I'm Josi. I am originally from Brazil, and I'm a Marketing Lecturer here in LUMS.

Broadly speaking, I research markets, how markets are made, why they work the way they do. And in the past six years, I've been researching Brazilian favelas and the tourist market in Brazilian favelas, specifically.

Thinking of these grand challenges that we have nowadays, you know, poverty, inequality, climate change. These things really require that we ask new questions and find new answers to some of these great problems that we have, and I thought, what better place to go than actually talking to people who are going through some of these great struggles. It's completely detached from our everyday realities, completely detached from my reality.

So favelas are a very interesting setting to look at entrepreneurial work. Because of the social exclusion and spatial exclusion really of favelas in Rio, people there need to find a way to make a living. And so they get very creative and they use whatever resources they have available simply because there isn't much available, they can't really rely on the typical institutions that people in formal markets can rely on. So they don't have public safety, they don't have basic infrastructure, you know, things that we take for granted in formal markets are not present in a favela.

So when you go there, you get to actually witness how people make a living and how do they survive in a context where they are deemed by the outside people, people from the city, from other places, as criminals. They're bundled as criminals, you know, they're bundled as people who are not interested in hard work, who are lazy. They're really stigmatised.

I think it's important that we bring insights from different places and we really provide a rich experience and a richness of discussion to our students. And then going to these different places and talking to different people who are living different lives, I think it really brings that to the classroom and helps students widen their perspective on things and be critical of some of the things that are out there.

I don't think I have words to describe how impactful that experience was for me because, as with any research, you go to the field thinking you're going to find something, you have some assumptions about what you're going to find, and then it completely takes its own shape and the research is something that is kind of alive. So it kind of follows its own thing you are just following it around.

It's shaped my interest, my research interest really, because I went to the field thinking I was interested in some things and I ended up being interested in other things. So at the same time that I was there interacting with them my research was being shaped by that experience as I went along.