The rise of Global South WhatsAppers

Supervisor/s: João Arriscado Nunes and Nenad Stojanovic

Doctoral Programme: Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Funding: FCT

This PhD research investigates how the WhatsApp appropriation is redesigning political participation and resistance today. I argue that a new type of political activist is emerging amongst contemporary social mobilizations: the WhatsApper, a digital activist who intensely appropriates the chat app leveraging its app affordances for participation in political life in the Global South. The theoretical framework combines digital sociology and digital activism to investigate identities, action repertoires, organizational forms and imaginaries of resistance movements in Brazil. The qualitative approach includes a long-term digital ethnography of selected WhatsApp groups, chat scrapping of group conversations, and a number of face-to-face, semi-structured interviews. The PhD research focuses on making apparent that WhatsApp is not only a chat app for "hanging out" with like-minded people, but also the battlefield itself for the political struggle and a central element guiding collective action, as well as it will capture the behind the scenes on WhatsApp activism, contextualizing their use and appropriation in the Global South, beyond the large-scale mobilizations based in Europe and USA.

Keywords: WhatsAppers, Global South, Digital Activism, Digital Ethics.