Digital Sovereignty Archives: Experiences of the Homeless Workers’ Movement in Brazil

This project addresses a key challenge identified by the Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST) in Brazil: while the movement’s technology initiatives have gained international recognition, including awards, they remain under-documented and not systematically accessible to movement members themselves. This lack of documentation limits opportunities for political education, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and internal reflection, hindering the movement’s capacity to sustain and expand its digital initiatives, risks erasing hard-won knowledge and limiting future organizing capacity. To address this challenge, the project’s overall goal is to co-develop a collaborative, low-bandwidth digital archive that documents MTST’s practices and strategies for popular digital sovereignty. They define this concept as the collective, locally grounded capacity to imagine, create, subvert, and govern technologies that respond to community-defined needs. By documenting both technological outputs and the collective processes, reflections, and protocols that shape them, the archive will serve as an internal organizing tool and a public-facing resource. The partnership brings together the University of Toronto and MTST’s Tech Sector as equal co-leaders, ensuring meaningful engagement of the partner organization in all stages of the project, from design and documentation to dissemination planning. The MTST Tech Sector will contribute its unique expertise in grassroots technological development, popular education, and territorial organizing. Their leadership ensures that the archive reflects the movement’s priorities and categories. The project will be guided by participatory action research and workers’ inquiry methods, embedding MTST’s leadership in all phases of the work and fostering a collaborative partnership that respects and amplifies the movement’s knowledge and agency. By documenting digital sovereignty from the perspective of a grassroots social movement, this project presents an alternative to top-down models of digital sovereignty and contributes an empirically grounded perspective to the field. It strengthens the movement’s strategic cohesion and amplifies broader academic and policy conversations about digital sovereignty in Brazil, Canada, and internationally.