AB: How are cross-disciplinary perspectives or methods important to your current project?

LG: In my current research project, which I’m turning into a book, I trace how technological actors in Brazil have engaged improvisation to navigate systems of inequality and challenge dominant ideas about innovation. To do that, I employ a variety of methods, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, collaborative research, digital content analysis, archival work, and I even pursued skills training at an electronics repair school in São Paulo. I draw on a range of theoretical perspectives from fields such as anthropology, science and technology studies, design, and media and urban studies to examine my empirical material. This type of cross-disciplinary approach is important to me as it allows me to see technology from many angles at once — not only as something that people build and use, but also as something that shapes everyday life, politics and culture. It allows me to work across scales, connecting particular hands-on experiences of making and repairing technologies to the larger histories and power structures behind these practices in Brazil and globally.

AB: What do you see as the major challenges of conducting cross-disciplinary research? What do you find most rewarding?

LG: Academia is structured around disciplinary boundaries. Each field has its canonical authors, methods, and key terms. Even when scholars are critical of those orthodoxies, they tend to be inescapable. There are some advantages to this silo-ism that have to do with ease of communication and the ability to quickly build knowledge on previous research. But in an increasingly interconnected world, and with all the tools available, that approach may be somewhat outdated. That said, working across fields demands a lot of intellectual flexibility, curiosity towards unfamiliar ideas and time to translate concepts and theories across fields. It’s no easy task. But it can come with great rewards. To me, the most important thing is the potential to open new questions and perspectives about problems that might have been too big or complex to be tackled from a single perspective.

AB: What ethical considerations drive your interests in postcolonial and feminist studies of science and technology in the Global South? 

LG: My interest in postcolonial and feminist approaches to science and technology stems from a commitment to challenging the usual stories about knowledge production and innovation — stories that tend to center famous men and powerful companies in Europe and North America. Instead, I choose to focus on the overlooked labor, skills and creativity that support the everyday technological life in the Global South. I’m interested in amplifying those practices and showing how important they are, reflecting on their invisibility and asking about the political, economic and cultural forces behind their undervaluation. For me, doing this work in a responsible way means collaborating when possible, being mindful of my positionality and creating scholarship that is respectful of the communities that welcome me. I must also add that I take the concept of the Global South rather expansively since I don’t consider it a geographic location but the result of a power relation. That means we can find similar dynamics in unexpected places, including in the United States and Portugal, where I also do some research.