Luisa Reis Castro

Luísa Reis-Castro is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She holds a PhD in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is broadly interested in the social, cultural, political, and historical dimensions of scientific knowledge about multispecies relations, particularly in contexts involving harm to humans. Her research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. She has published in Environmental Humanities; Engaging Science, Technology, and Society; Isis; American Anthropologist, among others. Her interdisciplinary research has received awards from the American Anthropological Association, the Latin American Studies Association, the American Sociological Association, and the History of Science Society.

Reis-Castro is currently completing her book manuscript, tentatively titled How to Survive the Mosquito: Vectorial Politics in Brazil and Beyond, which has been selected for the “Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century” series at the University of California Press. The book argues that climate change is reshaping disease geographies and the geopolitics of science. It asks: What does it mean to view a planet facing rising rates of mosquito-borne diseases from Brazil’s perspective? By examining the geopolitics of knowledge, racialized imaginaries of Brazilianness, and the mobilization of nature to address planetary challenges, How to Survive the Mosquito shows how novel mosquito projects are both technoscientific interventions and world-making endeavors.