Lunchtime research conversation: Dr Rodrigo Firmino

An informal lunchtime research conversation with Dr Rodrigo Firmino, Urban Laboratory Honorary Senior Research Associate until September 2016.

Dr Firmino's current research project is titled 'Connected Spaces, Controlled Movements: Technology, Surveillance, Security, and Cities', exploring the territorial implications and manifestations of surveillance and augmenting technologies in contemporary neo-liberal cities.

This research conversation will take the format of a 20 minute presentation with ample time for discussion of the topic, sharing possibilities for collaboration and for reviewing the remit of the research, which also covers an interest in the redefinition of boundaries between private and public spaces by new sociotechnical assemblages supported by a chain of interconnected so-called 'smart technologies'.

Dr Firmino is an Associate Professor in Urban Management at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUCPR) in Curitiba, Brazil, and a CNPq (Brazil's National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) Research Fellow. Since 2009, he has been chief editor of urbe, a Brazilian urban studies journal that publishes papers in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French. He is also a founding member of the Latin American Network of Surveillance, Technology and Society Studies and has been publishing articles and essays in major journals about surveillance & space, augmented technologies & cities, digital urbanisation, cyberculture, smart urbanism, among other themes.

One of his current projects, funded by the Newton Fund (in a partnership between the ESRC and Brazilian Research Councils), about smart urbanism involves two Brazilian (PUCPR and UFBA) and two British (Durham and Plymouth) universities.

His sabattical at UCL is funded by the Brazilian government.

• Dr Rodrigo Firmino on ResearchGate
• Contact Dr Rodrigo Firmino: r.firmino@ucl.ac.uk