Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP)

Action Research with Delivery and Tech Workers in Brazil and Argentina

Acceso en español. 🇦🇷
Acesse em português. 🇧🇷

Worker-owned intersectional platforms

Funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) through Insight Development Grant (IDG)

Research Team

Rafael Grohmann

Principal Investigator

Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the University of Toronto, affiliated to the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Faculty of Information. His research focuses on platform labour and platformization of labour, especially the forms of agency, organization and resistance on the part of workers. He is leader of DigiLabour Initiative, co-director of Critical Digital Methods Institute (CDMI). Researcher of Fairwork and Platform Work Inclusion Living Lab (P-WILL) projects. He is co-editor-in-chief of Platforms & Society journal. Principal investigator of Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP) project.
Alt Cooperativa

Research Member

Workers’ cooperative entirely by trans people, offering digital services such as web development, UX/UI design, website management, and community management services. We are located in different parts of Argentina, which is why we constantly work on strengthening our networks to expand our community and build cooperative and transfeminist digital spaces.Access our Instagram.
Central

Research Member

Cooperativa Central is a courier cooperative founded in 2017 in Salta, Argentina, registered and enrolled in INAES (National Institute of Associativism and Social Economy), dedicated to parcel distribution, banking procedures, municipal services, private services, etc., within the province of Salta, Argentina.Access our Facebook.
FACTTIC

Research Member

The Argentine Federation of Worker Cooperatives of Technology, Innovation, and Knowledge (FACTTIC) has over 10 years of experience and was created to facilitate the exchange of information and knowledge among worker co-op organizations in the sector and to collectively build collaborative solutions. FACTTIC brings together 35 cooperatives located in more than 10 provinces of Argentina, and nowadays it comprises 600 professionals from various disciplines.Access our channels:
• Website
• Instagram
• Twitter
MariaLab

Research Member

MariaLab is a non-profit organization with no political affiliation that has been operating since 2014 at the intersection of gender, race, politics, and technology. It was founded with the desire to make tech spaces more diverse: involving more women, transgender, and non-binary people, promoting intersectional thinking and discussion that considers race, social class, and gender identity in the design of technologies, whether digital or not. We work with civil society organizations and social movements on digital security and infrastructure issues.Access our Instagram.
Núcleo de Tecnologia do MTST

Research Member

The Technology Division of the Homeless Worker Movement in Brazil emerged in 2020 with the political task of supporting the development of tools and the appropriation of techniques for grassroots labor through technology. This process happens through the organization of struggle in the territory with the aim of enhancing workers’ capacity to build their future autonomously as a collective. We understand this struggle as a way to address our sovereignty, a capacity to determine for ourselves which paths are truly emancipatory for our people. It is through how we use technology to our advantage that we promote the construction of popular power.Access our website and Instagram.
Señoritas Courier
Research Member

Señoritas Courier is a bicycle delivery cooperative composed of women and trans people, operating in São Paulo since 2017. In addition to bicycle deliveries, we develop other income-generating activities, such as bicycle maintenance workshops and cycling routes, with a focus on the intersectionality of gender and race, and with an eye towards the diversity of bodies and territories. We are actively engaged in the debate on digital inclusion and the creation of a cooperative delivery.Access our channels.
Fabiana Benedito

Research Assistant

Fabiana de Oliveira Benedito is a PhD student in Communication and Contemporary Culture at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. She is a member of the Research Group on Gender, Digital Technologies, and Culture (Gig@). Currently, she is researching platform-mediated domestic work, with a special interest in the sociotechnical imaginaries surrounding digital work platforms. Her research aims to identify and interpret these imaginaries, taking into account the gender, race, and class dimensions that characterize domestic work in Brazil.
Mayara Almeida de Paula

Research Assistant

I am an Architect and Urban Planner (Federal University of Alagoas, 2019), a Master in Architecture and Urbanism (Federal University of Bahia, 2023), and a current Ph.D. student in Planning at the University of Toronto. I specialized through the course Cities in Dispute: research, history and Social Processes with a full scholarship at City School (2022). Was a scholarship holder for the Tutorial Education Program (2014-2019) and a volunteer teacher for the State Public Schools Student Support Program (2016-2018) in Alagoas, Brazil. Throughout my bachelor’s degree, I developed several academic activities such as monitoring the Architectural Project 1 course, organizing the Architecture and Urbanism Weeks (SEMAU), organizing the Regional Meeting of PET Groups, coordinating and designing the periodical ÍMPETO (2016 and 2018), and completed an exchange at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2016) through the Top China Program. My bachelor’s thesis was selected by ArchDaily as one of the best in architecture and urbanism in 2019 among Portuguese-speaking countries. During my master’s I held a scholarship financed by the Ford Foundation for a research called “Private-militarized control regimes in popular territories and new civic engagement strategies”, coordinated by Professor Raquel Rolnik. Currently, I am engaged in researching the interplay between race, gender and urban planning, and the possibilities of creating public policies aimed at Black women and equality in Brazilian neighbourhoods.
Kaushar Mahetaji

