[Air-l] Mário José Lopes Guimarães Jr.

[Christine Hine]

It is with great sadness that I announce to the Internet research
community the loss of one of its own. Mário José Lopes Guimarães Jr. had
been a doctoral student at Brunel University in the UK since 2000. On 29
April 2005, shortly after submitting his thesis, Mário was tragically
killed in a road accident. In recognition of his work, a posthumous
doctorate was awarded by Brunel University at a graduation ceremony last
week. 

Many people may have met Mário at AoIR conferences and virtual methods
seminars. He was a passionate scholar and a vibrant and lovely person.
There is a tribute to him on the Anthropology Matters web site at
http://www.anthropologymatters.com/mario_tribute.htm 

Mário had been working on a multi-sited ethnography of avatars in
development and in use. As an anthropologist influenced by science and
technology studies, he was interested to explore the socio-cultural
processes that bring these technologies of embodiment into being. Too
little of Mário's work was published, but some can be accessed via his
web site at http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~hspgmjg/home.html. There is also an
online paper on the practicalities of ethnography in virtual worlds at
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/virtualmethods/doingonlineethnography.pdf
and a chapter on "Doing anthropology in cyberspace" in C. Hine (ed.)
Virtual Methods (Berg, 2005). If you read portuguese, there is an
article on his recent work at
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0104-71832004000100006&script=sci_a
bstract&tlng=en and you may also be interested in his Brazilian web site
at http://www.cfh.ufsc.br/~guima/

In sadness, but also in celebration of a life well-lived, 

Christine

Christine Hine
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey
Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK
c.hine at surrey.ac.uk
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/christine_hine.htm