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

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

Next POBICS seminary: Martin Heiddeger & techné

Hi everyone! 

POBICS is here again and in this ocassion we want to announce our next seminary. It will take place on April 26th at 12:30 in the Martín-Baró's room (Psychology Faculty, UAB, Barcelona). Keep in mind this date is next week, and not the present one. This is because this week we have to plan and manage the whole of papers we have sent to congress and journals. 

Furthermore, we are still analyzing the focus group we made at the biginning of this year, and this task is quite slow (anyone needs enough time in order to listen, write and link ideas about the people who are talking along 90 minutes). For this reason, we apologize for not hold a open meeting this week.

If you are interested in the Heidegger seminary, remember it is open and free. We will read three chapters of the book "Coferencias y Artículos": 1) "La Pregunta por la Técnica"; 2) "La Cosa" and 3) "Ciencia y Meditación".

(This chapters are a compilation of different conferences and brief articles that Heidegger wrote).

Photo Credit: Nadya Peek

1st day of Co-Dis & POBICS Workshop

Last monday and tuesday POBICS took part in a workshop with the other team of TECSAL, Co-Dis (lead by the Senior lecturer Miquel Domènech), where all of us participated reading and discuting some differents ideas and points of view about machines, humans, objects, actors and other very interesting concepts related with the Actor-Network Theory. The workshop had a duration of two days and now we want to reflect some ideas about the first day: Simondon, magic and automaton.

The machines have always had a fascination on the human hand (since before the Renaissance automata). In addition, there has always been a need to emulate the human with these devices. Simondon wonders about the primitive magical way, which has to do with the symbolic process of separating and uniting. With the idea of ​​evolution on his time, he discusses the historicity of magic-religion-science. Recompose in magic: the constitutive act of magic is not evolutionary, but have to see what question involves the "how" (How to rebuild what has been broken by magic and technicality?). 

Simondon will tour with the transverse axis of the break & (re) composition and the magical in three times: 

1) Industrial Revolution.

2) Information and cibernetics.

3) This, by the exercise of recomposition of the human by the machine, it is central. The improvement of the tools is a pusher act art. Man feels more powerful when the tool is renewed, because in that act the man feels that fulfills its role more effectively (modernist period, the environmental crisis, social ... with postmodernism). 

In mediation it is when a set of points that are pooled and allow to allow to a first major technical distinction appear: the background / shape difference. The man-machine undistintion (any point is plausible to be in the magical point calculation, every point can be singularity (seminar last week), whether man or machine). Not a tabula rasa, but precisely as an invitation to make the first mark (first mark there ??) ((dice roll in Deleuze)). Simondon makes a privilege of the organization (with a nod to cyber / information): a set of points are privileged to the extent they are organized in a certain way. 

In this vein, if we call technical / machine or man, it is because the magic act has chosen one and has "subjectivized". 

Aesthetics is the recomposition capacity and therefore is able to "breathe" extra energy that is magical. The idea of ​​"breaking" man / half, What is broken? How it breaks? are questions that come after. That game breaking religiously How to create autooorganización / life without resorting to a total principle (God)? At first he uses figures such as the Golem (being linking, blanket and defends the Jewish people from a sequence of letters and clay) or Pygmalion. So the magical act is recomposed at this time and re-use it. In Spain it's the same: in the first experiments in psychology experiments start with magic, esoteric (soul, suggestion); wondering Where does magic come from? 

To Anthropology, to know you have to believe (any knowledge is based on a belief / I assume it, that is the same as believing). But I could be wrong, so I could not call knowledge.

The separation of the magic that is not going in the direction of Religion (I think so because, without foundations), but in the direction of the technical mediation. in improvable, in the possibility that it is known. Mediation not only separates, also recomposed. Recomposition league affectivity, a commitment and a will to that union. This binds us closer to the "warm" as they speak only mediation, mediation and mediation as a process of restructuring would be too "Frankenstein". 

We can make a historicity 1) of the elements, their perfection or 2) under the grouping of these elements into clusters as goldsmiths, then the industrial space. To explain the role of the affective (most "warm"), it has not been evacuated, but what has been evacuated is the playfulness that before did exist in the function of the machine (today an automaton of a duck inside to see the digestive system as described by Alfredo Aracil, it does not generate playful affection, but rather affections related reproduce nature, the macabre, the Frankenstein, etc) 

Photo Credit: kay

New interesting post-graduate course on UAB: One Health

Next course, the faculty of Veterinary of our university, the Autonomous University of Barcelona will begin a new master called: "Official Master's Degree in Zoonoses and One Health". This master is lead by our colleagues we are currently collaborating in some projects like focus groups o a possible joint-project.

