A new international research project, Digital Sovereignty Archives: Experiences of the Homeless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, has received CAD$24,955 in funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through a Partnership Engage Grant.

The project is led by Rafael Grohmann, CLCF co-lead, in partnership with the Tech Sector of the Homeless Workers’ Movement in Brazil (MTST). The collaboration brings together academic research and grassroots organizing around digital sovereignty from the social movements perspective.

The main objective of the project is to co-develop a collaborative, bilingual (Portuguese and English) and low-bandwidth digital archive documenting MTST’s practices and strategies related to popular digital sovereignty. Within the project, popular digital sovereignty is defined as the collective, locally grounded capacity to imagine, create, control, and govern technologies in response to community-defined needs. In addition to documenting initiatives and experiences, the project will also record collective processes, internal reflections, and organizational protocols that shape how these technologies are developed and used.

The archive is designed to serve both as an internal organizing tool for MTST and as a public-facing resource for researchers, activists, and policymakers interested in digital sovereignty. The project outputs are expected to support MTST’s long-term strategic goals, encourage other grassroots organizations to develop their own digital archives, and contribute to research on community-driven models of digital sovereignty.

By documenting digital sovereignty from the perspective of a grassroots social movement, the project contributes an empirically grounded alternative to dominant top-down approaches to digital governance. It also strengthens academic and policy discussions on digital sovereignty in Brazil, Canada, and international contexts.

This project continues a series of collaborations between Rafael Grohmann and the MTST, including the primer on digital sovereignty, the comic book Other Tech Worlds Are Possible, and the Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP) project.