Ricardo Díaz García Frade

Ricardo is an interdisciplinary social scientist, ethnographer, and urbanist. His research interests focus on questions of inequality, conflict, and transformation in contemporary urban spaces. In his work, he engages with materiality, assemblage, and STS perspectives to understand how power is actualized in and through the city, shaping inequalities in both imaginary and material urban landscapes.

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Throughout his academic career, he has conducted research on several topics that have shaped this line of inquiry. During his undergraduate studies, he explored how the 1968 Mexican protest movement utilized urban (visual) space in tactics of resistance. His master’s degree in Latin American Studies involved conducting life story interviews with Nicaraguan political exiles; he published part of this research in an article analyzing how the 2018 Nicaraguan protests unfolded through everyday materialities in urban centers. His second master’s degree in International Development Studies led him to Athens, where he conducted fieldwork on gentrification and domicide from an assemblage perspective. Through these experiences, he gained familiarity with a wide range of ethnographic methods, including cognitive mapping, walking interviews, and visual methods, while also developing GIS skills, which he strives to integrate with ethnographic research.

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Currently, he is researching everyday security relations in Amsterdam as part of the ANIMAPOLIS project. Taking an assemblage and ANT view on relationality, which emphasizes the role of non-human entities in mediating social relations, he studies how Amsterdam’s residents relate to each other and the state in the realm of public security. He explores how these relations are mediated by non-human entities such as technologies, infrastructures, and (police) dogs, and how different forms of social and spatial marginalization are enacted through these more-than-human relations. In this project, Ricardo moves beyond conventional views of security as crime control, viewing it instead as a field of discourses, practices, and relations, and as a collective project concerned with enacting ideals and aspirations of a "good city."