Rosana Pinheiro-Machado is a Professor at University College Dublin.
Prof Rosana Pinheiro-Machado is a Brazilian anthropologist and a social scientist focusing 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 the topics of authoritarianism, 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.
Pinheiro-Machado is the Director of DeepLab (Digital Economy and Extreme Politics Lab), which is an international hub of numerous PhD students, postdocs, research fellows and visiting scholars. 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, Consolidator Grant).
Prior to joining UCD as a Professor, she held positions at the University of Bath, the University of Oxford, Harvard University, and the University of Sao Paulo. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK. Based on a long-term ethnography in three countries, Pinheiro-Machado wrote one of the most awarded-winning theses in Brazil’s Social Sciences, receiving the Best Thesis Prize in Brazil by the Ministry of Education, among other prestigious acknowledgements.
As an activist academic, she collaborates with several international organisations and social movements, acting as a public intellectual in Brazil and writing on politics and current affairs for major national and international newspapers. In 2023, Prof. Pinheiro-Machado joined the Ministerial Committee that discusses strategies to fight hate speech and extremism in Brazil (Ministry of Human Rights)