Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the Open University of Catalonia’s CareNet-IN3 group.
His 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 particular mode of technoscientific activism (democratising knowledges, design practice and infrastructures); or as a practice of articulating ecologies of support (accessible urbanism; urban heat care plans).
As part of this work, he has been invested in experimenting with forms of anthropological intervention and multimodal devices for storytelling, joint problem-making or concept work (digital platforms, pedagogic toolkits or games) co-convening collective venues like: xcol. An Ethnographic Inventory; Colleex (Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation, an EASA network); the Digital Curatorial Collective of the Society for Cultural Anthropology; and, more recently, the Department of Umbrology, a division of multimodal ethnographic study and artistic intervention on urban habitability in times of climate mutation, foregrounding the affordances of shades.
Reflecting on these matters he has co-edited An Ethnographic Inventory: Field Devices for Anthropological Inquiries (Routledge, 2023) and Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices (Berghahn, 2018).
Tomás is interested in 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.