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 for an Unequal World, examines improvisation across various sites of technological production in Brazil and beyond, from innovation hubs and repair shops in São Paulo to self-improved houses in the periphery of Lisbon. Based on long-term fieldwork, this work contributes to critical debates on labor, skill, creativity, innovation, and global tech inequalities. 

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:

“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: 721–33.

“Method as responsibility in applied research.” Vis-à-vis: Explorations in Anthropology, 13(1): 97-113.

Research interests:

design, innovation, computing, work, repair, industrial ethnography, digital futures, DIY and citizen science, art-science intersections, inequality, critical development, post/decolonial and feminist theories, qualitative methods.