CareNet | UOC-TRÀNSIC
Interdisciplinary R&I Hub
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Rambla de Poblenou 156, 08018 Barcelona
More about Tomás Criado:
Tomás Criado
Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow · UOC
Presentation
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 ‘The Possible City: Embodied Plurality and the Activation of Urban Design’, condensing my research on these topics in the last ten years.
I am currently developing a new, long-term ethnographic project that links urban heat prevention plans and atmospheric care within the context of an ageing population.
As part of this exploration, I was recently awarded a BBVA Foundation Leonardo Grant to research “Ageing Cities. The futures of late life urbanism in the Spanish coast (CIUDEN)“. Simultaneously, I have begun collaborating with the Barcelona City Council’s Climate Change and Sustainability Office and Bit Habitat, following their prototyping of shady landscapes, climate shelters, and bioclimatic itineraries as part of the city’s development of urban heat adaptation infrastructures.
These interests have also led me to experiment with collective devices for ethnographic inquiry, exploring inventive forms of collaborative inquiry where multimodality is understood not just as a plurality of media, but rather as a plurality of relational and epistemic modes. As part of this work, I have been invested in convening collective venues for multimodal ethnography and collaborative pedagogy. These include xcol. An Ethnographic Inventory, a collaborative platform I co-curate to document ethnographic inventions (winner of the 2021 STS Making and Doing Award), and the Department of Umbrology (DoU), a division for multimodal ethnographic study and artistic intervention on urban habitability in times of climate mutation, placing shadows at the heart of urban design. The DoU has been awarded a Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation’s Citizen Art 2025-2027 project grant, working within a consortium comprising researchers and practitioners from CareNet & DARTS (UOC), Arquitectura de Contacte, Nusos Coop, and the Laboratorio de Pensamiento Lúdico.
In 2021, I obtained the Research Accreditation (Associate Professor rank) from AQU Catalunya, in 2025, I was awarded the R3 Certificate (Established Researcher), and I currently hold two active six-year research periods (sexenios) covering 2009-2016 and 2017-2022.
Research interests
- Care
- Science and Technology Studies
- Urban infrastructures
- Multimodal ethnography
- Heat
PROJECTS
The body and the city
The knowledge and politics of urban accessibility
Tomás Criado
The Department of Umbrology
Tomás Criado, Brigida Cristina Maestres Useche
CIUDEN
Ageing Cities. The futures of late life urbanism in the Spanish coast
Tomás Criado, Carmen Lozano Bright, Alexandre Molina, Daniel López Gómez
Multimodal Appreciation
Prototypes for the Evaluation and Institutionalisation of More-than-Textual Ethnography
Tomás Criado
EXPDEM
Acción política de los grupos concernidos con la promoción de la vida independiente en España
Israel Rodríguez Giralt, Daniel López Gómez, Asun Pié Balaguer, Míriam Arenas, Tomás Criado
PUBLICATIONS
Daniel López Gómez, Tomás Criado
Tomás Criado, Israel Rodríguez Giralt
Tomás Criado, Israel Rodríguez Giralt
Daniel López Gómez, Tomás Criado
Daniel López Gómez, Tomás Criado
NEWS
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Pablo Alonso García, Tomás Criado
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Daniel López Gómez, Tomás Criado, Israel Rodríguez Giralt, Judith Igelsboeck, Alexandre Molina, Blanca Callén
Tomás Criado
Tomás Criado
Tomás Criado
Tomás Criado
Tomás Criado, Daniel López Gómez, Israel Rodríguez Giralt, Blanca Callén