Notes on anthropology, AI, and how knowledge gets made. Straight to your inbox. Subscribe on LinkedIn
Roi Benitez EN/ES
Research

Research lines

I study how institutions create space to break their own rules — and what happens to knowledge when we produce it alongside AI.

Doctoral thesis in progress · ITBA

What conditions make it possible for a public institution to actually change?

My doctoral research investigates institutional free zones: spaces where the usual rules are temporarily suspended so that something different can happen. The hypothesis is that transformation becomes possible when three factors converge — those zones where the norm is suspended, middle leaders who act as cultural translators between worlds that don't understand each other, and political contexts that make the experiment legitimate.

Theoretical framework

Actor-Network Theory · Boundary objects · Experimentalist governance

Status

PhD in Systemic Innovation, ITBA. In progress.

What happens to knowledge when we produce it alongside machines?

An ethnography of how knowledge is produced, negotiated, and attributed when people work alongside agentic AI. And of what gets lost when qualitative knowledge — dense, situated, human — is compressed into formal semantic infrastructures. The theory is settled and well-cited; the empirical evidence barely exists. That gap is the work.

Theoretical framework

Suchman · Knorr Cetina · Bowker & Star · Forsythe — Science and technology studies · Anthropology of algorithms

Status

Ongoing research agenda.

Writing

Selected essays

Human-centered policy design: redefining public policy-making in the digital age

MIT LIFT LAB Research Fest · 2025

Learning governments: 3 keys to growing government capacity

Apolitical · 2022

Elevating human resources from sidebar to strategic: a case study in gender skills

Apolitical · 2023
More writing on Medium →