Manuel Castells

Manuel Castells Oliván (born 9 February 1942) is a Spanish sociologist.

He is well known for his authorship of a trilogy of works, entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture.

He is a scholar of the information society, communication and globalization.

Castells is the Full Professor of Sociology, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), in Barcelona.

He is also the University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Additionally, he is the Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for 24 years.

He is also a fellow of St. John's College at the University of Cambridge and holds the chair of Network Society at Collège d’Études Mondiales, Paris.

Manuel Castells was born on February 9, 1942, in the city of Hellín, in La Mancha region, Spain.

His parents, Fernando Castells Adriaensens and Josefina Olivan Escartin were both civil servants.

He also has a younger sister named Irene.

The family’s residence in La Mancha was short lived, as it was related to Castells’ parents’ work.

In fact, due to the mobility of his father’s career as a finance inspector, Castells’ childhood was also mobile.

He grew up in the cities of Madrid, Cartagena, and Valencia.

Politics were a part of Castells’ life from an early age.

He notes:

"My parents were very good parents. It was a conservative family — very strongly conservative family. But I would say that the main thing that shaped my character besides my parents was the fact that I grew up in fascist Spain. It's difficult for people of the younger generation to realize what that means, even for the Spanish younger generation. You had actually to resist the whole environment, and to be yourself, you had to fight and to politicize yourself from the age of fifteen or sixteen."

Castells’ engagement is evident in his early opposition to Francisco Franco’s semi-fascist regime.

His father initially fought in its favor as a member of the Falange Party.

Castells’ father eventually abandoned this mentality, as he was no longer pleased with Franco’s rule.

Castells completed his secondary education in Barcelona.

He was a strong student, and in 1958, he completed his course of study two years early, at the age of sixteen.

The same year, He continued his education at the University of Barcelona, where he studied both Law and Economics.

Beyond these subjects, Castells was also interested in literature and the theatre.

However, the oppressive Franco government cracked down on students’ self-expression.

Theatre performances were censored and student journals were shut down.

This motivated Castells to join the anti-Franco movement in 1960 at age 18.

He was one of very few students to engage in this kind of activism, largely because it was highly illegal and dangerous.

Secrecy was imperative.

Castells joined an opposition group of diverse ideologies called the Workers Front of Catalonia.

From there, he coupled his formal education with copious amounts of reading to supplement his activism.

Among many other topics, Castells involved himself in the exploration of Marxist and anarchist theory.

In May 1962, Castells’ activism led him to participate in a strike.

Its goal was to protest the iron-fisted government and stand in solidarity with exploited miners in the Asturias region of Spain. This resulted in many of Castells’ friends being arrested and beaten.

Fortunately, Castells was able to escape to France, but without the social support he had access to in Spain.

As a result, he was not able to complete his degree at the University of Barcelona.

Following his escape, a fellow resistance member assisted him in achieving political refugee status, and he travelled to Paris.

The 2000–2014 research survey of the Social Sciences Citation Index ranks him as the world's fifth most-cited social science scholar, and the foremost-cited communication scholar.

In 2012, Castells was awarded the Holberg Prize, for having "shaped our understanding of the political dynamics of urban and global economies in the network society."

In 2013, he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Sociology for "his wide-ranging and imaginative thinking through of the implications of the great technological changes of our time."

In January 2020, he was appointed Minister of Universities in the Sánchez II Government of Spain, position he held until his resignation in December 2021.