Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela
Assistant Professor at the Leiden University Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology Department
Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela joined the University of Chicago after receiving his PhD in anthropology from Princeton University in 2019. His book project, Pedagogies of Occupation: Free Time, Professionalization, and Protest in Urban Brazil, examines the politics and policing of youth in Brazil. The book addresses the anthropology of policing and incarceration, youth activism, education, digital media, drugs, and time, and is based on research that has been published in Current Anthropology. In a recent event with The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson, he launched Art of Captivity / Arte del Cautiverio (University of Toronto Press 2020, co-authored with Kevin Lewis O’Neill). A Spanish/English photo-ethnography and digital exhibition, the book investigates artistic production by youth inside drug rehabilitation centers in Guatemala. Fogarty-Valenzuela’s research has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and the Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship. At the University of Chicago, he teaches “Virtual Ethnographic Methods”—the class syllabus appearing in the Cultural Anthropology blog—and convenes the Chicago Ethnography Incubator. His multimodal work won the 2020 Current Anthropology Visual Anthropology Competition, and in 2021 he became the journal’s inaugural Visual Media Editor. He is currently working on a film that chronicles the occupation of a school by a vanguard youth movement in Brazil.