Short bio
My name’s Tomás Sánchez Criado (twitter: @tscriado | mastodon: @tscriado) and I am an anthropologist with specialisation in STS.
Between April 2018 and October 2022, I was Senior Researcher and Director of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology, where I remain attached as associate researcher.
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.
See personal website
Related publications
WASTE WHAT? is an open-source cooperative game, which explores how we can think about materials differently, trying out many ways to keep stuff in use.
In this collective text, we introduce the vision and work of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and propose to explore the values of multimodal ethnographic projects, broadly construed.
Outlining the basic principles of a new academic field, Socio-gerontechnology, this book explores common conceptual, theoretical and methodological ideas that become visible in the critical scholarship on ageing and technology at the intersection of Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS).
In diesem Text wollen wir zum einen das Stadtlabor für Multimodale Anthropologie am Institut für Europäische Ethnologie der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin vorstellen und über unsere Projekte der letzten Jahre reflektieren.
