Research interests: political and economic anthropology, statecraft, uncertainty, temporalities, crises and disasters.

Vinicius Cardoso Reis is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology. He holds a master’s degree in sociology from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and a degree in law from Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV Direito Rio). He is a member of the Brazil LAB at Princeton University and Grupo CASA at IESP-UERJ, and he has worked as a researcher at Transparency International – Brazil. His academic work has focused on the role of uncertainty and the distinct perceptions of time in people’s lives, chiefly during crises and disasters. Through ethnographic research, he engages with anthropological theory on statecraft, uncertainty, economic practices and underlying inequalities. His master’s thesis, an ethnography on social change caused by a mining disaster in Mariana, Brazil, was awarded best in the department, nominated to the Brazilian Contest of University Theses and Dissertations in Social Sciences, and selected for a book deal in 2021.

In his upcoming research, Vinicius plans to focus on the disputes over possible futures for welfare in Brazil, as the country undergoes overlapping sanitary, social, economic and political crises. Furthermore, he seeks to understand how critical moments shift the perception of past, present and future, creating new temporalities that combine memories and horizons, ruins and legacies, trauma and hope.