Larissa do Carmo Inacio

Larissa do Carmo Inácio is a Ph.D. Student at UGA’s Sociology Department. She is from Brazil and attended the University of Brasilia (UnB), where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Education, and a Master’s degree, all of them in Sociology.

As a sociology student, Larissa has never quickly settled for superficial answers. She was always drawn to issues that would make her understand this sometimes strange relationship between science, technology, and society. Larissa hopes to have the opportunity to continue exploring this personal curiosity while contributing to the sociology and social studies of science and technology.

For her doctoral training at the University of Georgia, Larissa is interested in investigating how knowledge and ignorance are produced among groups who distrust science. Three questions motivate her: How is agnotology (this culturally and politically induced ignorance) produced? How is scientific evidence evaluated in contexts where precaution, ignorance, and denial dominate? How do processes of knowledge and agnotology production relate to patterns of inequality? She hopes that her research could be important to understand expertise and inequality in authoritarian contexts and shed light on how denialist movements operate, from a comparative perspective between the United States and Brazil.