You can acces to the master's webpage here. In this page you will find how to apply to the admission, what is about it (content, teaching staff, etc), grants and a lot of more things. We leave a little sample from the official page:

The Master's Degree in Zoonosis and One Health is a professionally oriented programme that responds to a need for professionals with a well-rounded, multidisciplinary training encompassing human, animal and environmental health, who can work effectively and collaboratively on the prevention, control, management and communication of biological hazards and threats. This is the concept behind the new term "One Health". It means seeking to defend and improve the health and welfare of all species (humans, animals and plants) through greater cooperation between professionals working in public health, animal health and environmental health, and so to promote a multidisciplinary approach to health risk at the interface between humans, animals and the ecosystem.
 
The University Master's degree in Zoonosis and One Health will serve to train up highly qualified professionals to work in both the public and the private sector, with a multidisciplinary vision of One Health, in line with the requirements of the major international health bodies, like the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). It is the first official master's degree in One Health in the whole of the Mediterranean area.

For anyone that does not know anything about One Health, it is a concept related with the creation of a unique-single health, composed by animal, human, public and any other kind of health. In this vein, borders between species, disciplines or realms of knowledge are proposed to be broken.

From wikipedia: "One Health has been defined as "the collaborative effort of multiple disciplines — working locally, nationally, and globally — to attain optimal health for people, animals and the environment"

Photo Credit: Syed Asad Ali

New open seminary by Jorge Castillo: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Governamentality: Socio-Technical Associations in the Health and Illness Government

Next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, our colleague Jorge Castillo, arrived from the Psychology School of the Santiago de Chile's University, will explain some ideas about his current work and research. The title of this seminary is "Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Governamentality: Socio-Technical Associations in the Health and Illness Government". The meeting will be in Spanish, from 16:00 to 20:00, and is open to anyone who wants to come (Martín Baró's Room, Social Psychology Department, UAB).

Here we offer a little abstract about the topics and ideas that Jorge will explain:

The seminary is adressed to researchers whose project is related with the concept of bio-governmentality in order to understand the relationships between a) recent political

institutional formations, b) the development of technologies in biomedical knowledge on various socio-economic scenarios, and c) subjective and personal productions. For this, we propose the three thematic approach, each considering a case study:

Table of Contents.

Day 1 social studies of biomedicine.

a) Science, Technology and Society: semiotic approaches to the study of materials biomedical activities .

b) Micropolitics of normality: a case study of cancer in Barcelona.

Day 2. Evidence-based policy and power as prehension.

a) Modernization and political scenarios.

b) Case Study: power and evidence-based policies.

Day 3. Biogovernmetality.

A) From biopolitics to biosociality.

b) Case study: obligation schemes, somatocracy and acceleration in the system Explicit Guarantees in Health from Chile.


Finally, we offer his main milestones as researcher (in Spanish):


Jorge es psicólogo por la Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Máster en Investigación en Psicología Social y Doctor en Psicología Social por la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, con la tesis “Oncología y ontología, un análisis semiótico-material del cáncer”, que analiza desde la teoría del actor-red, las implicancias de la articulación de tecnologías y prácticas biomédicas en le redefinición del significado socio-material de la enfermedad. Desde marzo de 2013, se desempeña como Profesor Asistente en la Escuela de Psicología de la Universidad de Santiago de Chile.

Sus ámbitos de interés se relacionan con los tipos de gobierno sustentados en procesos de índole biológica, y su relación con prácticas y procedimientos biomédicos. De manera más específica, su labor se ha especializado en realizar descripciones de diagramas biopolíticos y modos contemporáneos de gubernamentalidad.

Actualmente, es investigador principal del proyecto PAI Nº 791220018, relacionado con la 
performatividad de las políticas basadas en la evidencia en Chile, e investigador responsable del proyecto Fondecyt de Iniciación en Investigación Nº 11140590, titulado “Aportes de los Estudios de Ciencia y Tecnología a la comprensión de enfermedades abordadas por la medicina basada en la evidencia: regímenes de subjetivación, corporización y biosocialidad en el GES”, ambos financiados por la Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica de Chile (CONICYT).

Photo Credit: Shawn Campbell