Research Assistant

Kaushar Mahetaji is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, specializing in media, technology, and culture. Her research explores how platform power is mediated, negotiated, and contested by integrating theoretical frameworks and methods from political economy, information systems, and strategic management. Specifically, she evaluates how social media platforms use digital tools to manage their relationships with content creators and third parties, including partners, data intermediaries, and advertisers. Kaushar is broadly interested in platform labour, the creator economy, and platform governance.
David Nieborg

Co-Investigator and Advisory Board Member

David B. Nieborg is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto. Currently, he is a Research Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute and a Residential Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He held visiting and fellowship appointments with MIT, the Queensland University of Technology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the University of Amsterdam. David published on the game industry, app and platform economics, and game journalism in academic outlets such as New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Internet Policy Review, and Media, Culture and Society. He is the co-author of Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021), which is translated in Italian and Chinese, and Mainstreaming and Game Journalism (MIT Press, 2023).
Denise Kasparian
Denise-Kasparian

Advisory Board Member

Denise Kasparian holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and a Doctorate in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires. She is an Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) based at the Gino Germani Institute of Research, and an Assistant Professor of Sociology of Social and Solidarity Economy at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. Additionally, she coordinates the Observatory of Popular, Social, and Solidarity Economy (OEPSS) at the same faculty. Between 2021 and 2023, she was a Fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (The New School) and a Kendeda Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing (Rutgers University). Her research focuses on conflict and social change in associative and self-managed work organizations, as well as their consolidation conditions. She is currently conducting research on the possibilities of deploying platform cooperativism in Argentina and the South American region, with a special emphasis on the home delivery and domestic work sectors. She has published numerous articles on the subject. Her book “Co-operative Struggles” (Brill, 2022) received an honorable mention in the 2024 edition of the Joyce Rothschild Book Prize, which recognizes substantive contributions to the advancement of economic democracy.
Roseli Figaro

Advisory Board Member

Full professor at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Director of the Center for Communication and Work Research (CPCT), where she leads the funded project Datafication of communication and work (Fapesp, 2023-2028). She works in the field of Communication, mainly focusing on the following topics: communication and the world of work, communication and discourse; communication/education. She has many articles published in national and international journals, book chapters, and the following books: “Journalistic discourse and production conditions in alternative economic arrangements to media corporations” (2021); “Communication relationships and production conditions in the work of journalists in alternative economic arrangements to media corporations” (2018), “Changes in the journalist’s world of work in São Paulo” (2013), also translated into Spanish (“Los cambios en el mundo del trabajo del periodista”) and published by the Autonomous University of Barcelona; “Communication relationships in the world of work” (2008); “Communication and Discourse Analysis” (2012); “Communication and work. Reception study: the world of work as mediation of communication” (2001).

 

The research explores the contours of worker-owned intersectional digital platforms in order to envision a future of labour that is more sustainable for workers.

Taking an action research approach, the project involves delivery and tech workers in Brazil and Argentina.

Worker-owned platforms entail workers who build their own technologies and formulate their own organizational principles, with self-management and democratic principles at the core.

What distinguishes this research project is the use of intersectionality, which articulates queer, feminist, racial, class and decolonial perspectives as multiple forms of labour oppression.

Further research on worker-owned platforms is needed in order to address solutions for platform workers.

Latin America is one of the worst regions in the world in terms of fair work enabled through digital platforms.

Through our research, we seek evidence for the need to envision and design alternative platforms.

The region has a long history of labour struggle and organizing around solidarity economy, community and alternative technologies.

These lessons from the past can contribute to future understanding in relation to worker-owned intersectional digital platforms.

Our research addresses four main objectives.

First, we aim to examine and support what would be worker-owned intersectional digital platforms from workers in cooperatives in delivery and technology sectors in Brazil and Argentina. Researching two sectors (delivery and technology) will provide an opportunity for cooperation between them.

Second, the research aims to connect current debates on worker-owned platforms with Latin America’s rich history of social-movement-building around solidarity economies, community and alternative technologies.

Third, we will develop a method for action research that involves workers and participatory research design in Latin America to serve as methodological intervention in the field of platform studies.

Fourth, we will develop, through co-creation workshops with workers, a design document that outlines the features of worker-owned intersectional digital platforms.

The project’s aim is to collectively discuss the different dimensions of how to build a worker-owned intersectional labour platform.

This involves conversations with workers on the organization of labour, platform governance, data policies, and the redesign and construction of platform infrastructures.

The subsequent design document that will be a result of action research is meant to serve as the basis for public policies in Latin America and beyond.

The results will also contribute to community-based knowledge – through co-creation workshops – about alternatives in relation to labour and technology in Brazil and Argentina, with global policy implications.