dr. Flávio Eiró de Oliveira

As a political ethnographer my research advances scholarship at the intersection of anthropology, sociology and public administration. Through my research, I aim to push for a critical theorising of the state-citizen relations in the field of politics and policy implementation through ethnographic fieldwork. I aim to move beyond normative conceptualisations of the state and citizenship by understanding how politics shape citizens and frontline workers’ representations, expectations and the daily constructions of the state.

My work on state-citizens relations began in my PhD in Sociology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (France), for which I won a scholarship from Brazil’s Ministry of Education to fully fund PhDs in international institutions. I was the first ethnographer to investigate the Brazilian welfare program Bolsa Família from the perspective of frontline workers, identifying how their efforts to implement the programme in a way they deemed fairer were embedded in their representations of ‘deservingness’, which generated insecurity among the programme’s recipients and claimants. This research has been published in journals articles, as well as an Open Access book (in Portuguese and French) by Etnográfica Press: A política da pobreza / La politique de la pauvreté.

Another of my research streams is on how different groups engage with politics and the state. I analyse how welfare recipients entered clientelist relationships, and how intermediaries operate in those contexts. In my current book project, I focus on politicians' viewpoints: based on ethnographic research among Brazilian political candidates and election campaign workers, I analyze how they make sense of the changing political landscape during the Bolsonaro administration, their own role in it, and the strategies they use to claim legitimacy for the political use of their own identities.

Since April 2024, I am assistant professor of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Currently, I am editor of the Dutch anthropological journal Etnofoor and I am co-convenor of the EASA network on Anthropologies of the State.

Prior to the VU, I was assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen, where I taught at the  Minorities & Multilingualism programme, and coordinated the university minor in Development Studies. In Groningen, my teaching focused on issues related to diversity and minorities, with a focus on race/racism, far-right politics and colonialism.

Between 2017-2021, I was a Post-doctoral Researcher in the ERC-funded project ‘Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics’, at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen.

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