Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Campus of International Excellence Southern Catalonia
Department of Anthropology, Philosophy and Social Work

Outreach activities 2023

On 17 January took place the 10th session entitled " Democratizar los cuidados en salud mental: reflexiones en torno a la gestión colaborativa de la medicación". Co-organised between MARC and ICEERS, and with the participation of DAFiTS and the Doctoral Programme on Anthropology and Communication, Asun Pié Balaguer (UOC) and Mercedes Serrano Miguel (UB) presented the "Guía para la gestión colaborativa de la medicación en salud mental". This tool, previously developed in Canada and Brazil, has been adapted to the Catalan context, based on participatory research led by a team from the URV-UOC.

Two lectures were held: "Neurolépticos para una biopolítica de la indiferencia: El descubrimiento de la clorpromazina" (9 February) and "La gestión psicofarmacológica de la femindad: antispsicóticos para mujeres insumisas" (23 February). Both lectures were presented by Sandra Caponi, Full professor at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil), Researchr at the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (Brazil), and at MARC.

Organised by the DAFiTS, on 24 February 2023 we gathered to enjoy the tribute to the Emeritus professor Dolors Comas d'Argemir.

On 10 March, a conference was held to explain the results of the project "Violències a la infància i discapacitat en entorns educatius a Tarragona", which aims to promote the digitalisation of the intervention of professionals linked to the Tarragona Provincial Council to promote the detection and care of violence affecting children and adolescents. The project coordinators, Nuria Torres and Eva Zafra, the doctoral students Eva Neus Miralles and Sònia Pujol, as well as professionals from different fields took part in the event.

On 16 March, the World Social Work Day was held once again in the Aula Magna of the campus Catalonia of the URV in Tarragona. The workshop, entitled "El treball social a debat: reflexions des de l'acadèmia i la professió", included different lectures pesented by Conchita Peña, Pilar Blanco, and Emiliana Vicente, and a round table where the current situation of Social Services and the challenges for the future were debated. This was followed by a second round table focused on "Treball social a Espanya en el marc dels serveis socials de base" with the participation of Txema Duque, Esther Robles i Tania Luque.

During this session held on 23 March, the project was presented, the objectives and the experience of the team members were shared, and finally, the project first phase actions were planned. The book resulting from the research was also presented: "Hijos e hijas de la violencia de género. Análisis de Casos sobre las Consecuencias del Feminicidio". In addition, Joshua Alonso Mateo and Luz Marina Rodriguez Rodriguez shared their testimonies. Finally, representatives from the Fundación Mujeres and the Fondo de Becas Soledad Cazorla explained their work.

Gerardo Abboud proposed a lecture which took place on 3 May. Gerardo graduated as an engineer and travelled to the East in 1970. He spent 14 years in the Himàlaies of India and Nepal, studying and practising Tibetan Buddhism. He is a translator and in this role, he accompanies his teachers and other lamas on their teaching trips to various countries.

Saturday 6th May the II Social Forum on Care was held at the campus Catalunya of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. The Forum is a citizens' initiative whose mission is to bring together social unrest towards the cure and to achieve the social and political transformation necessary for the recognition of the Right to a Cure [Dret a la Cura] and the creation of a National Cure System. This year's decentralised conference was simultaneously held in Tarragona, Girona, Lleida and Barcelona. 

On Wednesday 17 May, Gustavo Caponi (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil) argued that there is no concept of race which, when applied to Homo sapiens, finds its extension in a group of evolutionarily differentiable lineages. Consequently, from a phylogenetic point of view, human races are a fiction. However, "human races" can come to function as predicates with some degree of epistemic relevance. These "racial predicates" would specify certain physiognomic types that may be meaningful in different contexts of discussion. Most particularly, when it comes to identifying groups and individuals who may find themselves in conditions of vulnerability, or who may become beneficiaries of affirmative action policies.

Moderated by Joan Josep Pujadas (President of the ITA), the new special issue of the journal Arxiu d’Etnografia de Catalunya "Quan la memòria ens interpel·la" was presented on 18 May. Xavier Roigé (UB), Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré (CSIC) and Jordi Moreras (URV) took part in the event.

The challenges brought about by the globalisation of psychoactive plants were the focus of discussions at the VII MARC Colloquium, co-organised this year  with the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research & Service (ICEERS). The meeting took place on 25 and 26 May and was attended by more than a hundred participants during the two conferences and five presentation tables.

On 13 June Dolors Comas d'Argemir and Montserrat Soronellas presented a lecture on the occasion of the completion of their latest project on COVID-19 at the Societat Catalana de Geriatria i Gerontologia.

