Lucía E. Cantero is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and African American Studies from Yale University, an MA in the Social Sciences, and a BA in Psychology and Visual Arts from The University of Chicago. She approaches her objects of study from a firmly political economic lens, centering her analyses on the intersection between aesthetics and politics. Her areas of research include consumer culture, social media, algorithms and data science, infrastructures, and urban public space.
Within this, much of her work focuses on branding, advertising and markets as site for the construction of ontological and political subjectivity and the ways these “kinaesthetic” processes moderate formations of race, class, gender and sexuality. She is a coeditor of Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair and Resistance in Brazil, published by Rutgers University Press, which grapples with the role that affect and resistance plays in the political realities of a fractious Brazil. She has also authored articles on ethnographic theory and methods, such as “In Dark Times: Hauntologies and other Ghosts of Production” in American Anthropologist. She is currently completing her first monograph Olympic Afterlives: Global Spectacles of Design and Dispossession in Rio de Janeiro. This book explores the residues of racialized consumer design tactics and the reconfiguration of public sphere, space and surveillance after the Rio 2016 megaevent. She has begun a collaborative project with data scientists on the politics of facial recognition software and AI, machine learning and resultant biases. Her next book project will examine how technology and the (prosthetic) body shapes love and sex in the contemporary era.
Junge, Benjamin; Mitchell, Sean T; Jarrin, Alvaro; Cantero, Lucia ed. in Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair and Resistance in Brazil, Rutgers University Press (2021) “Editors Introduction: Ethnographies of a Brazilian Unraveling”
Cantero, Lucia “The Oil is Ours!”: Petro-Affect and the Scandalization of Politics” in Junge, Benjamin; Mitchell, Sean T; Jarrin, Alvaro; Cantero, Lucia ed. in Precarious emocracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair and Resistance in Brazil, Rutgers University Press (2021)
Ruback, Livia; Avila, Sandra; Cantero, Lucia. 2021.“Racial Biases in Machine Learning and its Social Implications: The Case of Facial Recognition Software in Brazil” WICS Society and Computation
Jobson, Ryan Cecil, Kamari Clarke, Lucia Cantero. “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn? Race, Racism and its Reckoning in American Anthropology” American Anthropologist website, July 20 2020.
“2016 Year in Socio-Cultural Anthropology- In Dark Times: Hauntologies and other Ghosts of Production,” American Anthropologist, 119: 2 (June 2017): 308-318
“Emerging Art Center: Rio de Janeiro – The Contemporary Carioca Art Landscape” in Zarobell, John. ed. Art in the Global Economy, 2017. Berkeley: University of California Press