Dr Pedro Salguero
Visiting Research Fellow
Dr Pedro Salguero
Visiting Research Fellow
Pedro Salguero is a labour anthropologist. His work lies at the intersection of anthropology, the sociology of work, and technology studies, and focuses -like that of many other scholars- on how the promises of innovation are sustained, and often strained, by the material conditions that make them possible.
With a background spanning the arts and the social sciences, his trajectory does not follow a linear path but rather a coherent drift: from an early interest in cultural practices and the commons towards an increasingly focused engagement with how labour is organised, exploited, and resisted. His doctoral research examined the professionalisation of activism and the processes through which the political becomes economised, a line of inquiry he now extends in his analysis of the global artificial intelligence industry.
He is a lecturer at the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he teaches sociology.
In recent years, his research has turned towards the “backstage” of artificial intelligence: global data supply chains, BPO companies, and the new geographies of extraction that underpin these systems. Across European and Latin American contexts, he examines how these infrastructures produce new forms of labour dependency, inequality, and colonialism, as well as which forms of labour, territories, and lives are rendered invisible for AI to appear seamless, with particular attention to Spain’s role in these dynamics.