Heidelberg · São Paulo

Eduardo
Altheman

I study the changing forms of capitalism and authoritarianism— and the futures they make imaginable, or impossible.

Theory as a form of intervention.

01 / Profile

Portrait of Eduardo Altheman Camargo Santos
Heidelberg · 2025

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS), Heidelberg University.

My research moves between sociology, political economy and Critical Theory. I am interested in how cutting-edge capitalist technologies reorganise labour, subjectivity and political imagination, and how these transformations streamline contemporary authoritarianism.

02 / Research

Lines of inquiry

01

Critical Theory

Reconstructing the Frankfurt School as a living method for diagnosing domination, contradiction and unrealised possibilities in the present.

02

Platform Capitalism

Examining platforms not simply as technologies or firms, but as a social form reorganising labour, class, culture and everyday conduct.

03

Fascism & Authoritarianism

Tracing how contemporary authoritarianism changes with capitalism, from mass integration to digitally organised atomisation, resentment and exclusion.

04

Apocalyptic Studies

Studying the apocalypse as a political grammar through which societies organise fear, futurity, catastrophe and the unequal distribution of survival.

05

Neoliberalism

Approaching neoliberalism as a political rationality and form of subjectivation that extends market imperatives far beyond the economy.

06

Political Economy

Connecting economic forms to power, institutions and social experience, with particular attention to labour, monopoly and the Global South.

03 / Publications

Selected work

04 / Curriculum vitae

Academic trajectory

2025—present

Postdoctoral Researcher

CAPAS · Heidelberg University

2024—2025

Research Fellow

CAPAS · Heidelberg University

2019—2024

Postdoctoral Researcher

Department of Sociology · University of São Paulo

2016

Visiting Scholar

Duke University · supervised by Fredric Jameson

2014—2015

Visiting Researcher

Goethe University Frankfurt · hosted by Thomas Lemke

Postdoctoral

International Herbert Marcuse Society

Marielle Franco Prize recipient

PhD

Sociology

University of São Paulo
Full academic CVPDF