ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how location awareness is constituted and becomes meaningful in the Global South. Taking a design anthropological approach, we show how the capacity that location-aware technologies are often supposed to have to drive changes in human experience and in society is muddied by the inevitable messiness, contingency, and forms of improvisation that characterize everyday life. Instead, we demonstrate how their use, meaning, and capacity to participate in processes of change in both individual lives and at a societal level are always situated. In doing so, we draw on our ethnographic research into commuting with location-aware smartphones and apps in Brazil.
