Thiago Pezzuto

Research Interests

• Global governance of artificial intelligence and digital technologies
• Comparative public policy: political parties, ideology, and policy-making
• Education policy, comparative and international education, and higher education
• Bibliometrics and scientometrics; social and intellectual cartography of research fields (including tools such as VOSviewer and CiteSpace)

Short Biography

Dr. Thiago Pezzuto is the first holder of the Academic Freedom Fellowship at the University of Erfurt, a programme that supports researchers whose work has been affected by restrictions on their freedom of inquiry. A Brazilian-Italian scholar and lawyer by training, he holds a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and a PhD in International Education Policy from the University of Maryland, College Park. He later held a postdoctoral research position at the University of Maryland until the external grant supporting his work was terminated following changes in US federal funding priorities.

At Erfurt, he holds the fellowship under the academic sponsorship of Professor Michael Riegner and Professor Andreas Goldthau and is affiliated with the Global Justice Clinic and the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy. His current research focuses on the global governance of artificial intelligence. Using scientometric and information-visualisation methods, he is mapping key themes, concepts, works, and authors that structure AI governance debates across academic communities and policy arenas worldwide, including how and to what extent they intersect with questions of ethics, power, positionality, and inequality.

Publications

Thiago Pezzuto (2023). Blowtorching Freirean Thought Out of Bolsonaro’s Brazil: Alagoas’s Escola Livre Law. Latin American Perspectives.

J. Salvador Peralta and Thiago Pezzuto Pacheco (2016). 'We Come in Peace': Ideology and Higher Education Policy in Latin America. In Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola and Tamson Pietsch (Eds.), The Transnational Politics of (Global) Higher Education: Contestation and Transformation. London: Routledge.

J. Salvador Peralta and Thiago Pezzuto Pacheco (2014). Resisting 'Progress': The New Left and Higher Education in Latin America. PS: Political Science & Politics, 47, pp 620-623.