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Short abstract:

How do we get at the ‘hidden’ workings of infrastructure when it's constantly ‘moving’? I discuss how a collective multimodal mobile ethnography addresses these dual challenges, enabling incremental and dialogic knowledge construction, while also generating logistical and analytical complications.

Long abstract:

Food delivery platforms, hailed for their infrastructural role during the COVID-19 pandemic by mediating delivery of food for immobilised populations, continue to proliferate in many cities across the globe, making ordering food using a mobile app everyday urban practice. This seemingly seamless experience of app-enabled food delivery that many take for granted is in fact realised through the joining up of heterogeneous practices of human and more-than-human entities, forming an infrastructure (Star, 1999). Focussing on the South Korean food app Baemin and its food couriers, my research inquire into the ongoing recreation of this emergent, vital urban infrastructure and the kinds of (dis)connections and movements it generates. Studying the mutual shaping of infrastructure and mobilities requires methods that allow the following of digital and material traces of food delivery with Baemin. To facilitate moving with the research subject, I have conducted a distinct mobile ethnography that combines autoethnography as a courier, walkthrough analysis of the worker-facing app, interviews, and smartphone GPS tracking of couriers’ delivery activities. Drawing on 10-month fieldwork in Seoul, I offer reflexive accounts on the collaborative and incremental process of knowledge co-creation through a series of mobile dialogues. The plurality of methods and data, while empowering, is also overwhelming, posing ethical, logistical, and analytical challenges. Therefore, I also seek to share unmet aspirations and gather thoughts on what would have been otherwise approaches. And yet, I highlight the generative quality of collective mobile ethnography, turning chaos into unforeseen understandings about the mobile lives of couriers and infrastructure-making.