Robert Samet

Robert Samet works on media, law, and politics in the Americas. Since 2006, he has been conducting research in and on Venezuela. Robert's fieldwork alongside crime reporters in Caracas was the subject of an award-winning first book, Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (Chicago 2019). Currently, he is pursuing a pair of projects that build on this research. The first uses the Venezuelan case to construct a theoretical approach to populism that combines the inductive methods of ethnography with conceptual tools from communications and cultural studies. As part of this project, he is co-organizing a week-long symposium with the Wenner-Gren Foundation on “Anthropological Approaches to Populism” in Spring 2022. The second project looks at how fear of police impacts urban space in a way that exacerbates the problem of violent crime in cities like Caracas. This project draws on comparative ethnography to show how substantive police reforms are undermined by tools of perception management.