Paper Short Abstract:

In times of glocal health crisis, as in the COVID-19 pandemic, elders in Greece became the focus of novel technological entities (biomedical and digital), along with practices of prioritization. We discuss how enhanced care and human-technological entanglements mediated ageing experience.

Paper Abstract:

In times of glocal health crisis, as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, and with regards to the ageing experience in the Greek ethnographic context, elders often became the focus of novel globalised technological entities (diagnostics, vaccinations, medical trackings, digitalized communications), along with policies and practices of prioritization (negatively and positively loaded and experienced).

This paper aims at discussing how niches of enhanced care and human-technological entanglements presented in the pandemic context mediated elderly ways of being in the world –a world long lived but at the same time newly imagined– and ways of caring (interpersonally, cross-generationally, biotechnologically and techno-somatically), in relation to local representations of elderly life (drawing from kincare to various forms of ageism), and along with the multiple potentialities and imaginaries of planetary changes.

The above intertwined modalities of care will be discussed bearing in mind how, during the pandemic, the chronic structural deficits within Greek health care and the uneven distribution of vulnerability among different bodies informed the potentialities and limitations of biomedical and digital care initiatives –such as prioritization policies in vaccinations and intense care, digitalized ways of living and caring– further creating new forms of intimacy or/and exclusion. Drawing from elderly experiences and healthcare professional reflections we are urged to critically examine the relation between care and technological practices, imaginings, and moralities as a matter of techno-somatic care materiality, highlighting the interdependencies between human and other-than-human entities and further problematizing the ageing experience in the context of planetary crisis.