domingo, 29 de mayo de 2016

New POBICS Seminary: Guy Debord and Society of the Spectacle

Our next and last seminary for this year will be about the most popular theory of Guy Debord: The Society of Spectacle.

We will close our cycle of seminaries with this lecture because we think it could be an important contribution for our recent image analysis. In this sense, we could compare and counterpouse our classical authors used to analyse images (Deleuze, Gillian Rose...) with an author with another interesting and important theory related with images and society in general.

For everyone who don't know Debord's work, we will post the report about our seminary when we hold it. But meanwhile, you can read a little bio about him and his book, extracted from Wikipedia:

"Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."

The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

The seminary will be hold on June 15th at 12:00 at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), in the Social Psychology Department (Martín Baró's room). The entrance es free and open for everyone. 

Photo Credit: Randy Lemoine

miércoles, 25 de mayo de 2016

New papers and topics by POBICS


Hi everyone again!

POBICS is coming back and in this ocassion we want to offer you a little panorama about our current works. We are working on several papers and (related) topics indeed, so we think is a good moment in order to talk about it and show them. There we go:


Fear and panic: we are working in a paper (one that was born from one of our proposal to the 4S/EASST congress). In this paper, we will expose why fear and panic are important in the risk management carried out by governments, institutions and agencies related to biorisk and biosurveillance. We will also describe how panic mediates between governance and liberty; and what is the role of lay-people (citizens aliened to biomedical expert knowledge) in that triade panic-liberty-governance.

Ebola and images: Although we have posted about it recently, we want to remember it because we think is an important topic given the even more importance of images in our daily life, as well as in social research. We bet for a work where the last ebola outbreak in 2014 would be linked to the images produced in that momento by newspapers, Internet, experts, governments, etc. The sense beyond this work is to describe what king of knowledge are being constructed around ebola, and what particular role would had this kind of images.

Drones and epidemics: We are also interesting in analyse how drone's new technology can be linked with epidemics in terms of surveillance and outbreak's detection. This is the topic we have less clear currently, but we are gathering several documents and other material in order to analyse it and open a new path with the implications and possible uses of drones in an epidemics situation or scenario.

Photo Credit: See-ming Lee

martes, 17 de mayo de 2016

POBICS has reached 100 post!

With the last post we published last week, POBICS has reached our hundredth post. This number arrives after one year and a half, time enough to post several joys and sorrows, posts of all kinds: from seminaries to achievings like our current project; from our published papers to reports about our readings; from works in progress to thoughts and discussions.

In this chance, we only want to acknowledge to all of our readers, suscriptors, buddies and all researchers your contributions along this first 100 posts. 

Now that the present course is about to end, we will continue posting our seminaries (open and free to you!), papers and all kind of interesting news for you (next 4S/EASST congress will be an important chance!). We wait for you in our webpage (http://pobics.wix.com/pobics) and also in our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pobi21/?ref=ts&fref=ts.

Photo Credit: g4II4is

lunes, 9 de mayo de 2016

Course addressed to young (pre)researchers: Introduction to research

At the end of this course (final days of May/ beginning of June), Enrique, one POBICS member will carry out a talk addressed to young researcher and students of postgraduate courses in order to exchange opinions, doubts and clear some issues related to the research world. 

This talk will take place at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, on the Psychology Faculty. The room and time will be announced when it would be scheduled (we recommend subscribing to his blog here).

This talk is free but it has limited capacity, so is important to book your seat contacting with him (in the last link or via email: contacto@ebaes.es). Furthermore, the talk will be in Spanish. If you have some important question to discuss or resolve in the talk, please send it in the book email.

INDEX (it could be modified or include last hour topics):

1) What is research? And a PhD Program?

2) Who to start to research?

3) Useful and practical tools: From Writing to Online Collaborative Tasks.

4) Helpful resources (Zotero, Web of Science, Google milieu, etc.)

5) Grants and scholarships in Spain.

6) Social Media on Academic Research

7) Two applied cases: POBICS and ebaes


This is all for now. If you are very interesting in any other topic related with research, please tell us and we will include in the talk. We wait your assistance. If you know someone interested in this talk, please share this post!

Photo Credit: Jim Surkamp

martes, 3 de mayo de 2016

Meeting of the European Society for the History of Human Sciences with POBICS

The Meeting about History of Science is about to be held! As we posted some weeks ago, POBICS
sent a paper and it was accepted. We do not want to reveal all the details about our contributions, but we thought it could be interesting to post the prezi we will use.


1) Presentation: The epidemiological factor:
 An analysis of the link between medicine and politics in the second half of the XX century.

2) Epidemiology. -More than a public-health discipline/concern. Science - Politics. 1. Complex relationships   2.  Social-technical network

3) Background. 18th-19th Centuries. -The birth of:

1. Clinic - 2. Modern nation-states

-Population & State tensions.

-New patient fields (Foucault, 1974).

-Aim: population control and (bio)surveillance.

-How? Statistics, public hygiene.


4) 40's-50's. 

-Great legal, political, economic, social and legal change in medicine.

-Statistics on (potential)risk assessment, insurances...

-An even more connected-world.


5) About biosecurity...

-From a concrete surveillance to a permanent and continuous surveillance.

-The potential (bio)risk is omnipresent. It could be anywhere, in any moment (in a global scale).

-Thus, statistics become obsolete as a surveillance and control tool.


6) So, what's new?

-Preparedess and the creation of (imagined and future) scenarios.

-Origin: Cold-War. Langmuir: "the aim of surveillance is not individuals, but the disease itself".

-An each more normalized state of emergency.

-The scale is re-framed: Global Health to understand the molecular one.


7) Implications

-Syndromic Surveillance (Fearnley, 2005; 2008).

-Scenarios as states of emergency (Maureira, Tirado, Baleriola, Torrejón, 2015; 2016).

-Syndromic observation (Baleriola, Tirado, Maureira, Torrejón, 2016).


8)  Scenarios as state of emergency in the ebola outbreak


Remember: POBICS will expose this Prezi (and his communication) on June 30th at 9:30 in the CEHIC place at the UAB!

More info clicking here.

Photo Credit: __andrew