Projects

Our projects are divided into four major areas: Technologies, Bodies and Territories; Hacking Patriarchal Violence and Envisioning Feminist Futures; Digital Segurity; and Responses to Public Policy Emergencies.

We are slowly feeding this repository with retroactive information, from older projects, until we have available all the institutional memory.

Technologies, Bodies & Territories

Digital technologies are gradually integrating our bodies and territories. Terminologies such as Biometric Identification, Smart Cities, Big Data, A.I, Internet of Things and VR are gradually showing up in public discourses as “innovative solutions” to improve public services and national security. But they can also pose a significant threat to citizen's privacy, freedom of expression, right to association, and even make us vulnerable to cyber attacks. How do we walk freely in a territory surveilled by both companies and governments? How are all these new technologies changing our relations to our bodies and territories? Who are mining the data we produce in these relations? Who profits from it? Who gets excluded or more exposed? Are we restating colonial relationships disguised as innovation? Are smart cities actually meant to be fueled by social environmental conflicts, digital colonialism and waste?

Hacking Patriarchal Violences & Envisioning Feminist Futures

Technologies are designed embedded with subjective values from the ones who develop or deploy them, most likely, white cis male from the Global North. Therefore, the future is likely to replicate many of the social inequalities that human rights movements fight against. To redress this scenario, this area of work has the goals to map and expose intersectional dimensions of power imbalances, considering race, gender, class, sexuality, etc behind digital technologies; raise awareness through creativity and community building; promote advocacy within feminist agendas in digital rights and foster our imagination for better futures and positive agendas through exercises of speculative futures in which technologies can be developed under transfeminist values.

Knowledge Sharing and Digital Care

With the increase in digitalization, which was also particularly accelerated during the pandemics of COVID-19, we have also observed an increase in online violence with severe consequences to offline activities of human rights activists. In Brazil, this scenario is even more challenging considering the rise of far-right groups who are tech savvy and use digital environments as battlefields attacking women, LGBTQIA people, black activists, sexual and reproductive rights advocates, land defenders, activists from the favelas and other communities that question the status quo of the white cis male heteronormativity of the dominant capitalist society. This trend, aligned with the business model of mainstream social media platforms, which is focused on turning hate into profit, results in digital environments prone to gender-based political violence, hate, threats and misinformation. In this area we focus on keeping track of emerging manifestations of digital violences and fostering a technopolitical and critical view of the tools we use for our daily activism, so we can have a more careful and strategic use of them and gradually shift towards supporting feminist infrastructures.

Emergency responses to public policies

Sometimes, shifts in the political context requires emergency actions that turn research into advocacy. This is what this area of work is about. And, as the internet is global, we nurture national, regional and global coalitions and/or networks to have strategic and collective engagement within policy makers in national, regional and international fora. Furthermore, we have also observed a growing demand for building digital security capacities and giving support during attacks due to the increase of threats against women, LGBTQI people, artists, journalists and activists in Brazil. To reply to this scenario, we have co-started a Network of Transfeminist Digital Security Trainers in Brazil to cope with the need of such emergency responses.