I am not writing this radar from outside the Complutense University of Madrid. I am writing it as someone who has learned within it, in the classroom and beyond it, both directly and indirectly. I have learned from teachers with whom I have shared classes, readings, questions, conversations and ways of looking. I have also learned from those who, even without sharing a particular course with me, have left a body of work, a method or a question that keeps working away inside me.

I want this piece to be, exceptionally, a gesture of gratitude, respect and admiration. Not because the public university needs abstract praise, but because its value appears in very concrete experiences: a class that opens a question, a reading that unsettles a certainty, a tutorial, a seminar, a conversation in a corridor, an open library, a person who keeps a piece of paperwork moving, a classroom that makes it possible to think alongside others.

Artificial intelligence is usually presented as a matter of models, computing power and performance. But it always enters worlds that are already inhabited: families, schools, hospitals, workplaces, religious communities and spaces of public dispute. The UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence warns that these systems can reproduce or aggravate discrimination, inequality and exclusion. The question, then, is not only what a technology can do, but which social relations it makes legible, administrable or invisible.

This radar grows out of a review of profiles on Dialnet and of the staff list for the Degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the UCM, carried out in June 2026. It does not aim to build a canon or to rank anyone. It brings together five trajectories that help me to name something I have lived: the university is not a credential factory, but a community of knowledge, discussion, care and collective work.

María Isabel Jociles Rubio and the question of how we come to know

The work of María Isabel Jociles Rubio has defended ethnography as a practice of relationship, attention and reflexivity. In La observación participante en el estudio etnográfico de las prácticas sociales (2018), to research is not to gather data from the outside: it requires building a situated position in relation to people, bonds and institutions.

I have found in this way of understanding ethnography a decisive lesson. To know is not to extract information from other people as one would gather an available resource. To know requires situating oneself, listening, allowing oneself to be affected and answering for one’s own position. It is a lesson that is especially necessary when AI turns ever more dimensions of life into data that appear separable from those who produce it.

That methodological interest is interwoven with research on kinship, adoption, single parenthood and assisted reproduction. Cambios en la concepción y representación del parentesco a raíz del uso de las técnicas de reproducción asistida con donante (2016), with Ana María Rivas Rivas, shows that family bonds are built through affections, documents, institutions, medical technologies and administrative decisions. Her work on international adoption rounds out that attention to the processes through which institutions and families produce kinship.

This perspective compels us to look warily at any system that translates family life into categories, risk profiles or access criteria. Before accepting that an algorithm “knows” a family, it is worth asking which relationships it leaves outside its scheme and who decided on its categories.

José Ignacio Pichardo Galán and the question of who can live without hiding

José Ignacio Pichardo Galán has placed sexual and family diversity at the centre of anthropological and educational analysis. Entender la diversidad familiar (2009), Adolescentes ante la diversidad sexual (2009), with Belén Molinuevo Puras, and the collective volume Abrazar la diversidad (2015), coordinated by Pichardo Galán, connect kinship, school, rights, language and inequality.

From this trajectory I have learned that school and university do not only transmit content. They also distribute recognition, silence, fear or the very possibility of existence. What an institution names, omits, protects or ridicules is not an administrative detail: it organises the possibilities of living and learning without hiding.

That observation helps to read the digital present without turning it into a simple metaphor. Default categories, moderation systems and the models that classify expressions, bodies or identities can also decide who appears as the norm and who as the exception.

The question thus takes on a new urgency. What social and technical conditions make it possible for a person not to have to hide who they are in order to inhabit a family, a school, a job or a digital space? UNESCO includes non-discrimination, diversity and gender equality among the principles that should guide the entire life cycle of AI systems.

José Luis Álvaro Estramiana and the question of what work sustains

José Luis Álvaro Estramiana, working from social psychology, brings a perspective that engages productively with anthropology. His doctoral thesis, Desempleo y bienestar psicológico (1988), approached unemployment as a problem of social structure, identity, stigma and belonging, not as a mere individual shortcoming. In his research on the meanings of work and on unemployment and mental health, working life appears as a space of time, recognition and social bonds.

This lesson goes beyond a reflection on employment. It reminds me that no institution exists apart from the people who sustain it. A public university does not reduce to its rectorates, its degrees or its buildings. It exists because teachers, researchers, technical, management and administrative and support staff, library, maintenance, cleaning, reception and IT teams and so many other people whose work makes everyday learning possible all work within it.

This point matters when the talk turns to automation, automated assessment or algorithmic management. The question is not exhausted by how many tasks a system can carry out. What also matters is what happens to autonomy, pace, responsibility and material security when a technical infrastructure redefines the value of a task and the position of the person who performs it.

The question is not whether AI will or will not replace employment in the abstract. It is which forms of dependence, surveillance or exclusion become normal when work ceases to be a stable space of social recognition.

Mónica Cornejo Valle and the question of who contests moral authority

Mónica Cornejo Valle has researched religion, spirituality, health and anti-gender mobilisation, attending to their transformations in the public sphere. Her work on contemporary spirituality and alternative therapies, among it La convergencia de salud y espiritualidad en la sociedad postsecular (2013), written with María Isabel Blázquez Rodríguez, analyses how therapeutic practices, discourses of well-being and moral repertoires run through institutions, networks and contemporary forms of subjectivity.

