For twenty years I have been researching on contemporary capitalism, especially on industrialization\de-industrialisation, work and class inequality. In 1999 I researched on de-industrialization and working-class lives in Sheffield, and in 2008 I started a new fieldwork in Volta Redonda, a Brazilian steel-town, where I lived in a favela and researched in the biggest steel complex in Latin America.
My monograph Made in Sheffield (2009) was based on long-term fieldwork in a deprived neighbourhood of Sheffield where I lived and worked in two local steel factories. The book broke new ground within the emerging discipline of ‘anthropology at home’ as well as in relation to sociological and political debates on class, de-industrialization and poverty in the UK in the post-Thatcher/New Labour era. It brought in conversation the subfield of economic anthropology, historically associated with the study of ‘non-western’ societies, with political economy, labour studies and institutional economics, anticipating the current critical engagement of the discipline with Marxist political economy.
My monograph Brazilian steel Town. Money, Land and Capital in the Making of the Working-Class, (2020) is based on a ten-years-long fieldwork in Volta Redonda, Brazil’s most important steel town. Following the structural economic and political development of the country through a fine-grained urban and labour ethnography, Brazilian Steel Town unpacks three central political and economic themes of our times namely, the ongoing underdevelopment of the global south, the feminization and racialization of labour, and the global collapse of left-wing populism and the rise of illiberalism.
In my Brazilian work, I particularly develop three strands of analysis (1) a comparative class analysis informed by feminism and postcolonial theory, in which I discuss the reproduction of racial inequalities and dependent development in Brazil under the government of the Workers’ Party, despite its progressive redistributive policies and left-wing stance (see my publication ‘Anthropology of Class. A view from a Brazilian Barrio') (2) an analysis of left-wing populism and right-wing authoritarianism in Brazil, starting form the the uprising of June 2013 (see my publication ‘The June Revolution') and (3) analysis of extractivism in Brazil, providing a novel comparative framework in relation to broader processes of extractivism in Latin America and the Global South (see my chapter ‘Labor and Land Struggles in a Brazilian Steel Town. The Reorganization of Capital under Neo-Extractivism’)
I have explored the politics of representation, of class, gender and sexuality and race, in film and visual art in various publications and talks, including at the British Film Institute (BFI) and tate Britain. My article 'Seeing the Invisible. Experiments in Cinematic Trance' (October) brings anthropology in conversation with art history, exploring the work of experimental filmmaker Maya Deren through a reflexive dialogue between western modernism and Haitian ontology. My article ‘Observation, performance and revolution: exploring “the political” in visual art and anthropology’ (Visual Anthropology) discusses cinema as ethnographic practice, and ethnographic fieldwork as a form of performative and political intervention at the intersection of pedagogy and activism.
I have explored issues of economic development and inequality through research-based documentaries, ethno-fictions and curatorial projects that mobilised the anthropological framework to generate original applied and public knowledge. For instance, the project The End of Oil that I curated as artistic director of the Bergen Assembly imagined the future of Norway without oil by involving climatologists, technological experts, energy ministers, anthropologists and artists, including Elizabeth Povinelli, writer Tom McCarthy and visual artist Phil Collins. Besides, as director of the Athens Biennial, I set up an innovative curatorial framework, based on the collaboration with social centres, civic organizations and social constituencies normally excluded from mainstream art events, putting at the centre of the public programme of the Biennale issues of economic austerity and urban poverty that were central to Greece at the time. In addition to the above written outputs, I have produced and directed films and documentary such as Steel Lives in Sheffield (2005), in Brazil (2013) and Norway (2016), that had considerable public impact outside the academic community and were shown in various venues, including Tate Britain, The Bergen Assembly and The British Film Institute (BFI). Lastly, in 2017, I founded the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) – a think tank of curators, museums and artists – still ongoing. Combining art, anthropological research and public engagement these projects are both original and timely.
Based on my fieldworks in Brazil and the UK, and on various applied projects conducted with the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) I have developed both a theory and knowledge around urban commons
I bring these threads together in my book ART/COMMONS. Art, Politics and the Radical Imagination (Zed Books, March 2020) in which the conversation between art, anthropology and political economy is discussed both theoretically and through the discussion of my film and curatorial projects.
