My name’s Tomás Sánchez Criado (twitter: @tscriado | mastodon: @tscriado) and I am an anthropologist with specialisation in STS.

Born in Ávila (Spain) in 1981, I grew up and studied in Madrid (PhD in Anthropology, UAM, 2012). After that I have spent most of my professional life in between Barcelona, Munich and Berlin.

I now work in Barcelona as Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow in the Social Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia’s CareNet-IN3 group.*

My ethnographic and public engagement work focuses on different instances of relational, knowledge and material politics in a wide variety of settings where care is invoked as a mode of intervention: be it as a practice of articulating more or less enduring ecologies of support; or as a particular mode of technoscientific activism democratising knowledges, design practice and infrastructures.

I am currently writing a book on how bodily diversity comes to matter in city-making, titled An Uncommon City: Bodily Diversity and the Activation of Possible Urbanisms. Besides, I’m beginning to imagine an expansion of this research line to the study of the genealogy and challenges of ageing-friendly cities / late life urbanism, paying special attention to the mutual transformations of bodies and urban infrastructures that the Euro-American ‘baby boomers’ are both an effect and a vector of. I call this an inquiry into boomer landscapes.

These interests have also led me to experiment with devices for anthropological inquiry (exploring inventive forms of collaborative inquiry where multimodality could be understood not just or not only as ‘in a plurality of media’ but rather ‘in a plurality of relational and epistemic modes’).

As part of this work I have been invested in convening collective venues of multimodal ethnography and collaborative pedagogy: such as, xcol. An Ethnographic Inventory, a collaborative platform I co-curate to document ethnographic inventions and the inventiveness of the ethnographic.

[*Between January and July 2023 I’m Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (LMU) in Munich]

CONTACT

E-mail: tomcriado AT uoc.edu | ORCID | Google Scholar

For any invitations, please note that due to child care and environmental concerns, I can only accept to take part in local or webinar events happening in a family-friendly time window. Thanks for your understanding.

MERITS

2021. Accreditation of research by the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (AQU Catalunya): Associate Professor / Professor Agregat rank.

PREVIOUS CAREER EXPERIENCE

– 2018-2022. Senior Researcher and Director of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology at the Humboldt-University of Berlin’s Institut für Europäische Ethnologie.

– 2015-2018. Senior Researcher at the Munich Center for Technology in Society & the Department of Architecture, Technical University of Munich.

– 2014-2015. Lecturer in Social Sciences. Psychology and Educational Sciences Department, Open University of Catalonia. STS-b (Barcelona Science & Technology Studies) research group.

– 2012-2014: Assistant lecturer / Alliance 4 Universities postdoctoral fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. STS-b (Barcelona Science & Technology Studies) research group.

– 2011-2012. Assistant lecturer. Psychology and Educational Sciences Department, Open University of Catalonia.

– 2007-2011. FPU-UAM PhD Fellow. Social Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.