During this conference entitled "IntervenArt. Art com a eina d'innovació i transformació social", which took place on 9 June, the role that art plays as a tool for innovation and social transformation was analysed. Projects and experiences were presented which, through art, show the potential of research and socio-educational intervention in promoting inclusion and encouraging social commitment.

From 25 to 27 September 2023, at the Arxiu d'Etnografia de Catalunya, Professor Eduardo Menéndez gave 3 sessions on consecutive days to deepen the relational perspective in the study of the health/illness/care process. The seminar was a unique opportunity to meet and dialogue with one of the main international references in the field of Medical Anthropology.

Led by Dr. Eduardo Menéndez Spina, this conference can be considered as the inaugural intervention of a cycle or lectures on social inequalities, networks and health that will be held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) by different researchers during the academic year 2023-24. The purpose of this Joint Seminar on Social Inequalities, Networks and Health is to deepen the relevance of social and structural determinants to understand the processes of health, disease, care and prevention.

The seminar focused on some of the disciplinary debates in Social Work around post-structuralism, mainly on the way in which some central categories are appropriate for reflection on professional intervention.

Amid growing international calls for decolonising scientific curricula and practices, this presentation discussed three areas of possible debate for a less colonial vision of biology and the life sciences. First, the imperial infrastructures of biological and medical knowledge were analysed, from early botanical research to Darwin's theory of natural selection, to the development of eugenics and human genomics in the 20th century. In this section Dr Meloni asked about the engagement of the epistemic history of biology and the health sciences, and how many alternative possibilities have been erased or silenced during this imperial history. Second, it traced a possible historical path towards a less Eurocentric and more inclusive view of environmental bodies/practices before the rise of modern biology. Finally, epigenetics was examined as a possible site of decolonial biology, suggesting looking at the specific adoption of epigenetics by southern and indigenous epistemologies to deflate cognitive tensions between the Western biological canon and postcolonial settings in areas such as human development, health, historical trauma and epistemic justice.

-Session 1 - 17 October: Cómo ilegalizar la antropología. Los comités de "ética" y el Reglamento general de protección de datos, by Dr. Fernando Vidal and Dr. Blanca Deusdad.

Anthropologists have been questioning Research Ethics Committees (RECs) since they began to be institutionalised in the 1970s in the USA. The underlying conflict is epistemic and moral, as RECs are modelled on the biomedical clinical trial and reduce ethics to regulation. In the 1960s, "ethics" in anthropology evoked issues of social responsibility; today it means complying with regulations on "human subjects research" and, since 2018, with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The aim of the GDPR is to protect individual privacy against the mass collection of personal data. But its rules have been incorporated into the 'ethical' assessment of research projects, aggravating the situation to such an extent that the question "Is anthropology legal?" has been used to highlight its impact on anthropological work.

-Session 2 - 7 November: Quality and ethics in qualitative research: a relational approach, by Prof. Virpi Timonen (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Despite the extensive literature on quality in qualitative research, understanding and demonstrating quality remains a challenge, especially for researchers who are new to qualitative research. Researchers tend to be more familiar with the core elements of research ethics (such as informed and voluntary consent), yet ethics and quality overlap in many ways. The purpose of this talk is to outline both paradigm-specific and cross-paradigm understandings of quality in qualitative research, before offering a parsimonious conception of the core constituents of quality, applicable and adaptable regardless of the paradigm that the (qualitative) researcher adopts. I will argue that quality in qualitative research is a relational process where the researcher constructs a set of relations that are constitutive of credibility and relevance. Quality in this understanding arises from formulating a research question that is relevant (for the studied concern and participants); sampling for (or accessing) data through a credible process that pertains to the relevant phenomenon; engaging analysis in a manner that is credible; and doing justice to the data while continuing to remain relevant to the studied concern. Quality is a set of relationships, threaded through the entire research process, between the researcher and the researched concern, the data, data analysis, and the audience or readership of the research. Concern with quality of qualitative inquiry layers an ethic of commitment over established formal research ethics procedures, achieved in practice through engaging a relational ethic of care at every stage of the research process.

On the 18 October at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona) a session of l'INDIFEST. Festival de Cinema Indígena de Barcelona, the following short films were screened:

· El DISCURSO DE TXAI SURUI - Climate emergency; group: Paiter-Surui.

· ETERNAL IGLOO - Sovereignty and self-governance; group: Inuit.

· IXIM, EL MAÍZ Y NOSOTROS LOS TZELTALES - Sovereignty and self-governance; group: Tseltal.

· MARCAXAXA UMA PHARJATAWA (LA SET DE LA MEVA COMUNITAT) - Climate emergency; group: Aymara.

Debate with MELVIN PICÓN (Alta Verapaz, Guatemala).

