Research
Three research lines of my own and some collaborations, each with its question and its status.
How to read the statuses
- published: article published, with a DOI.
- preprint: public version in a repository.
- under review: manuscript submitted to a journal, under evaluation.
- in preparation: manuscript in draft, not yet submitted.
- under way: project with data in progress.
- conference paper: presentation accepted at a conference.
- column: public-facing piece published in the press.
Doctoral line
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.
Doctoral thesis, Loughborough University (2024)
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. In four focus groups with Chileans aged 60 to 86, laughter marked the sensitive points of the conversation (dependence, mortality, stereotypes) and worked as an embodied enthymeme that exposes and regulates the tension between one's own account and the dominant imaginaries of old age, with distinct patterns by gender and class. Reading laughter, after Voloshinov, as an ideological symptom.
Epideictic ageism: political rhetoric and economies of worth in parliamentary debates on older age
Under peer review at Journal of Aging Studies. We ask how Chilean parliamentarians construct the social worth of older people through praise. Praise first sets them apart as a category and then confines their worth to the domestic register, as workers, parents, and nation-builders, leaving unsaid the civic, industrial, and inspired registers that the epideictic genre itself offers. We call this epideictic ageism.
Care rhetoric as symbolic reassurance: paternalistic discourse in Chilean old-age policy debates
What care rhetoric achieves when politicians profess it. In the debate that created the National Day of the Older Person (2013), care is declared and staged, but the concrete act of caring is left out: a paternalistic ageism that operates through affection and not hostility.
'Compassionate ageism': a rhetorical psychological framework for understanding paternalistic age prejudice
A rhetorical-psychology framework for paternalistic age prejudice: three mechanisms (selective valuation, particularisation as praise, and compassionate performance) through which affectionate political discourse restricts the worth and agency of older people.
Line under way with FAI funding
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.
Territorial configurations of digital inclusion in later life: a governance-centered integrative framework
Digital inclusion policy looks at individuals or at national infrastructure and often overlooks the local level, where infrastructure, social support, and public services converge. The framework locates digital inclusion in later life at the level of the municipality, the unit that brings together discretion over budget, service provision, and policy authority, and treats it as a governed configuration. It offers a mechanism to identify, from six positions in which older people stand in relation to technology adoption, what may be failing 'upstream' for autonomous adoption or for a deliberate, penalty-free non-use.
Context Matters: linking meso-level digital infrastructure and social resources to older adults' wellbeing
Postdoctoral project funded by the Research Support Fund of Universidad de los Andes. How much the subjective wellbeing of older people varies across municipalities, and whether each municipality's digital infrastructure and social resources explain part of that variation, using multilevel models on CASEN, EBS, SUBTEL, INE, SINIM, and SENAMA.
Forced technology adoption among older adults: a typology of responses
Drawing on interviews with older people who attend public day centres in the Metropolitan Region, we examine what responses the obligation to use digitalised services provokes, how to order them, and what non-use and 'reluctant' use say about autonomy in later life.
Emerging line
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.
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. The criterion is both the development of autonomous capabilities and, above all, the formation of professional judgement: there are moments when learning requires doing the work unaided, and moments when refusing the tool is training for a world that no longer exists. Submitted to EdArXiv in August 2026, under moderation.
Answerability, not meaning-making: a discipline for GenAI-assisted reflexive analysis
A commentary in response to the collective letter of 419 researchers that excludes generative AI from reflexive qualitative analysis because it would be incapable of meaning-making. I argue that the criterion is misplaced: what reflexivity protects in qualitative research is that practitioners answer for our interpretations before others and at a cost to ourselves (answerability), and machines cannot do that. From this follow two commitments for research, with or without AI: a named analyst answers for every interpretive claim, and what the machine produces enters as a candidate reading, never as a finding.
Operational gains without detectable critical change: digital-literacy measurement lessons from a pre–post pilot with a GenAI course assistant
A pre-post pilot in an undergraduate course with a customised ChatGPT-based assistant. We ask what changes in operational and critical digital literacy, and what the instrument used teaches about how to measure them.
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.
Collaborations
Collaborative line
Organisations, hierarchies, and workplace wellbeing
How organisational hierarchies relate to the structuring of compensation, turnover, and other key workplace behaviours in Chilean firms, and what place ascribed characteristics such as the sex of employees and managers have in this.
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. Conference paper accepted at EARIE 2026 (Mannheim, August).
Analysis and writing in health and education teams
Methodological collaborations
Colleagues' projects in which I collaborate on the design and execution of the analyses and on the technical interpretation of the results.
Sustained social withdrawal across the first year in preterm infants: longitudinal trajectories and neonatal follow-up
Under peer review. With a cohort of moderate-to-late preterm infants from two neonatal units in Santiago, assessed at 2, 6, and 12 months, we ask how sustained social withdrawal (SSW) evolves over the first year and whether a single early screening is enough to detect it. Analyses based on Firth penalised logistic regression and multiple imputation.