How public discourse, institutions and technology position people, particularly older adults, and what that does to their wellbeing and agency; and how academia is responding to generative AI.
Manuel Torres‑Sahli
I am a sociologist, postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Universidad de los Andes, Chile, with a PhD in Social Sciences from Loughborough University.
My research asks how public discourse, institutions and technology position people, particularly older adults, and what that does to their wellbeing and agency. I work across four interrelated areas: ageism and old age in public discourse; digital inclusion, territory and wellbeing in later life; the measurement of wellbeing and mental health; and the place of generative artificial intelligence in academic research and higher education.
Research lines
Ageism and the social positioning of old age through discourse
How public discourse positions older people in social life. In particular, how in parliamentary debates, by praising and expressing care for older people, politicians sometimes place them as a category apart and restrict the worth and agency granted to them.
Digital inclusion of older people, territory, and wellbeing
What relationship there is between a territory's communicational and social infrastructure and the wellbeing of the older people who live in it.
Artificial intelligence in education and research
How to incorporate AI into higher education and academic work, and when to resist it.
Measurement and determinants of wellbeing, distress and mental health
Development, validation and use of instruments to measure wellbeing, distress and mental health in different contexts, in Spanish, in Chile, and in other countries and languages.
Selected work
- published 2025 Laughter as ideological symptom: dialogical analysis of older adults' discourse Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1606683
- preprint August 2026 Refrain, then amplify: a curriculum framework for sequencing generative AI to form professional judgement Preprint on EdArXiv
- working paper August 2026 Hierarchies: new facts from administrative HR data Working paper, abstract and PDF
- column July 2026 No basta con enseñar IA en la universidad: hay que decidir cuándo usarla Opinion column in CIPER Chile
Ten articles in indexed journals, seven in the first SJR quartile; 604 citations on Google Scholar (h = 8) as of August 2026. Publications
Contact
Institutional: mttorress@uandes.cl
Personal: mtorressahli@gmail.com