Infrapolíticas de ciudadanía prácticas de cualificación en entornos materiales

Abstract

The thesis Infrapolitics of citizenship. Qualification practices in material arrangements is the reflexive result of two research projects, one about home telecare aimed at elderly people and another about elderly people engagement in techno-scientific controversies. Its field of action enrolls in the science and technology studies (STS), and it is from this that a number of conceptual tools and debates about the relationship between politics, science and technology are deployed. Over this thesis, the infrapolitics notion is developed. It is that, generally invisible and supportive political work, which is performed for the production of political scenarios. Through a conceptual tour of what is politics, different meanings are deployed and focused on a particular work of translation: qualification. Thus, a journey that goes from the qualification of the live beings, through the qualification of situations to conclude the qualification of space is shown, following authors as diverse as Agamben, Rancière, Dewey or Latour. The proposal of this thesis is focused on conceiving political practice as a technological practice, and vice versa, how and when technology is political. For a political fact happen, various entities must be mobilized to infrastructure the rise of politics, understood as an aesthetic break the world that is inhabited. This movement involves sometimes dis-infrastructuration, that is conceived as infrastructural inversion when is carried to a relational ontological plane. But sometimes it is also necessary reinfrastructuring. Thus, the political infrastructure appear as the "when" that heralds the rise of politics, understood, in an aesthetic sense, as an ontological change that enables the emergence of new entities and the allocation of identities not only to human actors and situations, but also to the stage where the action takes place. Being infrastructure a particular moment, the work of infrastructuring will be shown as modes of infrastructuration. In this sense, politics and caring appear as two processes that sustain the existence of singular material arrangements. The cases analyzed serve to show the co-existence of both processes in these kinds of practices in order to sustain and compose common worlds. In this sense, this thesis compiles two articles, one analyzing the processes of mediation within the framework of the implementation of the home telecare service addressed to older people, entitled “Care networking. A Study of Technical Mediations in a Home Telecare Service”; also another it based on how to adapt a consensus conference for the older people engagement, called “Hacking science and democracy. Decoding and recoding of a mechanism of deliberative democracy”

Date of Award	2 Oct 2015
Original language	Spanish
Supervisor	Miquel Domenech Argemi (Director)