Guilherme’s doctoral dissertation is an attempt to map the contemporary observation of labor. He seeks to conceptualize current practices of labor-related knowledge transmission and their media techniques as modes of space production: spaces where young students are oriented through careers, where job seekers promote the figures of their selves, and where professionals become able to accomplish their production tasks. In an ever increasing number of places where one is led to observe labor as an economic activity, techniques are mobilized which configure its experience. His research seeks to make the genealogy of these space-generating techniques and their institutional usages in order to show that modernity is characterized by a series of local economies of attention building the forms and meanings of human activity as labor – i.e. as an activity of wealth production – while simultaneously building subjects who are called upon to project themselves into the labor market, to develop economically useful skills, and to see forms of self-improvement that are at the same time in line with the needs of wealth production.

Guilherme da Silva Machado was a research fellow and PhD candidate in the Graduate Research Training Program “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University from 2019 to 2021. He defended his thesis on the institutional visual culture of work on April 30, 2021, completed under a joint supervision at Goethe University and Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 University (forthcoming publication by Antipodes). He currently holds a position as Junior Lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne, Department of Film History and Aesthetics. His current research focuses on the use of cinema and media in colonial empires for the recruitment and education of indigenous labor.

guilherme.dasilvamachado@unil.ch

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