UABDivulga - Barcelona recerca i innovació

Description:

The Institute for European Studies and the Faculty of Law of the UAB will be holding on 8 May at 12 noon a conference entitled "The role of the EU Court of Justice in a changing international context". The event will be held in commemoration of Europe Day at the Aula Magna of the UAB Faculty of Law. 

The talk will be given by José Martín, judge and advocate general of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Martín will analyse the key role played by the CJEU in a context of international change, marked by political, legal and geostrategic changes that test the functioning and projection of European law.

Place: Faculty of Law (Aula Magna)

Date: Friday 8, May de 2026 - 12:00h

Description:

This talk brings together emergent ideas and scholarship about planetary concepts and climate change with selected studies of various instances of radiocommunication: the human uses of radio waves in the electromagnetic spectrum.

The historical focus herein is meteorology, radio astronomy and global radio spectrum management during the Cold War. The rise of radio astronomy in the 1930s and 1940s raised recognition of the significance of the radio spectrum in planet-wide and extraplanetary research and awareness. The initial ITU assignments of radio frequencies crucial to radio astronomy in the 1950s (and in the 1960s, weather satellites) protected spectrum and “radio silence” for extraplanetary radio frequencies, crucial to space missions and satellites; yet such protective efforts were and still are often undermined by corporate interests eager to access and control as much radio spectrum as possible, particularly in a 21st century world where radio spectrum is now seen as a scarce resource.

The case study used in this talk is 24 GHz, a crucial bandwidth formerly protected for passive data collection tomeasure atmospheric levels of planetary water vapor that is now licensed for commercial services by government radio spectrum auctions, thus introducing contamination into the data.

James Schwoch is professor at Northwestern University, with appointments in the Department of Communication Studies, the Program in Science and Human Culture, the Ph. D. Programs in Media, Technology, and Society and in Technology and Social Behavior, and the Ph. D. cluster in Environment, Culture, and Society. He is also a related faculty in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, the Program in Environmental Policy and Culture, and a faculty affiliate at the Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy and at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern. Schwoch conducts research and teaching in areas related to global media, media history, outer space, planetary boundaries, and media-communication-environment. He has published seven books and many articles, and his most recent book is Wired Into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier (University of Illinois Press, 2018). He is a Contributing Member with the International Astronomical Union Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference.

Link to join the talk: https://meet.jit.si/Climasat_Schwoch_11May

This activity is part of the CLIMASAT ERC-StG project's series of seminars on "Data, satellites and environment".

Place: Online

Date: Monday 11, May de 2026 - 12:30h

Date: Monday 11, May de 2026 - 16:00h

Description:

From 12 to 15 May the UAB organises The Apocalypse Is Not Coming (TANC), an international conference in which to reflect on apocalyptic imaginaries and their implications in the context of contemporary ecological, technological and geopolitical crises. The Faculty of Arts  & Humanities will host academic debates, workshops and theatrical performances that question the discourse of the end of the world and propose alternative futures based on research, critical analysis and collective participation.

Apocalyptic imaginaries shape perceptions of fear and influence both thought and action, as well as the effectiveness of certain political discourses that construct distressing and fatalistic future scenarios. TANC aims to question end-of-time ideologies and propose alternatives to contemporary apocalyptic thinking from sociology to ecofeminism and artificial intelligence.

The programme combines academic exchange, artistic practice and collaborative experimentation in two master lectures, nine round tables, ten workshops, four theatrical performances, an audiovisual session and two experimental activities.

The two keynote lectures will be given by Marco Armiero, renowned expert in environmental history, with "Ghosts of the Apocalypse: Capitalist Imaginaries and Silenced Stories", and Malcom Ferdinand, expert in political ecology, environmental justice and decolonial thinking from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), who will close the event. Armiero will be accompanied in the post-conference debate by Mar Griera, professor of Sociology at the UAB and director of the Research in Sociology of Religion (ISOR) centre, and by Sergio Ruiz Cayuela, postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ) of the ICTA-UAB. Ana Fernández-Aballí, Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Religion, Conflict and Globalization at the University of Groningen, and Ione Avila-Palencia, senior researcher at the Centro de Innovación en Tecnología para el Desarrollo (itdUPM) at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, will participate in the debate with Ferdinand.

The round tables will revolve around narratives of permanent crisis; the relationships between ecology, power and coloniality; the social, technological and cultural transformations linked to the end of time, and the possibilities of generating alternative collective responses to these imaginaries.

The workshops will explore alternative ways of thinking, feeling and inhabiting the crisis, combining arts, sciences, humanities and collective practices. They will address the culture of prepping, dominant climate models and audiovisual imaginaries of the end of the world, among other issues.

Finally, four plays developed within the framework of the "Viable Unknowns" project will be performed by the companies Cantieri Meticci (Italy), Voice Lab (Poland), La Xixa Teatre (Spain) and Gruppe Tag (Germany).

The event is the culmination of “Viable Unknowns” and “Ontological Diversity in Environmental Education” (ODEEN), Creative Europe and Horizon Europe projects, respectively, which have brought together social sciences, environmental sciences and participatory theatre methodologies to imagine and promote sustainable and inclusive urban futures. The projects have been carried out over the past year by the UAB and the University of Groningen, together with a transdisciplinary consortium.

