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- Convenors:
-
Dara Ivanova
(Radboud University Nijmegen)
Daryl Martin (University of York)
Thorben Simonsen (The Danish Center for Social Science Research)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel interrogates how care practices become re-placed and re-configured in light of techno-scientific innovations. How can STS-scholars mobilize conceptually and critically to challenge techno-solutionism, and think through how digital technologies shape the relations between care and space?
Long Abstract:
This panel interrogates digital care technologies and their consequences in homes, cities and planet by mobilizing STS sensibilities around care as critique and speculative ethics (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). STS scholars have characterised place as an agent in socio-material constructions of caring (Oudshoorn 2012, Langstrup 2013, Ivanova 2020). Re-placing care onto digital spaces, however, has not been so adequately theorized; because of the massive uptake of digital technologies across care domains, we urgently need to understand how such technologies – whether apps, platforms, or virtual reality - spatially reconfigure socio-material care arrangements. The panel attends to the production, experience and implications of digital spaces of care as new frontiers for where the relations between health, illness and care are imagined and negotiated. Digital spaces cut across scales, requiring us to consider what is at stake when we care in and for homes, cities, and even planet. We are curious about how STS sensibilities can direct attention towards digital spaces of care and the techno-scientific care practices that follow, without falling into techno-solutionism. Indeed, can STS scholarship facilitate spatial critique as a particular mode of care?
We welcome abstracts exploring the following questions:
- How to theorize the interrelations between the spatial and care in the context of digitalization?
- How to understand digital and physical care infrastructures as care agents?
- How to develop and maintain STS sensibilities to care-in-place?
- Who imagines and produces (digital) care places and with what implications?
- How can we harness replacements in care as a mode of (feminist) critique?
- What care levels are at stake in the Anthropocene – home, neighbourhood, city, region, planet – and how should we understand these as interrelated care places?
We invite traditional presentations and alternative contributions, such as exhibitions, walking presentations, story-telling, and interactive performance.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Tanja Ahlin (University of Amsterdam)
Short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research with migrating nurses from India and their aging parents, I uncover the subtle workings of digital technologies on (health)care through transnational care collectives when being physically together is not feasible.
Long abstract:
How do digital technologies shape how people care for each other and, through that, extend 'the clinic' into a transnational space? This is a particularly pertinent question today, as technological innovation is on the rise while increasing migration is introducing vast distances among people. The situation has been additionally complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the requirements of physical distancing, especially for the most vulnerable – older adults. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, I explore how digital technologies shape elder care when adult children – professional healthcare workers – and their aging parents live far apart. Drawing on STS theory of material semiotics, I show how these family members enact remote care through 'transnational care collectives.' Within these global assemblages of people and digital technologies care is enacted through specific practices, such as frequent calling. Through calling their parents regularly and in most cases daily, the nurses maintain trust with their parents which is also key to support health at a distance. In this way, the space of 'the clinic' as a physical site of (health)care becomes extended from doctors' offices and hospitals into the transnational space, which in turn impacts on doctor-patient relationships and health outcomes in different geographic sites.
Frederike Fahse (Zealand University Hospital)
Short abstract:
This paper attends to the spatial reconfiguration of socio-material care arrangements through the use of eDevices in epilepsy.
Long abstract:
In recent years, there has been a great increase of consumer-oriented and clinically certified health technologies available, enabling patients and caregivers to collect large amounts of data in their everyday lives at home. This is also the case in epilepsy, where eDevices have found their way into the lives of patients, transforming both treatment and care practices.
Based on fieldwork conducted among people with epilepsy and their relatives who use a variety of technological devices to monitor and handle everyday life with epilepsy, I will discuss how data from digital health technologies creates and transforms therapeutic spaces (Trnka 2021). I will look at how different therapeutic spaces can contain different forms of data and attend to how e.g. health data from a smart watch is used by and helpful to a person with epilepsy at home but not seen as valuable in a consultation room by the same person. Inspired by assemblage theory (e.g. Schwennesen 2019) I will look at the implications of certain data being integrated into and transforming some socio-material care arrangements but not others.
Hannah Grün (Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg)
Long abstract:
Digital and non-digital places of everyday care in later life are manifold, as are the work, practices, infrastructures, imaginaries, institutions, arrangements, and connections that enact them (e.g. Peine et al. 2021, Pasveer et al. 2020, Ivanova 2020; Buse et al. 2018). However, how is everyday care distributed, organized, and re-placed through different places? And what can we learn about 'caring-in-place' practices when we study future feminist community places and imaginations of care?
Starting from these questions, I will present some insights from my ethnographic field work in a lesbian community housing project that has been planned and infrastructured for over a decade. In doing so, I will outline a specific lesbian practice and imagination of the 'caring interface' linked to a collectively imagined digital notice board in order to introduce the sensitizing STS vocabulary of the 'interface' into discussions on 'caring-in-place'. By interface, I refer to both a user interface between humans and computers and an ecology and place of care that organizes, connects and separates different care practices and places with "lifeworlds […] that are enabled in specific ways and through digital technology" (Waltorp 2018).
