Las tecnologías digitales han irrumpido en la vida de las personas con diversidad funcional con la promesa de ofrecer más autonomía y accesibilidad con logros ciertamente remarcables. La diversidad funcional intelectual, sin embargo, ha sido un campo en el que tales desarrollos han sido más modestos y presenta aún ciertas incertidumbres. La cuestión de la autonomía, concretamente, plantea problemas en su puesta en práctica, especialmente cuando se la piensa desde la idea de sujeto individual autónomo capaz de tomar decisiones por cuenta propia. A través de un trabajo de carácter etnográfico realizado en un servicio de vida independiente en Cataluña, se lleva a cabo el análisis de dos casos de implantación de tecnología para facilitar la autonomía de personas con diversidad funcional intelectual. A partir de la comparación entre los dos casos, hemos mostrado cómo el resultado final de las experiencias tiene mucho que ver con las interacciones que se dan entre las diferentes concepciones de autonomía que se encuentran presentes y la manera en que se concibe el papel de la tecnología en la consecución de la vida independiente. Pensar toda la red de relaciones que se establece como un conjunto de equilibrios precarios aparece en este trabajo como la clave del éxito que debe permitir lidiar entre asuntos tan complejos como la autonomía, el derecho a decidir y el acompañamiento no invasivo en el día a día de las personas con diversidad funcional.

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Technology has been holding out the promise of facilitating greater autonomy and improving care for people in a situation of dependency. This trend is expected to grow and this is happening precisely at a time of expansion of the so-called Independent Living paradigm. In this context, however, disability activists are generally suspicious of approaches based on being “left” in the hands of technology. They instead advocate for “subordinating hands” to their ability to decide, a principle that stands in tension with the field of intellectual disability, where individuals are perceived as intrinsically unable to make “good decisions”. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide insight into the uses and developments of technologies with regard to care and autonomy for people with intellectual disabilities. By ethnographically examining the case of a specific technology; QR (quick response) codes in the context of an independent living service, and in the framework of Science and Technology Studies and Disability Studies, the paper reveals the role and possibilities of care and autonomy technologies for people with intellectual disabilities. Based on these findings, and by thinking from what we could define as “within a sociotechnical assemblage”, this paper aims to rethink the ways in which technologies for independent living can be used in the field.

The growing complexity of technoscientific issues has posed a challenge to decision-making in our democracies. Over the last two decades, we have thus witnessed a rise in the participatory processes that promise to democratize these issues by including citizens in decision-making. This paper aims to study the discourses and practices of the organizers of participatory processes in Spain to analyze these proposals' limits. In order to accomplish this objective, we conducted eight case studies by interviewing the individuals responsible for these processes and examining publicly available materials related to them. The analysis of the collected data reveals that, although the participation of laypeople is considered a positive contribution, the very configuration of participation—based on a problematic division between experts and non-experts—ends up limiting the ambition of democratizing decision-making. Based on these findings and drawing on lessons from the field of activism, the paper proposes a 'participation in the wild', which would allow rethinking the disposition of the stages and rhythms of participatory processes, and thereby blur the asymmetries that constitute these devices. This work, therefore, aims to contribute to the assembly of elements of political theory and science and technology studies, as well as bridging the gap between two fields that can make important contributions to achieve more democratic ways of conceiving decision-making concerning science and technology in society.

Technoscientific participation in Spain: Facing the challenge of hybridizing science and politics Immersion in the knowledge society brought with it the danger of restricting the treatment of scientific and technical issues to a process of obtaining consensus among experts, while keeping citizens away from political participation. The need for increased dialogue between experts and lay citizens was pointed out by the EU Commission in 2002 in one of its research and innovation programs, the Science and Society Action Plan. This article analyzes the processes that took place in Spain in response to this democratic requirement. Consistent with some premises of Science and Technology Studies, we discuss the convenience of rewording the nomenclature used to describe and organize the different experiences carried out in Spain in recent years. To this end, we have made explicit the questions raised regarding the participatory treatment of technoscientific issues, as well as how they have been addressed. In that vein, we go beyond the common nomenclature to focus on the understanding of the specificities characterizing science and technology relations, which are expressed in what we propose calling "hybridization modes".