Vito Laterza

SCAS-Nordic Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Development Studies, University of Agder

Vito Laterza is an anthropologist and development scholar. He completed his PhD in Social Anthropology
at the University of Cambridge in 2011. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Develop-
ment and Planning at the University of Agder, Norway, and leads the focus area Sustainability, Digitalisation
and Communication at the Centre for Digital Transformation (CeDiT). Laterza is Work Package Leader in
the Horizon Europe project ReMeD – Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age. He is a co-editor
of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, a member of the editorial board of the journal Global Net-
works, and a member of the international editorial board of HUMA – the Institute for Humanities in Africa at
the University of Cape Town.

Laterza’s approach involves a systemic integration of ethnography, macro-level structural analysis, and
epistemological and reflexive inquiry, in the tradition of “big ideas” social science and social theory. A
major strand of his work focuses on political communication, digital media and new forms of social and
political mobilisation in Africa and the West, including spontaneous protests, right-wing populism, digital
democracy, and environmental activism.

Laterza has published several journal articles on the case of the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica,
and has used the rich empirical evidence from leaks, whistleblowers and commissions of inquiry to develop
a philosophical anthropology of human-technology relations under surveillance capitalism. At SCAS, he will
develop this work into a book-length monograph that will provide a deeper understanding of the social, psycho-
logical, cultural, economic and political dimensions of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, and of the onto-
logical transformations of political behaviour and human agency brought about by social media platforms.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.