PROJECTS
Current
– 2024-2025. CIUDEN – Ciudades que envejecen: Los futuros del urbanismo de la edad avanzada en el litoral español / Ageing Cities: The Futures of Late Life Urbanism in the Spanish Coast (PI). Leonardo Grant of the BBVA Foundation (Beca Leonardo de Investigación Científica y Creación Cultural 2024 de la Fundación BBVA). Team: Carmen Lozano Bright + Alexandre Molina Sourdat
Ageing Cities: The Futures of Late Life Urbanism on the Spanish coast wishes to study the Spanish Mediterranean coast as a present and future laboratory of versions of the ‘good life’ under the sun, at a peculiar moment when housing, demographic and environmental crises are coalescing into the perfect storm. For more than fifty years, the Spanish Mediterranean coast, one of the main hotspots of ‘retirement migration’ in the continent, has developed a signature approach to late life urbanism: with a great investment in urban infrastructures of care and urban accessibility transforming dwellings, as well as urban equipment, such as public transports, parks and beaches. In this critical context of urban forms of aging the project has two main objectives: (i) studying the genealogy of late life urbanism (undertaking fieldwork and archival research) in one of the following enclaves: Costa Blanca (Alicante), Costa del Sol (Málaga), Maresme (Barcelona) or Mallorca; and (ii) eliciting the imagination around the futures of late life urbanism (by means of immersive speculative workshops) within planetary boundaries.
The project will run from October 2024 to March 2026.
2023-2025. Ethnographic study of the architectural contest and prototyping process on ephemeral shading in public space (PI)
Research collaboration agreement together with Barcelona City Council’s Office of Climate Change and Sustainability and Barcelona Institute of Technology for the Habitat, to study the architectural contest and prototyping process on ephemeral shading in public space. Part of my Ramón y Cajal fellowship’s research.
-2023-2027. The Body and the City (PI)
Research line funded by a Ramón y Cajal fellowship (RYC2021-033410-I, Spanish National Scientific, Technical and Innovation Research Programme 2021-2023) at the Open University of Catalonia’s CareNet-IN3 group.
-2023-2025: Multimodal appreciation: Prototypes for the evaluation and institutionalisation of more-than-textual ethnography (co-PIs: Ignacio Farías, Tomás Criado, Andrew Gilbert), Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology, funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung‘s Open Up programme)
This project takes on an impossible problem. Ethnographers from across the humanities and social sciences have recently experimented with multimodal forms of description, analysis and intervention in order to grasp slippery research objects that otherwise remain outside of the apprehensible. This multimodal turn has resulted in a proliferation of more-than-textual forms that are impossible to classify and at odds with institutionalised modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Despite the important openings created by multimodal works, they are rarely seen as of equal value when compared to articles and monographs. The current situation is problematic but to a certain extent understandable, as peers, reviewers and supervisors are confronted with a complex conundrum: What criteria should be employed to evaluate such multimodal singularities? This project responds to this conundrum through two experimental moments that correspond to the two challenges producing the current impasse, those of evaluation and institutionalisation. The first moment is constituted by a set of immersive exercises designed to describe and compare the affordances of selected more-than-textual or multimodal research artefacts. The second moment is a set of prototyping exercises designed to produce and test a toolkit to facilitate the evaluation and institutionalisation of future multimodal research.
Team: Judith Albrecht, Tomás Criado, Ignacio Farías, Andrew Gilbert, Carla J. Maicher and Karina Piersig.
2018-ongoing. An uncommon city: Bodily diversity and the activation of possible urbanisms (book project)
The book is an anthropological exploration of bodily diversity and its impact in the material and knowledge politics of city-making. Drawing on field and archival work with independent-living and disability rights movements, paying attention in particular to their urban struggles as well as their pedagogic interventions in the training of architects, city planners, and designers (with materials mostly from Barcelona, but also from how I went back to those learnings whilst teaching to architects in Munich and Berlin), I trace a wealth of activist initiatives caring for an epistemic, material and political activation of urban design.
