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- Convenors:
-
Niels Christian Nickelsen
(University of South-eastern Norway)
Antti-Pekka Hämäläinen (University of Jyväskylä)
Hilde Thygesen (University of South-Eastern Norway)
Doris Lydahl (University of Gothenburg)
Kristín Björnsdóttir (University of Iceland)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Home as context of care makes a powerful image. Care at home may be a matter of learning to become dependent. We explore how home is made when care enters the homes of old people. This panel contributes to STS by focusing on the specificities of the transformation of care and home.
Long Abstract:
The idea of home as a good place to live one’s life is indeed a powerful image (Healey-Ogden, 2014). This open panel unpacks assumptions like ‘there is no place like home to care for older adults’ (From et al., 2009). Our aim is to challenge the idea of staying at home as a matter of independence and autonomy (Jakobsen & Lind, 2023). Instead, we will explore how home is made when care enters the lives of people as they grow old at home. This issue has already been discussed in STS. In a recently edited volume, Pasveer, Synnes and Moser (2020) propose to view home as a verb rather than a noun. Home is made. They suggest that growing old with care is about learning to become dependent. Correspondingly, homemaking requires continuous tinkering, relations, and arrangements between various actors such as patients, care providers, relatives, and digital technology - to mention just a few. In this panel, we want to underscore that doing home with care is a material and situated practice that reconfigures homes when various components are introduced. Specifically, we invite presentations that focus on how homemaking is reconfigured when digital technologies are used. The discussion contributes to STS by focusing on the specificities of the transformation of care and home. We invite a combined form open panel focusing on STS sensibility in relation to homemaking and digital technology and thinking about how we can commit ourselves to our research fields and their normativities while continuing to highlight learning flows between STS and its fields. Thus, we are expecting academic paper presentations, while also welcoming experimental formats of knowledge expression, such as dialogue sessions and workshops focused on homemaking and care for old persons.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Linda Pasch (University of Bonn)
Short abstract:
Ageing in a nursing home is often seen as the opposite of self-determined ageing at home. Based on an ethnographic study in nursing homes, I show how digital technologies and the infrastructure of nursing homes produce new socio-technical practices of homemaking and care.
Long abstract:
Ageing at home - so-called ageing in place - is seen as the ideal place to age with autonomy and dignity. Ageing in a nursing home is often seen as the opposite of self-determined ageing at home, where institutional constraints and high levels of care dependency are perceived as a threat to subjectivity (Higgs and Gilleard 2015, Hillebrecht 2020). In this paper presentation, I take a geographical and feminist STS perspective on nursing homes and show how digital technologies and the infrastructure of nursing homes produce new practices of homemaking and care. Home is conceptualised as a process (Pasveer et al. 2020) in which home is produced through socio-technical practices. I present the findings of my ethnographic study in which I followed everyday life in institutional care spaces. Following feminist STS debates, I show that the introduction of new technologies is full of contradictions, with new norms and creative practices of appropriation (Schwartz Cowan 1976, Oudshoorn 2018). I show how socio-technical practices in institutional care spaces challenge the normative ideal of independent and self-determined ageing at home and dependent ageing in nursing homes. Further, fragile communities of care are emerging in old age that go beyond the nuclear family. These caring communities are made possible by digital technologies and the infrastructures of the nursing home. I challenge normative notions of ageing in place by asking how new homemaking and care practices emerge with digital technologies in nursing homes. The talk will be an academic paper presentation of 15-20 minutes.
Aline Boeuf (University of Geneva)
Short abstract:
This contribution aims to examine how care holds a central place in home aging and reveal the limitations of the systems supposedly ensuring the continuity of autonomy. The Swiss telealarm system is turning the home into a space for care and surveillance, questioning the ways of “aging in place”.
Long abstract:
In Western Switzerland, keeping the elderly at home is now a consensual social project, widely supported by the public authorities. The success of the "ageing in place" policy is due in part to the standard of autonomy it embodies. It is accompanied by a reconfiguration of the care provided to the elderly as they age.
My doctoral thesis looks at the telecare system, a means of assistance that is being integrated into the homes of the elderly. The aim of this contribution is twofold: to examine how the principle of care holds a central place in the context of ageing at home, and to reveal the limitations of the systems proposed as ways of ensuring the continuity of autonomy. With materialist gerontology, we are enabled to see the relational processes that shape the experience of ageing and the transformation of the home.
For this qualitative research, interviews were conducted with people over 65 with a telealarm system at home. The aim was to identify how people 'do home with care' in the presence of technologies that blur the boundaries between the private sphere of the home and the public sphere of health, turning the home into a space for care and surveillance. By studying the dynamics of appropriation or circumvention of the telealarm by the elderly, this research is an opportunity to rethink the role of technology in developing or undermining a comfortable life at home for elderly people, from their own point of view.
Jussara dos Santos Raxlen (Bard College)
Short abstract:
In the US, home care has become seniors' preference, the state-market solution to the problem of where and how to care for older adults, and an antonym for institutionalized care. This paper problematizes these assumptions by exploring the possibilities of technocare in (un)making the home.