Researchers from different UAB centres will be participating in the conference: from Research in Sociology of Religion (ISOR), the Institute of Environmental Science and Technonlogy (ICTA), the Institut d’Història de la Ciència (iHC), the Institut de Govern i Polítiques Públiques (IGOP), and from the departments of Sociology, Journalism and Communication Studies, Art and Musicology, and Business. Experts from the University of Groningen, the Roma Tre University, the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the BC3 Basque Center for Climate Change, the University of Barcelona, and the Global Health Institute of Barcelona (ISGlobal) will also be participating. In addition, numerous artists and professionals from cultural groups will also collaborate.

The organising committe of TANC is formed by members of ISOR, the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Science and Technology (BCNUEJ) at ICTA-UAB, and the Centre for Religion, Conflict and Globalization at the University of Groningen, as well as a broad range of external collaborators. The conference receives the support of the Communities Oriented to Strategic Challenges (CORE) of the UAB.

The conference is free and open to all those interested, but prior registration is necessary.

All information on TANC is available here:

https://webs.uab.cat/apocalypse-conf/

Place: UAB Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Date: Tuesday 12, May de 2026 - 09:30h

Date: Friday 15, May de 2026 - 19:30h

Promotor: UAB

Description:

Carme Casablancas, lecturer in the Department of Business of the UAB, has participated in the research project Study of Economic Fakes, promoted by the Marketing, Communication and Business Projection Commission of the Association of Economists of Catalonia. The study, which will be presented on 12 May at the institution's headquarters, aims to analyse the current context in which economic lies and scams using social networks and other channels are increasing exponentially. The presentation will feature interventions by the authors of the project and other prominent economists, as well as by Javier Quesada, head of the Central Unit for Scams and Means of Payment of the Catalan police force.

Place: Association of Economists of Catalonia, Barcelona (Plaça Gal·la Placídia 32)

Date: Tuesday 12, May de 2026 - 18:00h

Description:

The UAB Political Studies, Identities, Institutions and Corruption Research Group, in collaboration with the Termcat Terminology Centre, the Citizen Observatory for Corruption, and the UAB Languages Service, organises the presentation of the online dictionary “Terminology of Corruption and Transparency”. The conference will take place on 13 May at 11:00 a.m., in the entrance hall of the UAB Social Sciences Library. The activity will revolve around the explanation and understanding of the concepts of corruption and transparency, as well as the terminological criteria used in the development of the dictionary and in the analysis of these phenomena.

The session will be moderated by Lluís Ferran Toledano, lecturer in Modern History and member of the GREPIIC research group at the UAB. Participating will be: Olga Cano, head of the UAB Social Sciences Library; Laura Santamaría, vice-rector for Culture and Language Policy of the UAB; Elisabeth Casademont, member of the TERMCAT; Marta Estella, head of the UAB Languages Service; Itziar Gonzalez, member of the Citizen Observatory for Corruption; Gemma Rubí, coordinator of GREPIIC; and Joan Lluís Pérez, professor in Constitutional Law and member of the GREPIIC research group at the UAB.

Place: Social Sciences Library (entrance hall)

Date: Wednesday 13, May de 2026 - 11:00h

Description:

During the Cold War, the tropical rainforests of Latin America—the Darién, the Amazon, the Chocó, the Orinoco plains—were surveyed by aircraft equipped with a radargrammetric technology called SLAR (Side Looking Airborne Radar). This technology could "see" the terrain through the clouds and thick vegetation, which for decades had prevented the creation of maps based on conventional aerial photography. What began as a radar system designed to locate enemy targets ("targeting") ended up producing the first detailed maps of vast tropical regions that until then had appeared "blank" in official atlases.

In this Work in Progress (WiP) seminar, Sebastián Díaz tells the still little-studied history of SLAR. It explores the pioneering projects developed between the 1960s and 1970s in Panama, Colombia, and Brazil, in which Latin American governments, the U.S. military, private companies, and cartographic institutes collaborated to “conquer the jungle” and make it legible. Radargrammetric projects were used to plan new infrastructure, open colonisation roads, inventory minerals and timber, monitor borders, pursue guerrilla groups, and, later, track illicit crops and monitor deforestation.

The central idea of ​​this talk is simple: radar technology never fully transitioned from military to civilian or environmental use. From the outset, SLAR was used simultaneously for warfare, development, resource extraction, and conservation.

And here a final paradox emerges: while from the air these technologies erased people from the landscape, on the ground they demanded enormous verification campaigns—geologists, soil scientists, forestry engineers, biologists, and, at times, anthropologists traversing the jungle for years—which ultimately transformed the paradigms with which the social and environmental sciences understood the tropics. What did not change, however, were the extractive, developmental, and surveillance functions that had given rise to remote sensing, and which have continued to accompany it to this day.

Commentator: Jaume Valentines (UAB)

Sebastián Díaz Ángel is a post-doctoral researcher working on the ERC-SG project "CLIMASAT: Remote-sensing satellite data and the making of global climate in Europe, 1980s–2000s". With a B.A. in Political Science, a B.A. in History, an M.A. in Geography and a Ph.D. in History, Díaz combines environmental history, science and technology studies, and geopolitics, with particular focus on historical geography and the history of cartography. His current research analyzes the politics of remote sensing and satellite data infrastructures in the Americas.

If you are interested in reading the entire text in advance—highly recommended, since the WiP seminar format presupposes prior reading—you can request it from Sebastian.Diaz@uab.cat or Laia.Torres.Casas@uab.cat

Remember that you can bring your lunch on site, as we will have a lunch-seminar format, rigorous and informal at the same time.

Place: iHC Seminar room

Date: Wednesday 13, May de 2026 - 12:00h

Date: Wednesday 13, May de 2026 - 13:30h