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Short abstract:

The presentation considers the embodied ethics of care work in the increasing digitization and robotization of healthcare services and working environments. It discusses touch as a transforming professional skill and ethical stance in care work.

Long abstract:

Hands-on working through touch: assessing, diagnosing, handling, treating, manipulating, and monitoring bodies (Twigg et al. 2011), is perhaps most versatile in nursing; Z.R. Wolf and colleagues (2022) identified a total of 128 typical nursing interventions that nurses carry out on patients’ bodies using direct or instrumental/technology-mediated touch. These interventions consist of varied instrumental procedures as well as social/affective touches. The increased digitization and robotization of healthcare services and working environments has arisen new kinds of ethical dilemmas concerning not only the patient’s rights but the professionals’ workload. How to create a sense of physical presence and caring touch over distance through smartphone screen? What kind of physical touch is needed to soften the touch of technological devices and reduce their agency in the 'triadic' touch of the patient, professional and material artifacts/digital information (Parviainen & Pirhonen 2017)? Is it ethically sustainable that in the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic, and amidst of aging societies and lack of nursing personnel, social robotics and other new technologies are developed to solve the problem of touch starvation - or do these technologies provide liberation from the affective reversibility of touch (Kinnunen et al. 2023; Paterson 2023)? The presentation is based of interviews of nurses working in various healthcare and social services. It discusses touch as a transforming professional skill and ethical stance in care work.