Long abstract:
Claimed as the preference of seniors who want to "age in place," extolled by experts as a cheaper and better alternative to the gloomy nursing homes of yore, sought after by care agencies as the "next frontier" for technological growth and profit, but still employing a highly underpaid workforce that is in short supply, home care as the long-term care policy for older adults has increasingly become a topic of political and public debates. Based on ethnographic research, this paper problematizes these assumptions by analyzing the transformative possibilities that different forms of technology might have in reconfiguring the meanings of and experiences in the home. Thinking with heterotopia, I ask what the home turns into once populated by long-term care professionals, front-line care workers, healthcare equipment, digital forms for reimbursement and health assessment, beeping sounds, flashing lights, tubes, and various other accouterments. If the home of home care becomes a new institution, what kind of institution does it become? Which logic does it have? Why should we ask? What is at stake?
John Rudnik (University of Michigan)
Short abstract:
How do digital metrics influence care practices and relationships? We interviewed 20 older care recipients and 20 professional caregivers about their routines and interactions with technology. Findings the contested nature of metrics and demonstrate how morality plays out in intimate contexts.
Long abstract:
How do digital metrics influence care practices and relationships? To answer this question, we interviewed 20 older care recipients and 20 professional caregivers about their routines and interactions with technology. Findings highlight how digital (e)valuation tools act as a contested resource in this context. Amidst widespread population aging, digital technologies are often framed as a response to concerns about the cost, quantity, and quality of care available to older adults and the well-being of the people who provide care to older adults. However, developing and implementing these technologies raises questions about their influence on existing care practices and relationships. This project seeks to understand how digital tools designed to evaluate professional caregivers and older adult care recipients intervene in care dynamics.
Working in the context of platforms—which act as intermediaries to algorithmically organize, arrange, and manage care—we interviewed 20 caregivers and 20 older adult care recipients to understand how their ideals and practices converge with and diverge from the affordances of digital evaluation tools. We hypothesize that evaluation tools act as contested artifacts, or tools that caregivers and older adult care recipients strategically engage to maintain their well-being.
Niels Christian Nickelsen (University of South-eastern Norway) Miquel Domènech (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) Doris Lydahl (University of Gothenburg) Hilde Thygesen (University of South-Eastern Norway)
Long abstract:
This paper explores the transformation of care practice involving robots. We draw on two case studies, one concerning the use of eating robots at a care home, and one concerning the testing of medicine-dispensing robots in home-care services. Combining the concept of assemblages with theories about the specificities of care, the paper emphasizes the specificities of the journey of robots into the specific worlds of care. This means observing how they participate in care, interact with various users and actors, and impact their lives. We will do this by first outlining the assemblage’s enacting autonomy and showing that they have different effects in different places. Second, we investigate the care and footwork it takes to sustain these assemblages, sketching what we call the assemblages of dependency in which care robots are embedded. Assemblages of autonomy and dependency are not necessarily in opposition to one another. Rather, we are referring to the different normative reception of the robots in the care institutions and homes.
Sara Marie Ertner (IT University of Copenhagen) Signe Louise Yndigegn (IT University of Copenhagen) Stina Jørgensen (IT University)
Long abstract:
Digital voice assistants (DVA’s) have been celebrated as a breakthrough in health- and eldercare. Corporate discourses emphasize DVA’s as practical assistants, and figure the voice as instrumental means, a sound object, to achieve certain ends. We see voice-based interactions as infrastructures to open up their ethico-political, ontological, and affective dimensions - how they create sonic-affective environments, and in/voice-abilities.
Combining the STS concept of infrastructure and a cultural anthropological view on voice, we study ethnographically how older people use DVA’s and with what effects for experiences of the home and its sonic-affective environment. Based on this, we see voice-based interactions with DVA’s as infrastructural in the sense that that they link the realms of the technical, cultural and sociopolitical to the level of the individual, creating sites where shared discourses, values, and affect are made manifest in and contested through embodied, social and material practice.
The use of DVA’s result in changes in the affective environments of the home, such as by creating uncertainty, harshness and intervening in cultural and temporal vocal gestures and norms. Moreover, the ability of DVA’s to make voices travel as data beyond the material confines of the home, renders its boundaries more permeable. As a 'porous home', the smart home presents experiences of disempowerment both towards technology and the management of the privacy of the home. We propose to see DVA's and other smarthome technologies as agential in infrastructuring Voices, Homes, and Healthcare, and explore effects of these processes of Infrastructuring in practice.
Gemma Hughes (University of Leicester) Maja Nordtug (University of Oslo) Alejandro Miranda-Nieto (Oslo Metropolitan University) CATHRINE EGELAND (OsloMet) Marit Haldar (Oslo Metropolitan University)
Long abstract:
Home has always been a key location for the provision of care. De-institutionalisation has been the direction of health and social care policy in many settings to deliver an increasing range of services previously provided in institutions and hospitals in the home. This includes supporting people with chronic conditions, older people and people towards the end of life to remain independent at home for as long as possible. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, digitally-mediated care has enabled an even greater proportion of healthcare to be delivered at home. In this paper we analyse how the digitalization of home organises and mediates the enactment of activities inside the domestic space and connects them with the ‘outside’ space.
Drawing from empirical cases, we examine the impacts of digitalization during the pandemic on facets of domestic life. We explore how the integration of digital technologies in domestic spaces is reshaping healthcare (and other) practices, as well as the experience of being home itself. We argue that the distinction between private and public spheres of social activity is at the core of what the domestic space means and how it is practised. Digital technologies are therefore bringing profound changes not only in practices of healthcare but in how people draw meaning from and experience their homes. As homes become intertwined with global networks, public and private spheres of social activity merge in a common domestic context, transforming how we do healthcare and reshaping our experiences and perceptions of 'home'.