CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Spanish National Research Council)

Faculty Member, CCHS

Senior Scientist

About

I am a Senior Scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Head of the Social Sciences Board at the Spanish National Agency for the Evaluation of Science (ANEP - Agencia Nacional de Evaluación y Prospectiva).

Previously I was Dean at Spain's School for Industrial Organisation (Escuela de Organización Industrial, EOI), University Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, and Lecturer and Tutor in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

I hold a D.Phil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and an MSc (Econ) in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

My areas of interest are the history and anthropological theory of knowledge practices, and in particular their contemporary expression in science/management/public encounters. I have written and continue to be interested in the political and economic anthropology of knowledge as a public good.

Today arguments about the relevance and importance of certain modes of organising knowledge are often expressed in terms of 'open innovation', 'public value', 'social responsibility', 'distributive justice', even 'political ethics'. So I have found myself writing about these things too.

I first did anthropological fieldwork among the nitrate mining communities of the Atacama desert in Antofagasta, Chile. For most part of the twentieth century, the history of nitrate mining in Chile was a history of corporate paternalism. The role of mining corporations as supplanters of the state and guarantors of social life mimicks in intriguing ways the new paternalism of universities. Or at least this is how I have explained to myself my jump from the Atacama desert to the world of corporate (academic) knowledge.

More recently, I have carried out research among humanities scholars at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid and among management consultants in Buenos Aires; and in collaboration with media artists, developers and critical scholars at Medialab-Prado in Madrid too.

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