The presentation was led by representatives of l'ITA. Associació d'Antropologia.

Coordinated by Dr. Joan Josep Pujadas (URV) on 25 October 2023 at the Arxiu d'Etnografia de Catalunya (Aula 521 del Campus Catalunya) Dr. Rafael Pérez-Taylor (UNAM - MEXICO) presented the lecture "La frontera norte de México y las relaciones inter-étnicas de los grupos indígenes"

This seminar by Dr. Cecilia Aguayo -organised by the Inter-University Doctoral Programme in Social Work- took place on 9 November 2023 at the Catalunya campus.

On 16 November 2023, Dr. Dolors Comas d'Argemir, anthropologist at the URV, presented the book, with the presence of its editors:

-Mari Luz Esteban, lecturer in social anthropology at the UPV/EHU. Specialist in feminist anthropology, anthropology of medicine and anthropology of the body/emotions.

-Miren Guilló Arakistain, lecturer in social anthropology at the UPV/EHU. She researches on health, body and affect, feminist epistemologies and social movements.

According to the latest report by the Andalusian Human Rights Association, five people die every day in their attempt to reach Spanish territory from Africa. These are not accidental deaths, but the result of immigration policies that violate human rights. The way in which European countries respond to the arrival of people fleeing poverty, violence and persecution allows us to speak openly of a necropolitics of the border. Borders are no longer mere territorial delimitations separating the domains of states, but have become places of death where any idea of international law seems to be blurred. The aim of this film series on death and migration is to raise awareness of the consequences of these policies on the lives of migrants, and to break with the trivialisation caused by the mediatisation of their deaths.

From 16 to 30 November 2023, the Arxiu d'Etnografia de Catalunya held a cycle of three allusive films:

-16 November 2023: Idrissa, crónica de una muerte cualquiera (Xavier Artigas-Xapo Ortega, 2018). Festival presentation and debate

-23 November 2023: Muerte accidental de un inmigrante: el caso de Alpha Pam (Pedro de Echave-Javier González, 2014). Debate

-30 November 2023: Tumbas de arena, las rutas migratorias del Sahara (Oriol Puig, Hibai Arbide, 2021). Final debate with the presence of some of the film-makers.

23 November 2023 - campus Catalunya-URV

Within the framework of the 8th edition of the Anthropology Week, the DAFiTS and the ITA. Associació d'Antropologia organised the conference "Experiències de cura comunitària i comunitats que curen".

The conference was led by Joan Josep Pujadas (ITA), with presentations by Jesús Sanz (UCM), Aurora Sáez (La Teulada), Alejandro Morcuende (URV), and Isabella Riccò (ITA), moderated by Yolanda Bodoque (URV).

The workshop- moderated by Joan Josep Pujadas and Mònica Marchesi, and organised by the Departments of Anthropology, Philosophy and Social Work, Communication Studies, Nursing and Public Law - consisted in contributions by by Manuel Pineda, Nazanin Armanian, Lourdes Rubio, Ignacio Álvarez-Ossorio, Salah Jamal and Antoni Pigrau.

On Wednesday 29 November 2023 at the Arxiu d'Etnografia de Catalunya, Dr. Sandra Caponi, professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina and post-doctoral researcher María Zambrano of the URV, presented her latest book entitled "Política, psicofármacos y vida cotidiana". Angel Martínez-Hernáez (URV), Martín Urquiza-Urquiza (URV) and Elisa Alegre Agís (UdG) accompanied Dr Caponi in the presentation.

Kenneth Rochel de Camargo (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) proposed this lecture.

In this presentation I will show how incorrect ideas about COVID-19 were promoted by physicians inBrazil, contributing to a catastrophic response at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives andexamine the implications of this episode for the social studies of science, technology and medicine.

The literature on the relationship between science and society takes two broad approaches, whichare sometimes at odds with each other: (i) there is a traditional critique of science that points tounsupported claims of certainty and thus undue interference in general human affairs; (ii) there aremany examples of attempts to undermine reasonable scientific claims, when they clash witheconomic and/or political interests of certain groups. Navigating those extremes is particularlycritical in situations in which accurate knowledge is necessary for intervening in people's lives, as isthe case in health-related issues. Determining who has actual epistemic expertise is a key factor insolving this conundrum. An instructive example of such developments was the chaotic response tothe pandemic challenge in Brazil, which saw, among other unfortunate situations, physicians alignedwith the denialist federal government advocating for unproven - or proven as ineffective -treatments and disseminating unfounded doubts about vaccines. Presumed expertise on the basis of professional training clearly did not translate into actual expertise in the necessary domains toascertain the validity of such claims and scientific advice was overridden by ideology.