I am a political anthropologist. My work focuses on the city as a strategic site for the emergence and erosion of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and democracy. I have conducted research projects in Brazil, Denmark, Nicaragua, and the United States. My current work investigates new forms of direct democracy and develops application software for democratic assembly. My books, research articles, and software development engage these issues as an anthropology of critique and experiment.  

I am a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and also founding director of the Social Apps Lab. I have written and edited a number of books, including The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília, Cities and Citizenship, and Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. A recent research article from 2019 concerns metropolitan rebellions and the politics of commoning the city. Another in 2021 presents the results of a pilot study I conducted with a team of researchers and residents in Managua. It implemented a social and software platform for citizen entomology that mobilizes community-based mosquito control to prevent dengue, chikungunya, and Zika.

At the Social Apps Lab, I lead the development of software platforms for mobile and web-based applications that address the terms and scales of democratic assembly, civic action, and urban knowledge. My software projects include AppCivist.org and DengueChat.org which engage people in assembly-based direct democracy. Various instances concern participatory budgeting (Vallejo, CA), master planning (São Paulo), and community-based arbovirus vector control (Managua).