Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the transformation of care practice involving robots. We draw on two case studies, one concerning eating robots at a care home, and one concerning the testing of medicine-dispensing robots. We outline the socio-material foundation of assemblage’s enacting autonomy and dependency

Paper 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.