Who are the WhatsAppers? Reinventing Political Participation in the Twenty-First Century

Orientação: João Arriscado Nunes e Nenad Stojanovic

Programa de Doutoramento: Democracia no Século XXI

Financiamento: FCT

This PhD research investigates how the WhatsApp appropriation is redesigning political participation today. I argue that a new type of political activist is emerging amongst contemporary resistance movements: the WhatsApper, a digital activist who intensely appropriates the chat app leveraging its affordances for participation in political life. The theorecthical framework combines digital sociology and digital activism field to investigate identities, action repertoires, organizational forms and the social-technical imaginaries of resistance movements in Brazil. The qualitative approach includes a digital ethnography of selected WhatsApp groups, a content analysis of a sample chat conversations, and a number of face-to-face semi-structured interviews with WhatsAppers. This project will focus on making apparent that WhatsApp is not only a chat app for chatting and "hanging out" with like-minded people, but also the battlefield itself for the political struggle and a central element guiding collective action and digital activism today.

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