Comunidad y acción social (2)

"Self-help virtual communities"

Director de tesis: Dra. Agnès Vayreda

Descripción de la línea de investigación
In the Information and Knowledge Society we can find a great number of public controversies on topics where Science and Technology are the principal actors. This manifests the great number of uncertainties that cross-cut our daily lives (Callon et al., 2001). Paradoxically we have a growing feeling that what we ignore is more important that what we already know. Health is one of the fields where these uncertainties are more visible and where they are related more directly to individuals.

This project is centred in the study of self-help virtual communities created by ill people that suffer from the same condition ((Burrows et al., 2000). Generally these are chronic, unknown or rare illnesses (such as fibromyalgia) or conditions which affect a particular group (AIDS). Within the Anglo-American and French context these virtual groups have been transforming in an important source of social, information or production of knowledge based in the experience of patients and their families next to and/or outside the scientific and medical institutions. In this sense some of them have even been spokesperson of the patients and their families in the discussions about their problems with scientific and medical institutions.

In this context, this project aims to accomplish two objectives 1) to follow up the generation of uncertainties that are brought into action through the association of these individuals 2) as a complement, we pretend to analyze how these associated citizens create new identities and express them leaving aside their usual spokesperson.

This project pretends to achieve a local perspective of this topic. For this reason, we will try to study different cases within the Spanish and Catalan speaking context.

Perfil académico

• An university degree in social sciences and/or philosophy.
• An expertise in STS studies.
• An academic background in qualitative research.
• An experience in Internet studies.
• Proficiency in English and French.

Información adicional
The position is related to the National project Plan I+D, 2008, coordinated with UAB entitled: "Techno-scientific controversies and citizen participation regarding the dependence policies".