Sérgio Barbosa

The main goal of this project is to understand the use of WhatsApp to foster digital activism. WhatsApp is more than a digital space for “hanging-out” with like-minded people and has come to constitute a key chat platform for twenty-first century politics, particularly in the Global South countries. To do so, the project examines the extent to which the emerging forms of (digital) activism may create a collective voice of resistance among WhatsApp activists at the local level in Brazil by asking the following question: Do WhatsApp networks promote a new collaborative form of political participation linking private chats to protests on the ground? While at the IWM, Sérgio Barbosa is working with data from face-to-face, semi-structured interviews collected during his fieldwork in Brazil with “Committee of Struggle Campeche,” a local resistance group based in the city of Florianopolis, which organized behind-the-scenes over WhatsApp to (mainly) collect votes during 2022 elections.