Science, technology and society shape one another

Two projects led by CECTS researchers and students were among those selected in the latest funding call run by the UAH Vice-Rectorate for Research and Innovation. The initiatives will contribute to the development of training activities and to strengthening transdisciplinary research.

In the Academic Activities category, the selected proposal was the National Meeting of Postgraduate Thesis Students in Science, Technology and Society (STS): Transdisciplinarity, futures and contemporary sociotechnical challenges, the first of its kind. The application was submitted by Mitzi Duboy Luengo, faculty member of the Department of Social Work, with a team of researchers and students associated with CECTS:

• Cristóbal Bonelli Iglesias, faculty member, Department of Sociology, FACSO
• Francisco Salinas Lemus, faculty member, Department of Sociology, FACSO
• Ambar Ángel Toledo, student, STS Master’s Programme, FACSO
• Daniela Silva, student, Sociology, FACSO
• Felipe Trañolao Neculqueo, student, Social Work, FACSO

The Meeting, to be held in October 2026, is conceived as an intensive space for academic exchange combining cross-reading workshops with short presentations of thesis progress in sessions of collective discussion and interdisciplinary feedback. These will be geared not only towards disseminating results but also towards strengthening research processes already under way.

In addition, as set out in the project’s official documentation, a “best STS thesis” prize will be awarded through the video competition Present your thesis in 3 minutes, promoting creative communication of research and its public outreach.

In the Research Competition for Academic Staff, the proposal titled Epistemological integration in transdisciplinary research: evaluating an intelligent agent as a facilitator of knowledge co-creation, was awarded funding.

The project will be carried out by an academic team that strengthens collaboration across different UAH faculties and departments. It will be led by Amaranta Alfaro (Department of Journalism) and Cristian Olivares Rodríguez (Faculty of Engineering), with Renato Moretti Tapia (Faculty of Psychology) as co-investigator.

Using an experimental design that combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, the research sets out to analyse how the mediation of an intelligent agent reconfigures the sociotechnical conditions of transdisciplinary co-creation — in terms of participatory symmetry, epistemological integration and the handling of disagreement — within heterogeneous working groups mediated by WhatsApp, incorporating a gender perspective that makes it possible to identify inequalities, differentiated risks and dynamics of power and/or violence.

As a measure of public impact, once the research is complete and drawing on its findings, the team plans to design a larger project that scales the AI-assisted co-creation methodology up to public policy or science governance settings.

Both funded projects will help strengthen collaboration across UAH units and consolidate national and international networks, while also serving as training spaces and as settings for research of quality and impact.

From 24 to 26 June 2026, Bogotá hosted the 16th ESOCITE Conference, one of Latin America’s leading gatherings in the social studies of science and technology. The event brought together researchers, students and academic networks from the STS field across the region, with sessions held at venues including Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the Maloka Interactive Centre and Universidad del Rosario.

The Faculty of Social Sciences at Universidad Alberto Hurtado was strongly represented by academics and postgraduate students working in the field of Science, Technology and Society. This presence reflects the sustained work the Faculty has been developing in the field, both in research and in training new generations of researchers.

Francisco Salinas, director of the UAH Master’s Programme in Science, Technology and Society, co-convened the panel “The circulation of conceptual hybridisations in Latin American STS”, where he presented the paper “De-composition: notes towards a sociology of the indistinguishable”. Tomás Undurraga, director of the UAH Department of Sociology, also took part with the paper “Ruinous conservation. Protecting life in Anthropocene ecosystems. Peñuelas Reserve, Chile”.

Student participation was also prominent. Ámbar Ángel Toledo, a student on the UAH Master’s Programme in Science, Technology and Society, presented the paper “Prophylactic futures: negotiations between user experiences and institutional temporal regimes of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) in Santiago, Chile”. José Pinto, a student on the UAH PhD Programme in Sociology, presented “Other fermentations in wine: the struggle over legitimation”.

Martín Pérez Comisso, faculty member of the UAH Master’s Programme in Science, Technology and Society, co-convened the panel “Latin American technofutures: anticipation, foresight and technological sovereignty”, devoted to discussing the ways in which technological futures are imagined, contested and projected from Latin America.

The UAH community was also part of a large delegation from the CTS-Chile Network. After the conference it was announced that the network had been recognised by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) with the 2026 STS Infrastructure Award, which honours exemplary initiatives that build and sustain infrastructures for the international field of social studies of science and technology.

The award highlighted the CTS-Chile Network’s fourteen years of work, its contribution to consolidating an STS community in Chile and Latin America, its annual meetings, its mentoring programme and its efforts to strengthen a collaborative and decentralised academic field. The 14th CTS-Chile Meeting will be held in January 2027 in the city of Antofagasta, with Francisco Salinas and Cristina Flores (a student on the STS Master’s Programme) serving on the organising committee.

The participation of Universidad Alberto Hurtado academics and students in ESOCITE 2026 and in the CTS-Chile Network is further evidence of the Faculty of Social Sciences’ commitment to a critical, interdisciplinary and Latin American perspective on the relationships between science, technology and society.

More about ESOCITE 2026

Master’s Programme in Science, Technology and Society

2026 STS Infrastructure Award

CTS-Chile Network

Universidad Alberto Hurtado has officially joined the International Network on Gender, Media and ICTs, an initiative developed under the UNESCO UNITWIN/UNESCO Chairs Programme.

