At the interface: Bloody Spectacles and Necro-Surveillance in Rio de Janeiro with Professor Lucia Cantero

About the lecture:

On October 28th 2025, residents of Rio de Janeiro’s Northern favelas (Complexo da Penha e Complexo de Alemão) witnessed one of the deadliest massacres in their nation’s history. Launched by the state, “operation containment” sought to mitigate the Comando Vermelho’s criminal network at the cost of 130 plus lives. Forensics revealed the targets of the visceral bloodbath were not only racialized (mostly black and brown residents) but also largely a product of summary style executions, and not the casualties of combat wounds. What does this public spectacle demonstrate about the state of ‘order and progress’ in Rio de Janeiro, and Brazil today? At a time when social media and other digital intimacies have heightened bodily knowledge through biometric management, how have increased police surveillance and other forms of technologies (like facial recognition software) led to such rampant and violent “inefficiencies”? Lucia Cantero will explore “necro-surveillance” and other emergent tech contradictions that draw from her monograph in progress Olympic Afterlives: Global Spectacles of Design and Dispossession in Rio de Janeiro. This book project examines the afterlife of the Rio 2016 Olympics, and the ways the mega-event reshaped policy and practices on the ground to consider the contemporary “interface” of urban subjectivity in Rio de Janeiro today.

About Professor Cantero:

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 sites 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.