Tomás Sánchez Criado

I am Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow in the Social Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia’s CareNet-IN3 group.

Born in Ávila (Spain) in 1981, I grew up and studied in Madrid (PhD in Anthropology, 2012, UAM).

After that, I have spent most of my professional life in between Barcelona (Lecturer, 2011-2012 & 2014-2015, UOC; A4U postdoctoral researcher, 2012-2014, UAB), Munich (Senior researcher: TUM, STS & Architecture, 2015-2018) and Berlin (Senior researcher and Director of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology: HU, Urban Anthropology, 2018-2022).

As an STS-inspired urban anthropologist 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 spatial 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.

In my recent work, I have been studying how activists, designers, and educators have become activated to rethink urban design practice from a concern with bodily diversity. I’m currently writing a book monograph, titled ‘An Uncommon City: Bodily Diversity and the Activation of Possible Urbanisms’, condensing my research on these topics in the last ten years.

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 territories 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 and collective venues of multimodal ethnography and collaborative pedagogy, such as ‘xcol, an ethnographic inventory’, which received a 4S ‘Making & Doing’ Award in 2021.

In 2021 I was awarded the Accreditation of research (Associate Professor / Professor Agregat rank) by the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (AQU Catalunya).