of power. So, in a way, this can be translated to a core part of my research identity, which rests on the idea that communication is a source of power, but this power is enabled by a network of relations. So, today, when I think about how communication shapes human behavior, I consider both the symbolic use of communication and the material use of inter-related systems and infrastructures come together to influence our choices or options. This is what has drawn me to study bordering practices and creative media practices because I see them as inter-related and in tension with one another. For example, states are continuously finding more and more creative ways to regulate our mobilities by way of newer surveillance technologies, while forced migrants are also finding more and more ways to address mobility issues by taking on dangerous routes or using questionable makeshift water vessels and so on. All the while, language is used to shape our public perceptions and understanding about the very nuanced phenomenon of our current migration crises. This is to say that my education journey has shaped my understanding of my current interests, but it wasn't by design. Communication studies is so interdisciplinary that it welcomes these kinds of journeys. I've also encountered excellent mentors that helped me to draw my connections. And, for the most part, I think everyone's own educational journey gives them their unique perspective on some field of communication studies' larger questions.

DR. XIONG-GUM: I'm still in my early career stage, and I'm still developing my research agenda, but I would say that my most notable research so far would be the article that I co-authored with Adriana de Souza e Silva, Mobile Networked Creativity, published in Communication Theory. This article opens up with the line that creativity is a hot topic now days, and we spend the remainder of the introduction explaining that people often don't think of creativity as a form of communication because it's been wrapped up in all the buzz about innovation and art. So, this piece is special because it attempts to reconsider creativity studies as more than what's been theorized in the field of psychology and the management sciences. This research is valuable for the field of communication and mobile communication studies because we often forget what Everett Rogers, the founder of diffusion and innovation studies, has said about creativity. He viewed creativity as a form of metacommunication. First, creativity has to be rhetorical because it has to resonate with others and be appropriate for situations. Next, creativity has to be mobile, otherwise ideas never diffuse into society. Lastly, when we recognize or view something as creative, we actually understand a network of things all at once from the history of a tool's uses, to knowledge about possible uses, to social norms about the tools, to even our emotions related to the tool and its uses. So naturally, all of these things are valuable to early mobile communication scholars who wanted to understand the phenomenon of mobile phones' diffusion and adoption in society. While diffusion, adoption, domestication, and appropriation studies have emerged as staple studies in the field of mobile communication, in general, scholars need to give more attention to how these studies intersect with creativity. I mean, look at all the creative things we've done and do with mobile technologies, from content creation to digital activism to all the agile things we've seen displaced and emplaced people do during our recent migration crises. But, like the power of language that I talked about earlier, mobile technologies alone don't create the conditions for power to take place or for creativity to take place. It takes a whole network of power relations and the nuances within an environment, in addition to mobile technologies, that create the conditions for creativity to emerge. So, I'm especially proud of this article for attempting to bring more attention to creativities with mobile communication studies. Moving forward, Adriana and I are currently working on our book project related to Mobile Networked Creativity, and I really encourage everyone to take a look at the crowdsourcing website that has been developed to help us work through this larger project, check it out under the Projects page.

DR. XIONG-GUM: I think, most obviously, my current book project with Adriana de Souza e Silva exemplifies a study of networked mobilities because we argue that creativity takes place because of a lack of resources for mobilities. From our previous work on Mobile Networked Creativity, we have argued that creative media practices require a network or relations that include mobile technologies, people's relationship to those mobile technologies or their access, and their relationship to the spaces in which they live in. As we are working through this current book project, we see that mobilities are a capability only when there is a network of communication, infrastructure, and politics that foster it. So, we are seeing that where people have been limited in their mobilities, there is some creative practice taking place as a response to the limitations. This also takes us back to Everett Roger's position that creativity is a form of metacommunication. And, actually, this is where we decided upon the idea that creativity is survival. Creativity is communication, but in situations of hardship and the lack of resources, creativity's deliverable outcome is a person or a people's way of surviving. Among our examples, we draw attention to marginalized people in the favelas, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, a major global city, and forced migrants who are trying to permeate the borders of the nation-states. A lot of the creative practices that take place are in response to creating networked resources that enable mobilities, and, sort of, a struggle for inclusion. When I think of inclusion now, my mind goes straight to networks since they produce the conditions for exclusion.