Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the emergence of Omaolo, a digital channel for social and health services in Finland, using anthropological approaches to the study of infrastructure.

Paper long abstract:

In mid-March 2020, a state-owned company dedicated to advancing the digitalisation of health and social services in Finland launched a coronavirus symptom checker. Although being developed merely for six days before it was released, this web-based symptom self-assessment tool turned out to be one of the primary means for managing the spread of the COVID-19 by the Finnish public health authorities. That became possible, however, only because the coronavirus symptom checker was from the very beginning embedded in an extended material assemblage that brought together multiple digital social and health services offered by Finnish municipalities and hospital districts, known as Omaolo. In this paper, I examine how Omaolo was assembled in the first place. To do that, I go back to the period between 2016 and 2018 and zoom in on a national flagship project titled “Self-care and digital value services”, out of which Omaolo was born. Using anthropological approaches to the study of infrastructure to explore the project’s blog posts and other qualitative material, I investigate the entanglements between the digital and the analogue in the emergence of Omaolo. In doing so, I am able to offer one type of explanation why Omaolo ended up being a well-functioning infrastructure in utterly dysfunctional times.

Paper short abstract:

Pet robots are widely used in Danish nursing homes and have been since the mid-2000s. In this presentation I will discuss how this futuristic technology and everyday object is embedded in the everyday life of a nursing home for people with dementia and how the robots and I become inseparable.

Paper long abstract:

Pet robots are widely used in Danish nursing homes. They have been in use since the mid-2000s but are simultaneously seen as objects of the future that may be able to help a welfare state struggling to provide good care for the growing number of older adults. These robots are simultaneously futuristic objects and everyday objects with which residents, staff, relatives and I interacted in a Danish nursing home for people with dementia during my ethnographic fieldwork from 2021-2022. When pet robots become embedded in social life, they become everyday objects together with dolls, teddy bears and blankets. In the fieldwork, the used pet robots somehow become an extension of myself and an integral part of the relations that I form with residents. It was hard to pin down where I stopped and the robot begun and to separate how ‘we’ impacted the interactions and the nursing home. This shows something general about the use of technologies in nursing homes. Technologies do not work alone. The pet robots work together with other actors in the nursing home, where care is provided in collectives. These collectives comprise of actors as different as tables, staff, robotic pets and people with dementia working together to care for each other. In this presentation, I aim to show how these robots do not work independently and may not be used, when I am not present in the nursing home, but nevertheless can help provide care and even enhance caring relations when embedded in care collectives.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores alternative commoning practices in the form of solidarities and collectives that are forged, maintained and reinforced at the intersection of the rapid digitization of Kenya's economy through mobile money technology and the limits of the country's national health insurance.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade, the Kenya government has continued to expand the country's national health insurance (National Hospital Insurance Fund, NHIF) to include those in the informal sector as well as providing free maternal health care and health insurance subsidies for the vulnerable populations such as the beneficiaries of cash transfer schemes and elderly persons. Recently, the government has considered the use of coercive measures in persuading its citizens to become members or pay premiums to the NHIF. The Kenyan state portrays the national health insurance as a national collective and frames it within the language of common good, equity, financial protection and state responsibility to care. Despite the government's commoning practices and processes in the domain of healthcare, public health facilities remain badly under-resourced and the national health insurance does not offer reliable access to healthcare. In many cases, patients and health workers navigate both mundane and persistent complexities, disappointments, frustrations and failure of the national health insurance through different solidarities: ethnic and kinship based, and patronage networks. The increasing digitization of Kenya's economy through mobile money technology over the last decade has transformed these forms of solidarities/networks of care in different ways. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya, this paper explores alternative commoning practices in the form of solidarity and collectives that are forged, maintained and reinforced at the intersection of healthcare distribution through the country's national health insurance and the limits of the health insurance.

Paper short abstract:

As smart water technologies are increasingly integrated in Danish water management systems, data on water shifts local and global water regimes. This paper investigates the promises and materialities of smart water. What kind of (un)commons will the future history of (digital) water unlock?

Paper long abstract:

What I define as ‘Digital Water’ infrastructures, or the uptake of datafied smart technologies within water management systems, is envisioned by leading industry stakeholders and utilities to carry a great promise. A promise that takes on local and national forms, but that is global in its aspirations. It is a promise of optimization and access, of equitable water futures and of responding to current and future climatic challenges. For the most inventive, it is even a promise of a new international export enterprise. The narrative is that, with the smartification of sensing and monitoring systems, decision-making in everyday water management transitions from being driven by “gut feelings”, to solid and data-driven accuracy through integrated data provided by imaging satellites, sensors, and AI-empowered predictions. However, to utility operators, automatization prompts a sense of loss of situated knowledges and control over the infrastructure...

This paper engages ethnographically and speculatively with the promise, experience, and materiality of ‘digital water’ in the Danish water sector.

I ask how smart technologies alter the ecology of sensing practices of the Danish water sector, and what repercussions these transformations have on water-human-data relations. What happens to water and data on water as commons and/or commodities if the future history of water is digital, and its water flows are controlled by data? And what does it take to make ethnographic sense of digital water technologies, when making sense of water, to “know it” and act upon it – its management, infrastructure, and future history – is altered?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the increasing ‘smartification’ of Danish homes by looking at smart technologies’ effect on social life, everyday practices and domestic roles. New forms of digital housekeeping reconfigure the home as a networked space, risking reinforcing gendered divisions of household labour.

Paper long abstract:

Smart lights, automated heating and digital voice assistants – these are some of the popular technologies that Scandinavians increasingly invite into their homes. Affecting not only material life, smart home technology (SHT) also impacts everyday practices, domestic roles and relations. This paper explores the role of SHT in a Danish context which is particularly characterized by the spread of SHT. Based on home visits and interviews with 15 households, the paper illustrates how SHT reconfigures the home as a networked space, implying new forms of digital housekeeping while simultaneously affecting existing household practices. When SHT moves in, digital skills and competences become increasingly important, however, such skills are often unequally distributed between household members, underpinning gendered categories of technology use and interest. When one person in the household – often a man – is more in charge of the digital housekeeping, while other (often female) household members engage less with the technology, this can lead to subtle forms of power imbalances in the home as a networked space. Furthermore, the unequal distribution of digital housekeeping risks reinforcing gendered divisions of household labour while also leading to new forms of digital inequality within the home. Drawing attention to these risks, the paper illustrates the importance of creating equal domestic spaces and responding to differentiated technological competences considering current digital transformations in our society and homes.