Candidate:
Juliana Vieira Valentim
Date, Time and Location:
9 October 2026, 14:00, Sala de Atos, Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto
President of the Jury:
Professor Pedro Nuno Ferreira da Rosa da Cruz Diniz, Full Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto
Committee Members:
Professor Leonor Graciela Natansohn, Associate Professor, Faculty of Communication, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil;
Professor Paulo Nuno Gouveia Vicente, Associate Professor with Habilitation, Department of Communication Sciences, NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, NOVA University Lisbon;
Professor Maria João Lopes Antunes, Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Art, University of Aveiro;
Professor Carla Sofia Marques da Silva, Associate Professor, Department of Education Sciences, Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, University of Porto;
Professor Pedro Jorge Couto Cardoso, Assistant Professor, Department of Design, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto (Supervisor).
The thesis was co-supervised by Professor António Fernando Vasconcelos Cunha Castro Coelho, Associate Professor with Habilitation, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, and by Ricardo Manuel Coelho de Melo, Senior Researcher in the Human-Centred Design team at Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS.
Abstract:
Over the last decades, the consolidation of the corporate internet and the power of big tech companies have globally reconfigured the circulation of information, the mediation of labour, and the production of subjectivities, intensifying forms of value extraction centred on data, attention, and immaterial labour. In the Global South, these dynamics tend to deepen technological dependencies and historical asymmetries, while connectivity continues to be frequently portrayed as a universal driver of development and inclusion.
Situated within the Brazilian context, this thesis examines how community and autonomous networks, feminist infrastructures, and social technologies challenge prevailing meanings of connectivity, labour, and digital governance, shifting them from technicist and universalist frameworks towards territorialised practices oriented by autonomy, care, and social justice.
The central objective of this thesis is to understand the transformations in the politics of technology when it is articulated through feminist, decolonial, Black, and community-based epistemologies, and to analyse how such experiences reconfigure narratives and practices of technological appropriation by conceiving the internet as a contested territory and a space of power, grounded in the lived experiences and material realities of local communities.
Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative, feminist, and decolonial approach, combining multi-sited fieldwork with interviews, participant observation, and the analysis of documents and materials produced by the initiatives studied. The analysis is conducted through a discursive-material perspective, articulating meanings, infrastructures, and forms of sociotechnical organisation.
The findings indicate that the experiences examined are not merely “solutions” to inequalities in access. Rather, they constitute insurgent technologies: sociotechnical arrangements that reshape who can define technological priorities, which scales matter, and which criteria of sustainability and legitimacy guide connectivity and, more broadly, the field of digital technology.
By recentring the reproduction of life as an analytical and political horizon, these practices affirm embodied existence, the body and everyday life, as well as affect, ancestry, and relations of interdependence between humans and more-than-humans. In doing so, they reinscribe historical genealogies of Black, feminist, and dissident collective resistance into the digital sphere, extending them to contemporary struggles surrounding digital infrastructure, digital rights, and internet governance.
From this perspective, technology is understood as a relational practice shaped by race, gender, sexuality, class, and territory. The thesis therefore contributes to debates on digital decolonisation by demonstrating that alternative sociotechnical imaginaries, plural, situated, and collective, are already emerging and offering viable alternatives to the deepening crisis produced by colonial capitalism in the digital age.
Keywords: Digital Autonomy; Community Communication; Decolonial Feminism; Hackfeminism; Technological Sovereignty.
