ProfessorRosana Pinheiro-Machado

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, a social scientist and an anthropologist, is currently a Professor of Global Studies in the School of Geography at University College Dublin (UCD) and director of the Digital Economy and Extreme Politics Lab (DeepLab), where she leads a team of PhD students, affiliated researchers, postdocs, and visiting scholars. She is also a Consolidator Grantee of the European Research Council (ERC) and the external coordinator of the Abdias Nascimento Grant (CAPES, Brazil), which promotes the international mobility of Black and Indigenous Brazilian candidates.

Prior to joining UCD, she had appointments at the University of Bath, the University of São Paulo, the University of Oxford, and Harvard University. She wrote one of the most award-winning theses (UFRGS, Brazil) in Brazilian Social Sciences, receiving all the prestigious national prizes, including the ANPOCS Prize and the Best Thesis in Brazil award from the Ministry of Education. She has published over 80 papers, chapters, and books and has given approximately 210 invited talks in Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Asia, including several prestigious keynote speeches at major international conferences.

She has vast experience working in interdisciplinary contexts. Her research focuses on economic and political transformations in emerging economies from an ethnographic perspective. She has been conducting fieldwork across several countries in the global south (especially Brazil, China, the Philippines, and India) and developing international collaborations globally. Her innovative research combines long-term and multi-sited on-the-ground ethnography with digital methods. She addresses authoritarianism, the far right, labour and economic precarity, and consumption. A thread running through her research agenda is the desire to gain a longitudinal, local understanding of the major processes of world-making and world-ordering that have transformed emerging countries in economic and political terms.

Beyond academia, she collaborates with several international organisations and social movements, acts as a public intellectual in Brazil, and writes on politics and current affairs for major national and international newspapers.