The power of dreams: An ethnography of start-up companies in Brazil and in the United Kingdom

Speaker: Louise Scoz Pasteur de Faria, UFRGS (Brazil) and UCL (UK)

Start-up companies are at the epicentre of narratives about contemporary capitalism. The image of the entrepreneur as 'the neoliberal subject', an agent that dwells in this economic environment of risk and uncertainty, is an example of economic subjectivities that began to emerge from contingent conditions in different levels of vulnerability of the Post-Fordist Era.

Louise Scoz Pasteur de Faria seeks to continue this critical perspective through an ethnographic focus on Brazilian start-up companies based on research conducted between Brazil and the United Kingdom, during the period of 2014 and 2017, amongst young entrepreneurs and networks of investors, consultants and experts creating their own start-up companies.

Her interests reflect upon the process through which a start-up enterprise ceases to be simply a project of economic livelihood to become a primary site of self-creation, embedded in their ways of being, feeling, thinking and acting in the world.

Louise is an anthropologist (PhD) and qualitative research expert with experience in managing multi-layered, complex and cutting-edge multi-method research projects.