Anthropological Trompe L'oeils

Abstract

As an anthropologist of cities I am particularly interested in informal, guerrilla and frontier urban processes in Latin America and Europe. For the past ten years years I have been studying the work of “free culture” urban activism. I am interested in how such expressions of free urbanism compare with other accounts of informality in the city (auto-construction, makeshift urbanism, slum urbanism, etc.), as well as in the socio-technical assemblages through which such free and open-source projects problematize forms of urban complexity anew. I have also an interest in the history and ethnography of science and experimentation. In particular, I have been drawn to the study of “interfaces”, understood as technical and experimental designs between nature and culture.