Title: A feminist methodology to understand Free software territory: the
“Baobaxia” network in Brazil
Abstract:
This article will discuss the process of building Free Software-based
digital infrastructures for communities in the Northeast of Brazil. We
will focus on the experience of the project Baobáxia, “a rota os Baobas”
an “eventually connected network” composed of a number of “Mucuas”
(nodes) located in over 200 communities of the Mocambos, a network of
Brazilian quilombos (freed slave communities). Baobáxia consists in
networked in online repositories operated in remote locations sometimes
through satellite links, and offline repositories shared by a social
network of travelers between Quilombos. The project was formed in 2004
in order to operate organically as spaces of transmission and
communication within the community.
First, we will provide the background of the network and characterize
their unique discourse as both the development of the language and of
the networks are largely understudied, hidding the benefice of these
aparatuses to a broader understanding of decentralized network,
intersectional and anticolonial studies.
Then, we will proceed to explore its intersections with other projects
for alternative computing in the country, such as “metarecyclagem” where
a group of Brazilian technologists and artists have been promoting the
“up-cycling” of computing technologies and their usage for artistic
expression through regular “Gambiarra” (translated as “makeshift”) and
“HiperTropicalProgramacao” events alongside several independent
technical and political collectives in the country. Another political
articulation of the reflection on the appropriation of digital
technologies has given rise to practises which are identified by local
activists and artists as “technoshamanism.”
We describe the work we conducted in the context of Baobáxia through a
series of interviews and direct participation in the activities of the
network, exploring their specificity vis-à-vis activist networks in
Europe where we are also implicated, such as the experience of bricolabs
which have been active for the past 18 years.
The research problem we will explore has to do with question of the role
and place of digital activism in the Brazilian context, and how a “third
technoscape” emerges from an anti-colonial position and cultural
narrative reappropriation, leading to the invention of “singular
technologies”. We will focus on how local “knowledges” of oppressed
Brazilian groups are translated into the formation of computer networks
and technologies that create infrastructure for Afrobrazilian communities.
Brazil is a fertile territory for new forms of technopolitics which can
be actualized by debates in intersectional and post- / anti-colonial
studies. Working from a necessary distance, the article will examine the
experience of direct implication of the authors. The analysis we pursue
highlights the importance of minorised technological practice that
convey integral organisational models opposing capitalist hegemony. In
order to frame our research problem, we will mobilize a feminist
epistemology which considers necessary principles of “intra-action”
(Barad 2007) across heterogeneous
sociotechnical spaces.
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