Manuel Torres-Sahli
I research ageism, digital inclusion of older people, and the place of artificial intelligence in universities. I am a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Universidad de los Andes, Chile, and hold a PhD in Social Sciences from Loughborough University. I have developed research lines in psychometrics, wellbeing, and mental health. I work with mixed methods, from modelling with survey data to discourse analysis.
ORCID Google Scholar mtorressahli@gmail.com mttorress@uandes.cl CV (PDF)
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, and how older people respond when they are forced to go digital.
Artificial intelligence in education and research
How to incorporate AI into higher education and academic work, and when to resist it: when a university programme should ask students to abstain from it and when to teach its use to amplify capabilities already formed; what work AI can do in qualitative analysis and what place reflexivity has in that analysis; and how the work, craft, and recognition of researchers change.
Recent
Epideictic ageism: political rhetoric and economies of worth in parliamentary debates on older age
We ask how Chilean parliamentarians construct the social worth of older people through praise. Under peer review at Journal of Aging Studies.
Refrain, then amplify: a curriculum framework for sequencing generative AI to form professional judgement
We propose a conceptual framework for deciding, at the curricular level, when a university programme of study should ask its students to abstain from using AI and devices, and when it should use them to amplify students' capabilities.
No basta con enseñar IA en la universidad: hay que decidir cuándo usarla
The public-facing version of the argument in Refrain, then amplify: the curricular question about AI is not whether to teach it, but when to require that it not be used and when to bring it back in to amplify the capabilities students have developed.
Hierarchies: new facts from administrative HR data
Using administrative data from a human-resources platform (3,059 Chilean firms and 10.1 million employee-months) we directly observe the reporting lines, from the general manager to the front-line worker, and document how hierarchies are built and compensated within firms.
Laughter as ideological symptom: dialogical analysis of older adults' discourse
What older people do with their laughter when they talk about ageing and the end of life.
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