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Studies

Aporophobia and Its Social Impact

Research 18 December 2023

Dr Juan Albacete Maza has recently joined IQS as a postdoctoral researcher with the SEE group to produce evidence on the topic of aporophobia and study its impact on society.

Dr Juan Albacete Maza has recently joined the Sustainability,  Economics, and Ethics (SEE) group as a postdoctoral researcher thanks to one of the grants awarded in the call under the Investigo Programme of the Government of Catalonia financed through European funding. Dr Albacete's project aims to produce evidence on the topic of aporophobia, hardly investigated at present, and study its impact on society. Dr Flavio Comim and Dr Cristina Montañola are the supervisors of the project.

The concept of aporophobia was coined by the philosopher Dr Adela Cortina in 1995 and entered the Spanish RAE dictionary in 2017, defined as a "phobia of poor and disadvantaged people." According to Dr Cortina herself, aporophobia refers to a "rejection, aversion, fear, and contempt towards the poor and the helpless who, at least in appearance, cannot bring anything good in return," with a clear component of discrimination and prejudice.

Within the SEE group at the IQS School of Management, Dr Flavio Comim leads a line of research on aporophobia through a very interdisciplinary perspective. This group has recently added Dr Juan Albacete, with whom we discussed his joining IQS and his project.

Juan, what has your research career been like so far?

I'm originally from Úbeda in Jaén, and I studied Pedagogy at the University of Granada (UGr). Then I later earned a master's degree in Psychopedagogical Intervention and completed my doctorate in Education Sciences there in the Department of Research Methods and Diagnosis in Education at the UGr, which I completed in the summer of 2022. My thesis consisted of analysing the tragic component present in Spanish children's folk songs and their pedagogical potential to educate children and adolescents about death, tragedy, and resilience. It's a complicated topic, which is also a taboo in today's society, but we thought it was crucial to talk about and research these issues.

And coming from the field of education, how did you end up at IQS to do research on aporophobia with Dr Comim and Dr Montañola?

I wanted to continue working as a researcher, but the final academic work completed by my supervisor, Dr Antonio Fernández Cano, was my thesis defence. He retired right after that. After their doctorate, many people continue working with their supervisor and expanding the research they conducted in their thesis. I wasn't so lucky, because my other supervisor, Dr Zoraida Callejas Carrión, works in a field that's quite distant from education sciences. I'm really grateful to both of them. They have always helped me so I could continue my academic career. However, the circumstances weren't right, so I started looking for other options.

On LinkedIn I found two spots open at the URL within the call for Investigo grants for unemployed PhDs under 30, which was my case: one was at Blanquerna and the other was at the IQS School of Management within Dr Flavio Comim's group. At that time, I was searching for a place where I could continue my research career and I found a great opportunity to join the SEE group. So here I am!

Dr Comim, how does a PhD in pedagogy fit into a such a social project like yours?

F. Comim. As Dr Adela Cortina said at the recent conference on aporophobia, "education is an essential tool to combat it." Therefore, Juan fits in great with his background in this line of research and in our group.

His presence in our SEE group shows, first of all, how multidisciplinary it is. We've been working in this area for some time. Now with the addition of Juan, we can delve into aspects that were beyond our experience, and rather focused on the area of humanities, until present. Juan provides us with excellent tools related to education and a literature review of all existing publications on stigma, aporophobia, and rejection of those in vulnerable situations.

Education is an essential tool to combat aporophobia

Why are you doing research on aporophobia within the IQS School of Management?

F. Comim. We must ask ourselves if the poor deserve to be poor. Within the IQS School of Management, our group has a great concern for this social issue, along with studies on other types of discrimination such as gender, racial, religious, and so on. In the end, we prepare people to work together in companies, and this is where ethics and education become crucial elements that we must consider, especially in a study as complex as this.

Juan, can you tell us a little about the details of your Investigo project?

The main objective of my work, and of the entire group, is to produce quality scientific evidence on aporophobia with the ultimate aim of better understanding the problem we face and being able to fight it more efficiently. We need to provide evidence on a very new and unknown topic, because the problem to which it refers is still too invisible.

