Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Faculty Member, Psychology and Educational Sciences

Other Affiliations: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Anthropology

Profesor ayudante

Thesis Title: Las lógicas del telecuidado (provisional)

About

In February 2011 I have joined UOC's Psychology and Education department in Barcelona to act as 'profesor ayudante', after a long time working as a researcher at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid's General Psychology and Social Anthropology Departments.

Besides my teaching duties, I am currently writing my PhD thesis (Las lógicas del telecuidado / The logics of telecare), an ethnographic project on home telecare devices for older people in Madrid (Spain).

In my PhD I focus especifically on the practices of implementation and use of home telecare devices through which certain articulations of subjects, social contacts and care spaces emerge out. 
Home telecare has been from its very beginnings a core service in a long-lasting public policy aimed at promoting older people's autonomy and preventing their social isolation. In Spain this social policy is also tied to another long-lasting concern, collaborating in solving the problem of what some feminist researchers have called 'the crisis of care': Spain's main carers (the older people's daughers) have started to work and cannot -and no longer feel obliged as they did before- to be the only responsibles for this type of care. Allegedly, home telecare services would provide us with a solution which would re-articulate care relations, enhancing the older people's users autonomy and self-determination, without imprisoning the traditional main carers.
But, despite its ethical concern -and according to certain critical gerontology's arguments- I take issue with the policies of (inter)active/autonomous ageing by showing how telecare implementation and use should be better understood as a practical politics of life, as a frictional process of 'bringing (a certain type of) users into existence' which intersects with other modes of subjectivation and dwelling ('ancient' and 'new' ways of practicing old age; safety and security; or family, relatedness and in/formal care). In fact, as I would like to show, home telecare for older people articulates a diagram of what I call ‘connected autonomy’, in which telecare users and their socio-material links are fabricated, indoctrinated and embodied in the fashion of what Peter Sloterdijk terms architectures of ‘connected isolation’: a particular way of creating communication and spatial links between ‘automised older people’ in their homes and contacts who could be activated in the wake of an emergency. I would like to show how this diagram requires the articulation of a very particular type of users through specific regulation work upon one’s self and the mediation of specific ‘technologies of identity’.
Despite its positive aspects this diagram has also a potential dark side: it is embedded in and traversed with class, gender and race values, which could entail potential new disablements for certain groups of older people.
In that vein, I hope that this ethnographic research might help in the opening up a debate around 'how we want to be taken care of' and 'what type of care arrangements we might want to promote'. A debate in which we might be able to articulate different possibilities of becoming old and of fabricating care-receiving and care-giving relations.

Main research topics
- Science and technology studies
- Governmentality and biopolitics
- Politics of care and social protection
- Embodiment and modes of subjectivation
- Dwelling practices and built environments

Research groups
- Member of ATIC (Social action and technology research group) - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: http://aticresearchgroup.net/
- Collaborator of GESCIT (Group for the Social Study of Science and Technology) - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: http://psicologiasocial.uab.es/gescit/

Other research activities
From January 2009 to December 2010 I have been Student Representative Member of the EASST Council (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology - www.easst.net ). This has led me to be part of the Programme Committee of the forthcoming EASST_010 conference in Trento (Italy), co-ordinating the student activities: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010

Between Octobter 2009 and January 2010 I have been visiting PhD student at the Centre for Science Studies, Dpt of Sociology, Lancaster University under the supervision of Maggie Mort: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/

Since 2004 I am member of the Editorial Board of AIBR. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana  (quarterly journal of Anthropology in Spanish): www.aibr.org

Contact Information