I am a political ethnographer interested in practices and assumptions of power amidst inequality.  I'm especially motivated to identify and question forms of entrapment and escape from power and capitalism, particularly in cities of the Global South. 

I interrogate these questions primarily from Brazil -a country long intertwined with the expansion of capitalism, inequality and racial order- but also in the global capillaries of Silicon Valley. 

I've written two books, The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil (2015), and Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (2022), both published by the University of California Press. 

I'm now at work on a third ethnographic monograph, which examines the practices and logics of 'trust and safety' in Silicon Valley as vital to a global regime of security and accumulation rooted in platform capitalism. 

My other work is published across disciplines in journals such as Public Culture, the American Political Science Review, American Ethnologist,  Comparative Studies in Society and History, Socio-Economic Review, and ​World Development, among other venues. 

In 2021 I was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize.  

Institutionally, I am Professor of Global Politics and Society in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. I am a Fellow and Director of Studies in Geography at Queens' College, Cambridge.

I joint edit the Journal of Latin American Studies. 

Please see my CV for publications and related scholarly life.

If you are seeking an expert witness for an asylum case because of police or organised crime violence in Brazil, I welcome hearing from you.  

At left: Sketch by Jean-François Millet, 'Man with a Spade'. Cover image for Keep the Bones Alive.