In this way, the paper aims to contribute not only to the empirical question of how digital technologies are involved in the spatial imaginations and reconfigurations of socio-material care arrangements, but also to the theoretical question of how care and place relate to each other through 'the interface' when the perspective of feminist care as well as the seemingly lesbian 'non-users' is included.
Marlene Hobbs (University of Bonn)
Long abstract:
Digital care technologies promise to solve the care crisis by transforming care work, making it more efficient and empowering for both caregivers and care recipients. Digital technologies are increasingly being used in institutional care spaces, but little is known about how technologies are transforming institutional care spaces and how these spaces configure care work with technology. Drawing on ethnographic observations of care work with technology and interviews with stakeholders in the elderly care and technology development sectors, I explore how digital technologies are intended to, and actually do, transform everyday care practices in assisted living spaces and care homes for older persons. To do this, I adopt a feminist STS understanding of a mutually co-constructive relationship between care and technology and a geographical perspective on the relationality of space and care and space and technology. I show that digital technologies constitute new socio-technical care practices and that care workers are essential to how these practices shape spaces of care. Extending the notion of technogeographies of care (Oudshoorn 2012), I argue that a focus on everyday care practices with technology can challenge notions of techno-solutionism and contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between care, technologies and space.
I would like to give a traditional paper presentation of 15-20 minutes length.
Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe (University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland) Arzu Çöltekin (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzeland (FHNW))
Long abstract:
Collective and individual experiences during and beyond times of confinement and contagion contributed to a shifting understanding of health when it comes to urban space, ecologies, and the body proper. The temporary absence of supporting physical infrastructures has amplified inequalities, intersectional differences, and spatial injustice, particularly for those, who are most vulnerable during such times of crises: among them, aging persons with cognitive losses. The health crisis (Covid-19 pandemic) has reminded us that we all share certain risks, and that we can only address them collectively with attention to marginalized and vulnerable groups, and diverse bodies in precarious situations (Tschoepe 2024).
VISDOM (Çöltekin 2019) is an exemplary project that begins to mediate this issue. It focuses on experiences with highly realistic 3-dimensional representations and virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) within the Digital Earth framework. The goal of the project is exploring the interactions between aging, memory, and realism in 3D visualizations. It enables spaces of care for persons with age-related loss of cognition through the possibility of stimulating memory by navigating familiar spaces, and (re)establishing connections with physical space.
In the context of technological transformation, and when it comes to spaces of health, emerging and changing digital infrastructures should not substitute or translate physical spaces, bodies, and ecologies of care into digital ones. Rather, they need to be reflected as they add complexity to questions of inclusion in, access to, and ethics of urban space and its fluid boundaries and thresholds as it expand into augmented and virtual space.
Stefanie Gerold (BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg) Hendrik Theine (Vienna University of Economics and Business) Karin Sardadvar Katarzyna Gruszka (Malmö University)
Long abstract:
Demographic change and the increased labour-market participation of women in the last decades have exacerbated the crisis of social reproduction. Especially in middle-class households, outsourcing domestic work is increasingly used as a strategy to deal with this crisis. However, jobs in the domestic sector are traditionally characterised by low pay and precarious working conditions. Performed in isolation behind closed doors, this kind of work often lacks social recognition and institutional control. In recent years, digital labour platforms have entered this sector, promising to provide an alternative to informal labour. While working conditions in domestic platform work have received increased attention, the perspectives of clients are remarkably under-researched. Against this background, our contribution explores the perspectives of clients who hire domestic cleaning services via Helpling. This online labour platform provides a digital space for matching households with mostly self-employed workers. Based on semi-structured interviews with clients and cleaners in Germany, it analyses the motives of clients for using platform-mediated cleaning, compared to more conventional options. Another aspect concerns the question of how clients relate to the issues of undeclared work, low pay, and precarious working conditions in the sector of domestic work. The article also explores how the cleaner-client relationship is shaped by the platform’s digital space. Thereby, the study contributes to the understanding of the thus far neglected role of clients in the use of platform work and the role of platform-mediated domestic work in the crisis of reproduction.
Naonori Kodate (University College Dublin) Mayuko Tsujimura (Shiga University of Medical Science) Sebastien Lechevalier (EHESS) Yuki Maura (Shiga University of Medical Science) Masako Kitamura (Shiga University of Medical Science)
Long abstract:
In May 2023, a newly built acute care hospital in a rural community in Japan was reopened and one of the novel features was that transfer robots were introduced to support nurses, pharmacists, clinical engineers and technologists.
The introduction of these robots was designed to improve and enhance the quality of care from the perspective of person-centered care in a sustainable manner in response to social issues such as labor shortages in healthcare, and harsh work conditions facing care professionals.
After six months since the opening of the hospital and the robot introduction, semi-structured interviews were conducted with various stakeholders including care professionals as users, and the engineers who designed, developed and managed the machines.
This presentation, as part of a larger project, reports the findings from our interviews with engineers. The questions asked include: what do they think about the choice of the transfer robot for use at the hospital among the various types of robots available? What were the biggest challenges they faced in the development, design, and maintenance of the robot, and how did they overcome them? They also provided some examples of the process that they consider to be user-centered design.
The paper discusses how work systems in an acute care setting have been transformed not by the transfer robots per se, but by engineers providing another layer of care and creating new digital and physical care infrastructure.