Past
-2021-2022. Trash Games — Playing with the Circular Economy Transition at the Haus der Materialisierung (PI: Vera S. Rotter, Recycling engineering, TU Berlin; Co-PI: Tomás Criado, Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology, HU Berlin – Funded by the Berlin University Alliance 2021-2022 call for Experimental Science Communication Laboratories)
The project “Trash Games: Playing with the Circular Economy Transition at the HdM” has brought together the Chair of Circular Economy and Recycling Technologies (CERT, Technische Universität Berlin) and the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) to develop and explore games and game design as formats of public engagement with the Circular Economy (CE). The idea of a circular economy goes beyond current top-down efforts to achieve sustainable development by extending the life of products and the materials they contain through their reuse, repair, remanufacturing and recycling. In this project we have experimented with games as a special form of science communication enabling accessible, speculative and interactive forms of participation of non-homogeneous publics in complex topics. In cooperation with actors of the civic platform “Haus der Materialisierung” – part of the Haus der Statistik, flagship project for community-oriented neighborhood development in Berlin –, as well as other circular economy initiatives from Berlin, we undertook a several months-long research process, resulting in the prototyping of a game that explores potentials and conflicts in the social transition to a collaboratively managed circular economy.
Stadtlabor’s anthropological research and game design team: Petra Beck, Sebastian Quack, Ignacio Farías & Tomás Criado.
Main result: WASTE WHAT? An open-source game on the many ways to reuse stuff!
-2015-2018: Accessibility Values: Disability rights movements, political regulations and market devices in the design of urban democracy in Europe (Individual research project)
An ethnographic research project (involving fieldwork, interviews, and archival work) on inclusive urbanism struggles and the creation, implementation, maintenance and supervision of sidewalk democracy projects in Europe, with a focus on Barcelona and Spain. Funded by Assistant Professorship of Participatory Technology Design, Munich Center for Technology in Society & Deparment of Architecture, Technical University of Munich .
– 2012-2014. Participatory experiences in the design of independent living technologies & services (Postdoctoral project at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
An ethnographic research project on different practices of participatory & collaborative design for ‘independent living’ and urban accessibility, taking part as a member of the “En torno a la silla” design collective. Funded by: An Alliance 4 Universities postdoctoral fellowship; and the Spanish National R&D programme 2011-2014 “Political Action of Groups Concerned with the Promotion of Independent Living in Spain (EXPDEM)” (CSO2011-29749-C02-02) research project.
– 2007-2012. The logics of telecare: The fabrication of ‘connected autonomy’ in telecare for older people (PhD in Social Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid).
The result of an ethnographic project on home telecare devices for older people in the region of Madrid (Spain), in which I focused on the practices of implementation and use of such devices & services through which certain articulations of ‘users’ as well as care relations and spaces emerged out. Funded by: FPU-UAM 2007-2011 PhD fellowship; FP7 project 2007-2010 “Ethical Frameworks for Telecare Technologies for older people at home (EFORTT)“; and Spanish National R&D programme 2008-2011 research project “Technology and attention to dependence: An analysis of the psychosocial effects of telecare’s implementation” (CSO2008-06308-C02-01/SOCI).
COLLECTIVE VENUES
-2024-ongoing: Department of Umbrology (co-curator)
A division of study and artistic intervention founded on the principles of an Urbanthropocenic Anthropology, whose self-appointed task is the creation of devices to equip future professionals of umbrology for a context of scorching heat, with a particular interest in shade analysis and the politics of shadows. Its main objective is to re-enliven shade knowledges and practices, working «on shadows, from shadows.»
The Department of Umbrology is a joint production of xcol. An Ethnographic Inventory & Tarde, a handbook of minimal and irrelevant urban entanglements.
Curatorial team: Tomás Criado & Santiago Orrego.
-2020-ongoing: xcol. An Ethnographic Inventory (co-curator)
A digital inventory—co-curated with Adolfo Estalella (Complutense University of Madrid)—for the documentation of inventive forms of ethnographic inquiry, which seeks to intervene in current forms of anthropological practice and learning.
Its initial development was funded by the Laboratory of Experimental Visual Anthropology (LAAV) of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Castilla y León, Spain (MUSAC). PIs: Adolfo Estalella & Tomás Criado.
The project received the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) ‘Making and Doing‘ Award 2021.
Curated by Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Criado. Research assistant & web producer: Carmen Lozano. Web development & maintenance: Alfonso Sánchez Uzabal (Montera34)
-2016-ongoing: Collaboratory for ethnographic experimentation — #Colleex (founder & co-convenor, 2016-2021)
#Colleex /kɒli:ɡz/ — An EASA network that aims to open a space for debate and intervention around experimental forms of ethnographic fieldwork. It seeks to explore novel forms of knowledge production for anthropology.