Graham Denyer Willis | Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil

This is an Archive of a Past Event

The Department of Anthropology, Concerning Violence: A Collaborative Research Group, and Law and Literature in the Global South are hosting Graham Denyer Willis, who will engage in dialogue around his newest book, Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (UC Press, 2022). This book engages gravediggers, mothers who are searching, prosecutors, the PCC, among others, leading Denyer Willis to place these disappearances in conversation with a longue durée of racial capitalism and Brazilian state formation. Denyer Willis is keen to dialogue around the book but also about similar problems and topics addressed in other attendees' work.


About the Speaker

Graham Denyer Willis is Professor of Global Politics and Society in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Geography at Queens' College, Cambridge. Denyer Willis is a political ethnographer interested in practices and assumptions of power amidst inequality, who is especially motivated to identify and question forms of entrapment and escape from power and capitalism, particularly in cities of the Global South. Denyer Willis's work interrogates these questions primarily from Brazil, a country long intertwined with the expansion of capitalism, inequality and racial order, but also in the global capillaries of Silicon Valley.

He has published two books, The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil (2015) and Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (2022), both published by the University of California Press.

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