Date: Friday, 18 May
Time: 11:00-12:30
Venue: HB 8-18 

This wide-ranging talk takes the issue raised by Walter Benjamin in "The work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction" to our age of digital communications. How might we open up space for some of the progressive potential of the new technologies while at the same time criticising their alienating aspects? This question is particularly acute for a younger generation of students and researchers who have grown up with these technologies.

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro holds his Ph. D. in Anthropology (CUNY). He is currently a full Professor of Anthropology in the University of Brasilia. He has done research and written on topics such as development, environmentalism, international migration, cyberculture, globalisation and transnationalism. He has published 14 volumes in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and more than 100 chapters and articles in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Japanese, French and German.

He was president of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology; and a founder and the first chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations. He is a co-chair of the Committee on World Anthropologies of the AAA and serves on more than 20 editorial boards of journals in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America.

His recent books are (edited with Arturo Escobar) “World Anthropologies. Disciplinary Transformations in Systems of Power” (2006) and “The Capital of Hope”, in Portuguese, about the construction of Brasilia from the workers’ point-of-view (2008).