Liliana Gil specializes in ethnographic studies of science and technology with a focus on Brazil and its transnational connections. Her first book project, Improvised Tech: Tactics in an Unequal World, examines technological improvisation as a situated and politically ambivalent tactic for navigating inequality. Drawing on long-term fieldwork across community technology projects, cellphone repair schools, electronics factories, and activist networks, the book asks what happens when “making do” is reframed as innovation. Rather than treating improvisation as inherently subversive or liberatory, Gil shows how its value depends on the people and institutions involved, the material conditions in which it takes place, and the circuits through which it is celebrated, captured, or condemned.

Dr. Gil’s scholarship has been supported by, among others, the Fulbright Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Before joining OSU, she was a Lecturer at the National University of Singapore.

Selected publications:

“The Making Together Kit.” In Kits for Digital Methods: Doing Sociotechnical Research. Routledge, 129–145.

“Becoming a Repair Entrepreneur: An Ethnography of Skills Training in Brazil.” Third World Quarterly, 45(4): 640–57.

“A Fablab at the Periphery: Decentering Innovation from São Paulo.” American Anthropologist, 124(4): 721–33.

Additional publications and citation information are available on Google Scholar.

Research interests:

cultures of design and innovation; ethnographies of work, skill, and expertise; critical computing and development; infrastructure and inequality; post/decolonial and feminist theories; SciArt.