 

 

 

 

 

My goal is to provide quality scientific evidence on aporophobia

I've started with some small simultaneous projects, such as the literature review that Dr Comim commented on earlier. We have also worked on a survey among IQS School of Management students, together with professors Montañola and Martori, to identify attitudes and aporophobic beliefs from the perspective of potential aggressors (in this case, students).

In parallel, I have started another research project focused, in this case, on potential victims in collaboration with the ASSIS Foundation, which also participated and collaborated in the last conference. The objective is to delve deeper into the aporophobic experience from the testimonies of those who suffer from it through semi-structured interviews.

Is your research focused only on Spain, or will you go further?

In theory, we will carry out studies at the local level, especially in the city of Barcelona where there's a great social assistance network that allows us to collaborate with foundations and organizations that work with potential victims of aporophobia.

For now we're focused on the Barcelona area, where there's a great social assistance network

Historically, Barcelona is a city with a solid awareness of supporting the underprivileged. It's a great place to sow this seed as you can talk to associations and groups and immediately find possible collaborations. It's not so easy in other places.

We are working at different levels: from surveys and interviews with social organizations in Barcelona, to building a map of aporophobia around the world based on stigmatizing expressions used in different countries to discriminate against the poor.

Are there really differences in societies’ beliefs and attitudes towards the poor?

This is a question that we want to research. A priori, I would say yes, but we need to have more solid evidence. Providing data that can confirm or reject this type of hypothesis is one of our objectives. But if I had to answer right now, I would say that cultural factors have an important, concrete weight in the treatment of the homeless.

Cultural factors have an important, concrete weight in the treatment of the homeless

It's not just about knowing where there is more inequality or higher levels of poverty, but looking for what causes it. There are societies that consider the causes to be more structural and don't really blame the individual for their situation. They understand that the causes can be multiple (family circumstances, the greater or lesser development of the environment in which they find themselves, the place where they live, wealth, and so on). On the other hand, there are others that attribute the causes to more personal situations: individual failures, bad decisions, laziness, lack of effort, and so on. They are more focused on the concept of meritocracy, which is highly present in American thought, for example. The evidence we have on all this is quite old, and we really need to update it.

What can you tell us about your experience here?

It’s been great and I'm really happy. As I mentioned earlier, I came out of a very uncertain future situation when I finished my thesis, and I was very lucky to find this opportunity in just a few months to do this postdoc at IQS, a small and very welcoming university with great resources and a lot of flexibility. And I'm super happy with the team I have joined, with my colleagues who are now doing their PhDs, and of course with the two supervisors, Cristina Montañola and Flavio Comim, with whom I really connected from day one! 

1st International Conference on Aporophobia

On 30 and 31 October, IQS hosted the first international conference on aporophobia, chaired by Dr Adela Cortina, professor of Ethics from the University of Valencia, who coined this "concept of social pathology."

"From a quantitative point of view, the conference was a huge success in terms of participation, with more than 250 attendees and significant media coverage. Moreover, it made it possible to showcase Ramon Llull University, with the participation of several URL schools in addition to IQS, including Esade, La Salle, Blanquerna, the Borja Institute of Bioethics, the Advanced School of Design, the University Institute of Mental Health, and the Pere Tarrés Foundation," stated Dr Flavio Comim. He went on to add: "In addition, many social organizations that are highly important in this field, such as the Arrels Foundation, Cáritas, the ASSIS Foundation, and Christianity and Justice also participated. Thanks to the efforts of our SEE group and this conference, we were able to meet groups that work and research in the area of aporophobia, converge with our approaches, and begin to build a network of work and collaboration among everyone." He continued: "I would like to emphasize that Juan played a decisive role and became the organizational nucleus of the conference."

On 11 December, the organizers of the Conference on Aporophobia met again at IQS to jointly read their "Manifesto against Aporophobia."

The Investigo grant programme is funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU