Research Proposal 

Research Group

CareNet

Technologies of Presence? Emotions and Digital Connections in Young People with Cancer

The project analyses how social media and artificial intelligence tools shape the ways adolescents and young adults with cancer express, share and manage their emotions. Using digital and qualitative methods, it examines the tensions between support, exposure and control that emerge in these contexts, and how these technologies contribute to the contemporary redefinition of care, health and vulnerability.

CareNet

Critical Studies in Risk and Disasters

CareNet

The innovation ideology

The focus on innovation is pervasive in contemporary societies. Most institutions – particularly companies, but also public administrations and universities – have explicitly included innovation in their strategic plans and their missions. Many of them have even restructured themselves and built new units in order to make innovation their main driver and goal. Innovation has become both a buzzword and a God term. However the innovation imperative is not neutral. It fosters a very particular vision of technology and specific ways to fit it in society; it also shows clear neoliberal traits; and it is severely damaging many social institutions. We seek PhD students willing to carry out research – using mainly STS (science and technology studies) concepts and theoretical frameworks – on one of the following areas: (a) the roots of this ideology and its links to social and political stances; (b) the way it has spread to specific institutions, particularly universities, and how it has changed them; or (c) the specific vision of technology it is based on.

MUSSOL

MUSSOL

Age-friendly environments: Late life urbanism and architectural innovations for ageing societies

As a result of both "alarmist demography" approaches and participatory governing processes and policies seeking to combat various forms of "ageism" (stereotyping or discrimination based on age), welfare states and market actors around the world have developed a wide range of age-friendly environments. Drawing on critical gerontology, disability studies, science and technology studies, and the anthropology of ageing, this sub-research line welcomes PhD proposals aiming to explore the design of age-friendly environments, with a particular focus on late-life urbanism and architecture, and the transformation of cities, housing and facilities in ageing societies. We are interested in ethnographies of urban equipment such as transport systems or pavement and public space designs; new housing facilities and communities such as co-housing and sheltered accommodations with services; assisted living environments such as home-like and open care homes; and leisure and wellness infrastructures ranging from cruise ships to thermal spas. We are looking for PhD candidates who are interested in exploring how urban and architectural designs inscribe specific notions of ageing, what role older people have in their management, and what capabilities they have to alter and change them.

CareNet

Ethnographies of urban heat mitigation and adaptation: Practices, infrastructures, and experiments with atmospheric care

Cities across the globe are grappling with the prospect of rising temperatures, which could make many urban arenas inhabitable, increase mortality and cause dangerous health effects. In places like Barcelona, heat has indeed become a major problem for the city's urban governance and climatology. In recent years, a wide variety of urban actors and the local government – together with public health, meteorological and civil protection agencies – have begun to experiment with forms of atmospheric care: from urban interventions to mitigate heat waves or cool down the city (climate shelters, nature-based solutions, shade infrastructures) to risk prevention campaigns and warning systems targeted at "vulnerable groups" (e.g. children, older people and people with disabilities), also including everyday practices of relating with growing heat. In addition, social movements regularly seek to activate existing alternative knowledge to address the multiple challenges. We wish to explore the relevance of more-than-textual ethnographic approaches, drawing on contemporary research in urban and environmental anthropology, feminist technoscience and geo-humanities, PhD proposals are invited to study the practices, infrastructures and experiments tackling urban heat, making practicable care as an atmospheric matter.

If interested, the candidates could join an ongoing case study in the city of Barcelona, focusing on shading infrastructures and practices.

CareNet

Datafication in education policy and management

According to authors such as Soshana Zuboff, Bernard Stiegler and Byung-Chul Han, datafication is one of the multiple consequences of the increasing use and normalization of algorithms, platforms and other apps to control, manage and monitor societies and groups through various dispositifs (Foucault). But what happens when these technologies reach students, teachers, schools or, more generally, educational communities? How are they received by these communities? Is there a process of resistance on the part of local educational actors? If so, what is the nature of this process and how is it reappropriated in each territory? Drawing on a wide range of authors and disciplines (sociology, social psychology, philosophy, politics, etc.) and adopting a biopolitical perspective, this line aims to address this type of question in a broad sense, in order to study and analyse the effects of educational management at the macro, meso and micro levels.

 From Mental Health to Social Suffering: Critical Epistemologies of Care in Health / Illness / Care Processes

In contemporary Western societies, there is growing social unrest related to our ways of life. This increase raises questions about the adequacy/inadequacy of individual treatments, the limits and effects of mental health diagnoses, the lack of collective spaces to address suffering, and the most effective strategies for enabling spaces for health. In the field of psychiatry, biomedical hegemony, the misuse of diagnoses in society, pharmacocentrism, hospitalocentrism, gender bias, and the pathologization of vital discomforts are part of the problem of ways of dealing with mental suffering. In general terms, these ways of addressing suffering problematize individuals and leave unquestioned the structural and systemic elements that produce precariousness and suffering. This situation points to the need to broaden the methods of treating human suffering and overcome the limitations of a psychiatric model that is insufficient and problematic in many ways. In this direction, we promote doctoral proposals focused on producing new epistemologies of care that are an alternative to current models of managing human suffering. We also accept proposals aimed at analysing and discussing the difficulties of understanding and managing other human diversities, the logics promoted by social inclusion policies and their effects, as well as work aimed at generating hermeneutic openings on psychosocial disabilities.

The aesthetics of being in the human exception

The topic of this proposal is the experience of the human exception. This concept may refer both to a) the disabled subject whose body is reified as an exception, and b) humanity itself as an exception relative to its wider world. The goal is to critically examine this lived experience, in terms of its own praxis, focusing on its materiality and its transformative episteme. The methodology is grounded in aesthetic experience, employing the language of art as a method of critical inquiry. In debates on inclusion, the disabled subject/body is reified as a human exception; there is a need for radical ways of breaking away from this objectification (which we consider to be cultural, at least in Western societies). The paradigm of diversity, for instance, has not managed to break from this cultural reification precisely because it has not managed to escape the biopolitics of the exception, which is a cultural atavism that perpetuates discriminatory policies and social differentiation. Simultaneously, the entrapment of humanity within its semantic sameness – firmly established in urbanized societies – has prevented the construction of a collective 'us' that acknowledges its own vulnerability and exceptionality in a world undergoing catastrophe in slow motion. Without this, trapped in sameness, humanity generates violence against both internal othernesses (disabilities) and external othernesses (non-human life). Drawing on sensory studies and post-humanist theory, this researchwill critically analyse artistic materiality and aesthetic experience to vindicate these forms of 'being in exception' as experiences possessing transformative agency. The implications of these disruptions relate directly to aesthetic creations and the generation of new knowledge.