A new project has been achieved!

As I posted the last time, we have a great new to share with all of us: we have achieved an I+D project by the Government of Spain for threes years!

This project is called "Citizen Participation in Social Aproppiation of Knowledge and Technological Design Processes" head by Francisco Tirado and Miquel Domènech and funded by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Government of Spain. It has begun on 1th January 2015 and it ends on 31th December 2017. His reference is CSO2014-59136-P.

We have made an "abstract" about his content and his future lines of investigation for these threes years:

In our societies of knowledge it is a usual topic to show the enormous difficulties that daily people experiment when they want to participate in the processes of definition of social politics and common services. Frequently, it is put forward that such situation is inevitable because of the mentioned politics and services are based on specific and complex technoscientific developments. Nevertheless, in the last decade it has appeared an important scientific and political tradition questioning that affirmation. This tradition poses lay people have the right to participate in the production of a knowledge and technology that is thought and designed in order to improve, precisely, their lives. Such participation means both a relevant improvement in the quality of our democracies and a better definition and acceptation of the technoscientific products and results.

Our research is based on this tradition and we propose the following hipothesis: the social appropiation of expert knowledge and the citizen participation conform a important democratic value. This has to be strengthen and the ways it works have to be deeply analysed in order to figure out the dimensions and variables that can facilitate a permanent relation between lay people and experts. In this sense, we put forward two main objectives:

1. To analyse the dimensions which are working in the social appropiation of expert knowledge. That is, to examine the psicosocial, cultural and individual elements that are intervening in that practice of appropiation.

2. To evaluate and to establish what kind of elements are facilitating the citizen participation in the development of expert knowledge and technology.

Every main objective is composed by the following specific objectives:

-1.1 To establish the set of actors intervening in the definition of biosecurity protocols.
-1.2 To analyse the biosecurity protocols used in research laboratories, health centres specialized in infectious diseases and army units focused on biological war.
-1.3 To analyse how are used the mentioned biosecurity protocols.
-1.4 To analyse how daily practices about biological risk are conformed and acquired meaning.
-1.5 To design and to carry out a citizen panel in which experts and lay people will share their opinion about the production of knowledge on biosecurity.

-2.1. To make an inventory of the different experiences on participatory design in Spain in the field of Health technologies.
-2.2. To analyse both the different strategies followed in the participatory design experiences listed in the previous objective and their main results.
-2.3. To sketch a social network with the mentioned experiences.
-2.4. To design and to carry out a participatory process collaborating with a team of engineers in the field of Health Technologies.
-2.5. To analyse the pros and cons of a participatory design.
-2.6. To prepare suggestions and recommendations useful for teams of engineers interested in introducing participatory strategies in their processes of design.

From now, we will focus in this project, so we will be posting about it in the future. You can check all of our novelties in this blog and in our webpage: http://pobics.wix.com/pobics

Thank you so much for reading!

Photo Credit, Flickr, user Stuart

Biovigilant citizenship. A new paper is coming!

A month and a half later, we are ending our paper about biovigilant citizenship. Although we wrote some points about it in March, now is when we are reviewing the result and so, we will have a new document ready to be send very soon. 

Finally, the paper brings a landscape where we gather the main theories about the classical citizenship: we begin with a brief abstract from Greece to the 20th Century, talking about the citizen condition and liking it to the main features in each time: classic right, marxism, liberalism...

In a second moment, we focus on these studies that works with new kinds of understand the citizen: Nikolas Rose, Aiwa Ong, Petryna... all of them link the citizen condition to the "bio" condition, each one within their current work (tissues and organs, catastrophes, biohazards...).

Then, we offer our particular vision bringing a new feature to the path opened by these lasts authors. In this vein, we present the biovigilant citizenship as those citizenship that is "invited" not only to be watched, but also being an active vigilant about any kind of biological risk (a new epidemics, an odd man that is bleeding in the street...).

To illustrate it, we work with some images anddocumentos by the WHO and we do a first analysis about HealthMap, an app for smartphones that allows anyone to alert and inform about new cases or biohazards; and also allows to watch if close to his home there is a reported virus or bacteria. Along the analysis we focus on the "paraskeue" or equipment concept given by Michel Foucault.

In the conclusions paragraph, we wide the conception of biovigilant citizenship and we also point out some points about further studies.

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Sascha Kohlmann.

Biovigilant citizenship

Another month, another monday I am writing a new post for the blog. In this case, I want to point out some ideas about a new paper we are clarifying, and it is about the role of citizenship within biosurveillance. 

The first we made is to build the index, and it has remained as follows:

1. Introduction: We talk about our current moment and their main events: the heightening of bio-sciences, Big-Data, DNA researches, pandemics, anthrax, ebola... and then we frame it within the preparedness logic of government: scenario-planning, biorisk, etc. We also remark some aspects of our theoretical framework: Social studies of Science and Technology, and Actor-Network Theory.

2. What is citizenship?: Starting with a brief review about the classical conception of citizenship (in Roma and Greece, the republican vision), we meander till the Marxist's conception of citizenship going through the liberal conception (with Hobbes or Marshall, for instance). 

3. New citizenships: From the beginning of the 21th Century, as many authors have pointed out (i.e Nikolas Rose or Petryna), and in part on the basis of the panorama given in the introduction, some new conceptions of citizenships have emerged. We discuss them here and we also give some key points of each one (we also talk about the biosecure citizenship of Kezia Barker for instance).

4. Biovigilant citizenship: In the fourth paragraph, we want to present our own proposal within these new categories of citizenship, the biovigilant citizenship. However, in which consists it? Well, I cannot advance so much, but our concept is constructed using the Foucault's idea of paraskeue or equipment. In this vein, we affirm the existence of some equipments that allows citizenship to become biovigilant, in the sense of watch and be watched. Is here where we present our empirical data to support our thesis.

5. Conclusions: We aim to problematize the naïf role of citizenship as a mere collaborator in the alert and detection of new outbreaks, and we conclude with the idea that this equipment becomes normal a very concrete regime of veridiction, with quite interesting implications.

So, what do you think about it? We can really talk about a new kind of citizenship, or is only a concrete and not so important feature? Do you think another term would be more interesting?

This papers will be send in May, so we have to wait until Christmas (more or less) to have it published. We will keep reporting!

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Bernard Goldbach