The Political Implications of the Digital Economy in Brazil

The Department of Political Science,  The Ateneo Martial Law Museum and Library and The School of Social Sciences

Cordially invite you to 

The Political Implications of the Digital Economy in Brazil

24 April 2023
5:00 - 6:00 pm
SEC A 123

A Lecture by

Prof. Rosana Pinheiro-Machado
Professor, Department of Geography
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

ABSTRACT: In this talk, I will analyse how Bolsonaro support is fomented among low-income groups in Brazil, especially precarious workers engaged in the digital platform economy. Relying on previous long-term research projects on low-income entrepreneurship, I analyse some of the cultural and social roots of such a process. The talk will also explore my current research project, which analyses how new digital technologies transform and foster such an ideological trend, making the far right an attractive force amongst various low-come strata by mobilising several layers of resentment and aspirations. The talk will also explore some future scenarios for comparisons with the Philippines.

Please register via: https://bit.ly/Digital_Economy_Brazil

About the Speaker:

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, anthropologist and social scientist, is a Professor in the School of Geography at the University College Dublin. She is the director of the Digital Economy and Politics Lab (DeepLap), an international hub for studying labour and politics in the twenty-first-century Global South. She is the Principal Investigator of the project “Flexible Work, Rigid Politics in Brazil, India, and the Philippines”, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). In 2023, Pinheiro-Machado joined a ministerial committee that fights extremism in Brazil (Ministry of Human Rights). Prior to joining UCD, she held positions at the University of Bath, Oxford, and Harvard. Pinheiro-Machado has focused on emerging economies' political and economic transformation from an ethnographic perspective. Her most recent works, such as Humanising Fascists? and From Hope to Hate, have examined authoritarianism in Brazil and the Global South.  The edited volume "The rise of the radical right in the Global South" (with Vargas-Maia, Routledge, 2023) is her most recent publication on the topic. Pinheiro-Machado also acts as a columnist, featuring articles in The Washington Post, El País, the Intercept, etc.