Israel Rodriguez Giralt
Bio
"Israel Rodríguez Giralt, professor of social psychology in the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain.
Though trained in Social Psychology, I consider myself an STS academic. In this sense I have experience in Social research and particularly in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies. My PhD thesis (2008) concerned the implications that an STS approach has for the analysis of contemporary collective action. The working hypothesis I have developed states that the conceptual and methodological baggage that goes with Actor-Network theory (ANT), and its shaping into what has been called the ’symmetrical turn’ in the social sciences, can become a fundamental resource for renewing and enriching the analysis of collective action. To give an example of the fertility of this approach, I focused on an analysis of the ecological disaster that occurred in Doñana’s National Park, in Spain. As emerged from my reading of the events, environmentalist groups mobilized and enlisted human and non-human entities to re-signify the content of their political activity and weave a globality that was to resist the attempts at localizing the disaster.
My research career began with work on the social and cultural consequences of scientific and technological development. From here I moved onto the relationship between the implementation of ICT and the virtualization of institutions and organizations, which also led to my interest in the virtualization of social movements and new forms of technopolitics. This led to the subject of my thesis. At the same time, I conducted a case study of the Red Cross’ Home Telecare Service in Catalonia and how ICT set up extitutions - a customizable open space where different caregiver resources are connected and disconnected ad hoc rather than the fixed and enclosed space of the traditional caregiver institutions. This also led me to other research on the social and cultural consequences of tecnoscientific innovations: on how professional women reconcile work and family life with ICT, and on bio-medic information in telemedicine services. Lastly, I was involved in a major interdisciplinary research program on the information society in Catalonia, which was coordinated by Manuel Castells.
My more recent research has been in an ongoing project regarding the technosciencetific controversies and public participation in social care policies in Spain, the objective of which is to analyze the ethical, political and cultural consequences of the technification of care policies and assistance devices.
My current research interests are firstly, the role of the Internet in how expert and non-expert knowledge is combined by actors in strategies developed to participate in the public debate; and secondly, to track the efforts of new civic groups and newly formed concerned groups to articulate collective identity and to create mechanisms for more participatory and creative models of democracy; and thirdly, to explore theories and methodologies to map online public space. (http://www.taller-commons.com/?page_id=32)