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Paper short abstract

We, a research project on ageing well in the German-Polish border region, explore unmet care needs that emerge when citizens engage with digital public services that are meant to foster care-giving and caring communities.

Paper long abstract

How are care needs met in the German-Polish border region? How do older people, (older) individual and institutional caregivers struggle with missing ressources in demographically challenged rural communities? In our presentation we discuss these questions by referring to a transfer research project funded by the German Ministry of Research, Technology and Space. By using practice-based research approaches and co-creative methods we try to open up the discourse about unmet care needs. Our focus is on public care service technologies that are meant to foster care-giving and caring communities. We explore instances of citizens’ engagement with such digital public services as settings where care needs are discussed. We are especially interested in how digital technology becomes a medium for sharing observations and opinions of care needs, care poverty and care inequality, and thus, for the articulation of locally salient social and economic divisions with and through expectations and experiences of care. In the process, we examine how the provision and use of digital public infrastructure unsettles taken-for granted roles of the states, the family and the private sector in preventing and addressing care poverty and care inequality. Along with these substantial questions, we are interested in the methodological challenges and opportunities of rendering care poverty and inequality accessible through a combination of ethnographic and participatory methods.