Bianca Freire-Medeiros, PhD, is Sociology Professor at University of São Paulo (USP, Brazil) and coordinator of the UrbanData-Brazil databank. She is one of the main references for those interested in the so-called poverty-tourism field in Brazil and abroad. Her book Touring Poverty (Routledge, 2013, 2015), as well as the documentary film based on her research project, A Place to Take Away (2012), have been highly praised both in and outside academia. Her work has been published in several languages and she was a Visiting Researcher at Princeton University, El Colegio de Mexico and Lancaster University, and a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Julia O'Donnell, PhD, graduated in History (University of São Paulo-USP, Brazil) and holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, Brazil), where she is currently an Assistant Professor. Her research interests are the urban history of Rio de Janeiro and the boundaries between anthropology, history and literature. She has published many articles in specialized journals and is also the author of De olho na rua: a cidade de João do Rio (Zahar, 2008) and A invenção de Copacabana (Zahar, 2013).