Lucia Cantero

Lucía E. Cantero is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, Claremont Graduate University. She holds a PhD and MA in Anthropology and African American Studies from Yale University, and an MA and BA from The University of Chicago in Anthropology and Psychology/Visual Arts, respectively.

Her research critically engages with consumer culture, social media, algorithms, urban public space, and infrastructures through a political economic lens that centers aesthetics and power. She investigates how branding and advertising shape racial, gendered, and class-based subjectivities, particularly in post-megaevent contexts like Rio de Janeiro after the 2016 Olympics.

Her recent publications reveal a strong focus on ethnographic theory, affect, and resistance in Brazil, as well as the racial biases embedded in facial recognition technologies. She co-edited Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair and Resistance in Brazil and is completing her monograph Olympic Afterlives: Global Spectacles of Design and Dispossession in Rio de Janeiro. Her upcoming work explores the intersection of technology, prosthetics, and intimacy.

Her scholarly output spans anthropology, cultural studies, urban studies, and critical data studies. She collaborates with data scientists and engages in interdisciplinary critique of AI and machine learning, particularly in Latin American contexts.

• Racial Biases in Machine Learning and its Social Implications: The Case of Facial Recognition Software in Brazil (2021)
• Editors Introduction: Ethnographies of a Brazilian Unraveling (2021)
• "The Oil is Ours!": Petro-Affect and the Scandalization of Politics (2021)
• The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn? Race, Racism and its Reckoning in American Anthropology (2020)
• 2016 Year in Socio-Cultural Anthropology- In Dark Times: Hauntologies and other Ghosts of Production (2017)
• Emerging Art Center: Rio de Janeiro – The Contemporary Carioca Art Landscape (2017)

Lucia Cantero has co-edited major volumes and published in top anthropology journals. She is actively involved in collaborative research on AI ethics and has secured interdisciplinary partnerships. While specific grants are not listed, her ongoing projects suggest active external funding or institutional support. She advises students in cultural studies and anthropology, though no named advisees are currently listed.

She is engaged in a collaborative project with data scientists examining facial recognition and AI bias, indicating strong ties to computational social science teams. Her work bridges humanities and data science, contributing to critical technology studies and ethical AI discourse.