Deborah Fromm is an urban ethnographer and a Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow at the Department of Geography and Environment of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She holds a PhD and a Master’s degree from the University of Campinas, with visiting periods at Goldsmiths College, University of London and the Centre for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS, Mexico City). She is a researcher at the Nucleus for Urban Ethnography of the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) and has conducted multisite field research in Brazil and Ghana. She also collaborates with the project ‘Global Cars: a transnational urban research on the informal vehicle economy (Europe, Africa and South America)’ - funded by FAPESP and ANR.

During her stay at LSE, she will develop the project ‘The business of urban security: Insurance and illegal protection in violent cities’ with the supervision of Prof. Gareth Jones. She will publish her PhD research findings on the role of the insurance sector in the governance of urban order and in the processes of financialisation of urban security in Brazil, as well as the forms of commodified policing emerging in the borders between legal and illegal markets for the sale of protection. Her work contributes to the gap between Urban Studies and Security Studies and to reframe the problem of violence in Latin America from poverty to market disputes over the accumulation of wealth.

Awards/Scholarships

• Urban Studies Foundation International Fellowship 2024

Selected publications 

• Fromm, D. and Blokland, T. (2024), São Paulo's Crackland as Urban Impasse: An Ethnographic Account of Mobility, Territory and Viracao as Form of Nomadism. Tijds. voor econ. en Soc. Geog. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12595
• Fromm, D. (2023). Insurance technopolitics: Car theft, recovery, and tracking systems in São Paulo. Security Dialogue, 54(1), 39-53. https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106221141355
• FROMM, D. (2022) Designing the Market. In Feltran, G. (ed) Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict. 1st edition: New Jersey, Wiley.
• FROMM, D.; MOTTA, L. (2022) Not outlaw, Legislators. In Feltran, G (ed) Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict. 1st edition: New Jersey, Wiley.
• Fromm, D. (2019). Creating (Il)legal Markets: An Ethnography of the Insurance Market in Brazil. Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 1(2), p.155-163. https://doi.org/10.31389/jied.29.