ProfessorRosana Pinheiro-Machado

I have been involved in four major research projects:

Flexible work, rigid politics: the nexus between authoritarian politics and labour precariousness in Brazil, India, and the Philippines (2023-2028): principal investigator (PI), consolidator grant, European Research Council.

New consumers in emerging economies (2019-2022): investigator partner in a multi-sited collaborative research project funded by the discovery grant, Australian Research Council. The project is led by chief investigator (CI) Anna Pertierra from Western Sydney University, with partners Tingting Liu from Jinan University and Cezarina Saloma from Ateneo Manila. Conducted over three years in Brazil, China, the Philippines, and Mexico, this research examines how globalized economic growth is transforming lives within low-income urban communities of the global south.

From hope to hate: the authoritarian turn in Brazil (2009-2018): in collaboration with Lucia Muri Scalco (UFRGS, Brazil), this research explores the impacts of economic rise and decline, as well as democratic collapse, on the political subjectivity of the poor. This ten-year study illuminates how citizens who symbolized Brazil's ascent as a global democratic power during Lula's era—the "new consumers"—later came to support far-right political movements.

China-Paraguay-Brazil: informal economy and piracy (1999-2019): funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, this research culminated in my 2017 book Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South (Routledge Studies in Social Anthropology). Spanning a decade of ethnography (1999-2009 and 2014), it examines a global commodity chain of counterfeit and smuggled goods across China and the Brazil-Paraguay border. I conducted extended fieldwork in these regions during my Ph.D., combining in-depth local ethnography with transnational research.

In addition to my scholarly work, I collaborate with international organizations, including Article 19, focusing on social movements and the right to protest in Latin America.