Liliana Gil specializes in postcolonial and feminist studies of science and technology with a focus on Brazil and its global South connections. Her ongoing research and book project – Beyond Make-Do Innovation: Practices and Politics of Technological Improvisation in Brazil – examines how improvisation has been thought of, performed, and valued across a range of sites of technological production, from innovation hubs and repair shops in São Paulo to electronics factories in the Amazon. Based on long-term fieldwork, this project contributes to debates on labor, skill, creativity, global tech inequalities, and inclusive innovation and design.

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

Selected publications:

Gil, Liliana. 2023. “Becoming a repair entrepreneur: an ethnography of skills training in Brazil.” Third World Quarterly, [early view]. DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2023.2207006

Gil, Liliana. 2022. “A fablab at the periphery: decentering innovation from São Paulo.” American Anthropologist, 124: 721–733. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13769

Gil Sousa, Liliana and Filipa Queirós. 2016. “Method as responsibility in applied research.” Vis-à-vis: Explorations in Anthropology, 13 (1): 97-113. https://vav.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/vav/article/view/27058

Research and teaching interests:

digital futures, design, innovation, skill, work, creativity, improvisation, inequality, computing, repair, factories, development, citizen science, sci-art, post/decolonial and feminist theories, ethnography, Latin America (Brazil)