Graham is Professor of Global Politics and Society in the Department of Politics and International Studies, and a Fellow of Queens’ College.
A political ethnographer, Graham’s research and teaching is concerned with practices and assumptions of power amidst inequality, as they work through cities, institutions and informality. He approaches these questions from historical and contemporary Brazil, to question how direct and indirect forms of violence and social organisation matter in the production and maintenance of political authority. He is especially motivated to identify and question forms of entrapment and escape from power and capitalism, globally.
He is the author of 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. He is now at work on a third ethnographic monograph, which examines the practices and logics of ‘trust and safety’ in Silicon Valley as vital to a global regime of security and accumulation rooted in platform capitalism.
