In this talk, Prof. Pinheiro-Machado will analyze the link between labour precariousness and the rise of the far-right in Brazil, focusing on the digitalisation of work. The political engagement of non-organised workers has been a long-standing debate in social sciences. She will examine this phenomenon by exploring how platformisation is transforming it. She will focus on the case of Instagram digital entrepreneurs—an unregulated and rapidly growing phenomenon dominated by a network of far-right influencers. Additionally, Prof. Pinheiro-Machado will draw on her 25 years of ethnographic work on informal workers to provide a longitudinal perspective on the political impacts of digitalisation. 

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado (presenter) is a social scientist and an anthropologist with vast experience working in interdisciplinary contexts. She is currently a Professor 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 prestigious national prizes, including the ANPOCS Prize and Best Thesis in Brazil by the Ministry of Education. She has published over 70 papers, chapters, and books and has given approximately 200 invited talks in Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Asia, including several prestigious keynote speeches at major international conferences.Her research focuses on economic and political transformations in emerging economies from an ethnographic perspective. She has been conducting fieldwork and developing international collaborations across several countries in the global south (especially Brazil, China, the Philippines, and India) and beyond. Her innovative research combines long-term and multi-sited on-the-ground ethnography with digital methods. She deals with authoritarianism, the far-right, labour, consumption, and poverty. 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. 

Lucas Anjos (discussant), Postdoctoral Research at Sciences Po Law School and Coordinator of the DIGILAW Clinic.