Together with Pichardo Galán she has studied anti-gender mobilisation in La “ideología de género” frente a los derechos sexuales y reproductivos. El escenario español (2017) and Actores y estrategias en la movilización anti-género en España (2018). This research allows us to observe such currents as organised networks of emotions, institutions, media, doctrines and political projects.

For me, the lesson lies in never accepting that moral authority presents itself on its own or in an innocent way. Hierarchies of visibility are organised on platforms, recommendation systems and generative models too. Not because algorithms have a morality of their own, but because those who design, fund, regulate and use them decide what is amplified, what is classified and what is made invisible.

Who defines which family, which desire, which body or which way of life deserves public recognition? By what rules, data and responsibilities is that space ordered today? These questions are a defence of the university as a place where disagreement can be formulated without having to conform in advance to a logic of profitability or of obedience.

María Isabel Blázquez Rodríguez and the question of the bodies that medicine administers

The research of María Isabel Blázquez Rodríguez has been crucial for the anthropology of reproduction, health and gender. Aproximación a la antropología de la reproducción (2005) and Del enfoque de riesgo al enfoque fisiológico en la atención al embarazo, parto y puerperio (2010) show how pregnancy, birth and motherhood are organised by medical knowledge, institutional protocols and gender norms. Her review of the biomedicalisation of women’s lives (2021) insists that these processes are neither neutral nor unconnected to inequality.

Far from simply opposing medicine and experience, her research allows us to see how health practices produce relations of authority and concrete ways of defining risk, care and normality. Reproduction thus becomes a terrain where autonomy, expert knowledge and social justice are negotiated.

The WHO guidance on the ethics and governance of AI for health recognises the potential of these technologies for diagnosis, treatment and research, but it requires that human rights and ethics be present in their design, deployment and use. Read through Blázquez’s work, that requirement becomes material: which bodies feed the data, who interprets the recommendations and who bears the consequences of an error or an exclusion?

To give thanks is to defend the public university

This radar is born of gratitude, but it does not want to remain a private emotion. To give thanks for what one has received in the public university means defending the conditions that made it possible and that must remain possible for other people.

I defend a public university because knowledge cannot become a privilege reserved for those who can pay for it. Because a decent higher education must not depend on family income, on postcode, on the capacity to take on debt or on the promise of immediate profitability. Because the humanities and social sciences are needed to understand the effects of AI, but also because the sciences, the arts, basic research, teaching and every form of knowledge that does not fit on a profit-and-loss spreadsheet are needed too.

I defend the public university because there is no teaching or research without workers who have rights, stability, time and decent pay. The Organic Law on the University System establishes that the structural funding of public universities must be sufficient for a high-quality public service, covering multi-year needs in staffing, research and sustainability. The LOSU recognises this body of workers as technical, management and administrative and support staff (PTGAS) and guarantees their right to free and meaningful participation, as well as to representation in the governing and representative bodies of the universities.

In the Community of Madrid, this defence cannot remain abstract. The official figures for the 2024-2025 academic year record six public universities and thirteen private universities, along with one belonging to the Catholic Church. They also indicate that 206,501 students were enrolled in the public universities’ own centres, compared with 121,900 in private and Catholic Church universities. That map is no reason to deny the existence of private education. It is a reason to demand that the funding, autonomy and accessibility of the public university be an undeniable political priority.

In May 2026 the regional government approved a new funding model for the six public universities of Madrid running to 2031. It is reasonable for any multi-year plan to be examined in its real figures, in its impact on staffing, on tuition fees, on university autonomy and on the actual capacity to sustain research, teaching and services. An open letter published on 4 March at the UCM Faculty of Political Science and Sociology questions the composition of the 14.8 billion euros announced —which incorporates tuition fees and own income— and argues that the planned regional transfer would not reach the public investment target set out in the LOSU.

That is why I align myself with the spirit of the UCM for the Public Platform. To defend the public university in Madrid means opposing the privatisation of higher education: any model that deliberately weakens what is public, shifts more costs onto students and families, subordinates knowledge to market logics or turns the precariousness of its staff into a normal form of management.

This is not about idealising the university. The public university has inequalities, bureaucracies, conflicts and unpaid debts. That is precisely why it must be funded, cared for and democratised: because it is a space that belongs to society and where its problems can be discussed, researched and transformed collectively.

An archive of questions and a debt of gratitude

These five trajectories do not offer a single theory of artificial intelligence. They offer me better questions for preventing AI from presenting itself as an autonomous force.

How does one research without feigning neutrality? Which forms of kinship does a classification recognise? Which identities become the norm or the exception? What sustains work when a technical infrastructure reorganises its rhythms? Who defines what is morally acceptable in a public space mediated by platforms? Which bodies appear as risk, data or cost within digital health?

Artificial intelligence does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives among relations of care, institutions, economies, inequalities, bodily histories and conflicts over recognition. That is why, before asking what it can do, it is worth asking which social world it is about to classify, administer or transform.

I have learned to formulate these questions thanks to one concrete public university and to many concrete people. To the teachers of the UCM with whom I have had the good fortune to learn, directly and indirectly, thank you. Thank you for the depth, for the rigour, for the closeness, for the humour when there was some, for the demands you made and for turning learning into a living and engaging experience.

To defend the public university is to defend the possibility that such an experience will not be an exception or a memory. It is to defend that it remains a right, decent work and a common space.

Sources