UNESCO confirmed the decision in a letter to the Rectorate formalising UAH’s entry into the international network and recognising the participation of Amaranta Alfaro, faculty member of the Department of Journalism, who will act as the institutionalfocal pointfor this academic collaboration.

The International Network on Gender, Media and ICTs brings together higher education institutions and research teams working on gender, communication, digital technologies, media literacy, participation and social transformation, promoting academic exchange and the development of collaborative initiatives internationally.

This new membership aligns with several lines of work pursued by the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Department of Journalism, particularly in areas related to digital citizenship, online violence, gender, communication and interculturality.

Amaranta Alfaro welcomed the appointment: “Universidad Alberto Hurtado joining this network is a highly significant opportunity to strengthen the work we have been developing on gender, technologies and communication from a Latin American perspective. It also opens up possibilities for international collaboration, joint research and exchange with institutions facing similar challenges in different contexts.”

She also noted that this new link resonates with initiatives currently being led by the Department of Journalism: “This recognition comes at a particularly relevant moment, as in November we will hold the Gender, Communication and Technology Festival, which seeks to build bridges between academia, civil society and institutions in order to reflect on online violence, media literacy, participation and digital justice. We hope this space will also help project the network’s work in Chile.”

The membership also coincides with the launch of the course Gender, Media and ICTs, which Alfaro will teach this semester. The course seeks to strengthen a critical perspective on the relationships between gender, communication and technologies, addressing topics such as online violence, media representation, algorithmic bias, artificial intelligence, digital citizenship and media literacy, contributing to the training of future communicators with a rights-based, diversity and inclusion perspective.

How can we better prepare for floods, landslides, droughts and other extreme events associated with climate change? That was one of the questions that brought experts from various disciplines together on Tuesday 9 June at the workshop “How can we understand and address hydrometeorological risks through transdisciplinary approaches?”, held at Universidad Alberto Hurtado.

The event gathered representatives from academia, public agencies and companies involved in monitoring, management and emergency response, who agreed on the need to strengthen cooperation between disciplines and actors in order to address increasingly complex risks.

One topic of particular interest was the analysis of climate phenomena with a strong media presence, such as El Niño. Participants discussed how such events are usually communicated to the public, warning of the need to distinguish between scientific evidence and alarmist readings that can distort public understanding of risk.

Research and data were also reviewed that shed light on the relationship — at times more complex than is usually assumed — between large-scale phenomena such as El Niño and particular weather events affecting the country.

“We congratulate Universidad Alberto Hurtado on this initiative. Clearly, everything to do with hydrometeorological risks that directly affect our country will always be important. Climate change is affecting us directly today, and it is therefore incumbent on academia, the public sector and the State to prepare and cooperate in order to take this task forward,” said Miguel Muñoz, regional director for the Metropolitan Region at SENAPRED (Chile’s National Disaster Prevention and Response Service), who opened the event.

The event was organised by the Centre for Studies in Science, Technology and Society (CECTS) at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, together with Imagine-IT and the FONDECYT project “Towards a hydro-sociology of experts: knowledge, objects and practices around water in Chile”.

For Francisco Salinas, director of the UAH Master’s Programme in Science, Technology and Society and principal investigator of the FONDECYT project, one of the meeting’s main contributions was to create spaces for conversation between actors who normally work from different perspectives.

“At CECTS and Universidad Alberto Hurtado we opened up a dialogue between the STEM disciplines and the social sciences on hydrometeorological risks that was remarkably fluid and symmetrical. We held a conversation with representatives of organisations as diverse as the State Railways Company, satellite information firms and SENAPRED,” he said.

The presentations were delivered by specialists addressing topics such as hydrological risks under changing climate scenarios, extreme weather events, socio-environmental vulnerability, satellite observation technologies, urban planning and emergency management.

Alongside the talks, participants learned about research, models and tools developed by different organizations to improve the capacity to anticipate and respond to large-scale hydrometeorological events.

“This event sets out to address meteorological risks from a transdisciplinary perspective, with the aim of improving our understanding of these events and how they interact with multiple actors. We need a shared language that allows us to better confront the challenges facing Chile today and tomorrow in terms of water resilience and extreme events,” said hydrologist Eduardo Muñoz-Castro, researcher at SLF Davos and ETH Zurich.

Against a backdrop of extreme events growing in frequency and intensity, participants agreed that managing hydrometeorological risks requires not only better technical tools but also closer articulation between scientific knowledge, public policy, infrastructure, territorial planning and communities.

List of talks presented

• Hydrological risks in a changing climate
  Eduardo Muñoz-Castro (SLF Davos – ETH Zurich)
• Extreme weather events
  Raúl Valenzuela (Universidad de O’Higgins)
• Hydrometeorological events and socio-environmental precarity
  Evelyn Arriagada (Universidad Diego Portales)
• Geohazards in the age of satellite information
  Juan Muga (imagine-it)
• Urban planning in the face of hazards
  Isadora Arellano (Gearth)
• Emergency management
  Stephanie Seria (EFE)

Science, Technology and Society Research Centre (CECTS)

Master’s Programme in Science, Technology and Society