Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the practices of caring for animals that act as substitutes for humans in experiments seeking to enhance health for new born infants within the field of "translational medicine". Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a perinatal pig laboratory I look at the complex aesthetics through which the researchers' care for the piglets become central in instrumentalizing them as tools for infant health. Specifically I investigate the spatial boundaries of the caring community focusing on how the care work becomes muted outside the laboratory setting the moment the piglets have graduated to research samples and are abstracted into medical categories. I argue that the spatial segregation of care may be seen as part of a politics of life that morally detaches the pig from the human in order to pave the way for pig based research results to enter the clinic and translate into infant health. More broadly, the paper engages with debates about care in the emergent fields of hum-animal studies and the ways in which questions of solidary and community may be approached from a multi-species perspective.

Paper long abstract:

In 2005 three videos on promoting Ambient Assisted Living were published by an international network for age care services. Seven years later the same institution published a new, "updated" corpus of promotional videos on the same matter. These two video-corpora allow a comparative investigation on how knowledge/technological orders and social orders are co-produced in making the future of Ambient Assisted Living in these videos. I explored in a case study how making the future in videos can be understood as a site of co-production, where relations between different (human and non-human) actors become established and fixated. The videos themselves can be seen as "scripted scripts", organized strategically to mobilize and situate actors accordingly. The structure, make-up and narrative of the videos are dedicated to establish a future-vision of aging and eldercare in context of innovation-technologies. Investigating these aspects allows shedding light on how actor-relations are imagined in order to realize the promoted technologies. Definitions of concepts - such as health, normalcy, well-being and aging - and of actor's identities are co-produced in making the future of AAL in these videos. Tracing back these "virtual act(ion)s of definition" then allows to situate the communities the video's authors realized in the videos. Choosing a comparative approach of analysis further allows understanding how practices of co-production in making the future of AAL change, facing progress in development.

Paper long abstract:

Forms of solidarity emerging from the domestication of technological innovations are linked to moral values and to particular types of gender relations. This paper presents a research perspective for exploring informal care through the lens of gender-technology relations. Due to the significance of gender for the organization of care and specifically informal care, it is important to extend the analysis of gender-technology relations from professional to informal care. Thus, gender is analysed as social process, mutually shaping with technology in the development of forms of solidarity. The proposed approach conceptualizes gender-technology relations as part of processes of domestication of technology. Informal care in later life includes the combination of various types of technologies: not care-specific everyday technology, technology developed to support independent living in later life and technology which is also used in professional care. The presented research perspective focuses on exploring the mutual shaping of gender and these different technologies in informal care as linked to moral values.

Paper long abstract:

Worldwide, 400 million people are living with incontinence. They often deal with it alone, and in silence, due to the stigmatized nature of the condition. Internet enables ways of living with incontinence in a more collective way. It is an important source of information on the topic and of (anonymous) contact with similar others.

In this paper we investigate how active members of a Dutch internet forum try to build a community around the topic of incontinence. On the forum, members learn from each other how to be open about the condition. This is not primarily done by discussing the taboo, but through gathering, sharing and evaluating experiences on the wide range of incontinence materials available.

A shared sense of aesthetics is developed related to these products and to the ways in which they enable 'having a good life with incontinence'. By having these conversations on the appreciations of materials, members jointly develop a sense of what this good life might entail for them. Simultaneously they alter incontinence from a private affair to a shared experience; to a condition that can generate togetherness.

Paper long abstract:

When thinking about care relationships in the context of dementia, we tend to assume that it is the caregiver who possesses memory, while lack of memory is ascribed only to the person with dementia. However, there are certain situations in which the caregivers do not have memories of the person for whom they provide care or do not have direct knowledge of the person's past history (as, for example, a paid caregiver in the context of either homecare or institutional care). This paper considers one such situation, tracking the movement of stories about people with dementia that takes place in an adult day care center located in Spain. These stories navigate the sometimes conflicting present and past of the person with dementia, and are told by the different actors involved in the center, both human and non-human: family members, nurses' aides, physicians, the person with dementia herself, photos, brain scans, personal objects. By analyzing how these stories move and what they (are meant to) do, I argue that they provide the foundation for a caring community, connecting formal and informal carers, engaging people with dementia and influencing the care practices enacted throughout the center. I draw on this ethnographic research to explore how the assemblage of these stories, together with other elements, is embedded in networks of memory that hold the different actors involved in the caring process together, allowing them to adapt their interventions to the particular situation of people with dementia.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I want to learn from a caring community outside health care. On the basis of participant observations and a study of a bimonthly magazine, and building on the work of Hennion and Gomart on 'amateurs', I will investigate a community that cares for, and loves, a particular type of things: old cars, especially the Peugeot 404 (I have two of those). Meetings of 404 lovers and articles in their magazine are couched in a highly aesthetical, but also a strongly care-related language. They not only share a desire for preservation and beauty, but also for innovation: such cars, for instance, are often dressed up with the most sophisticated forms of audio equipment. 'Caring' is also related to functioning: a beautiful 404 that cannot move is a car not being cared for and about. Caring raises questions and discussions about what the good is that this care should bring about: should the 404 shine and glimmer or should it show its age (veracity)? Should it have safety belts or not (authenticity)? Should it be made less polluting by putting in a new engine (postmodernist re-working)? Caring for 404's also involves political negotiations about taxing and acceptable pollution levels, and about what 'old' really means as a ground for special treatment; in these negotiations, a solidarity between things and people (other brands of old timers and their owners, for instance) emerges. The parallels between communities caring for things and caring for humans will be explored in the paper.

Paper long abstract:

Against the background of the demographic transition and the steady increase of the senior population in Germany we investigate in our research project "SONIA - social inclusion by communication devices in urban-rural comparison" (2013-2015) how the life of the elderly in rural areas can be made more autonomous with special interest on the enhancement of their social inclusion.

Methodologically, we apply qualitative research methods, combining semi-structured interviews with focus group discussions and document analysis.

Our approach raises, among others, the question how regional populations are enabled to care for each other. Care is seen here in a wider sense as practices of looking for, supporting and helping each other within a community.

In this respect, we analyze how information and communication technologies may be utilized to enrich human interaction in real space. We seek to illuminate the link between socio-technological innovations and emergence of solidarity networks. Is there a way to mutualize rural population and what are requirements and consequences?

In our perspective, technology is seen as a catalyst for social inclusion and solidarity. Ideally, virtual communication induces face-to-face contacts and interactions in real life. Based on the findings of our needs assessment, we aim to establish and probe the concept of a "space of exchange", that will be realized as a dedicated online platform for senior citizens.

Paper long abstract:

Aesthetics are commonly thought of as dwelling in the realm of the fine arts. However, aesthetic values are also very prominent in daily life and health care, but often go unrecognized. This is unfortunate, because, contrary to the proverbial impossibility to argue about taste, aesthetic values are at stake in many arguments, debates and misunderstandings. In this paper I want to explore the role of aesthetic values in medical treatment. Are doctors speaking a language of truth and reality where patients are speaking a language of aesthetics, of quality of life? I explore how medical treatments contain their own variety of aesthetics, often relating to the accessibility or state of health of the body ('good veins' are accessible to the needle, 'nice wounds' are wounds that heal properly, even if they may seem appalling to the patient, efficient and clean feeding is to be preferred over being occupied with feeding oneself all day in messy ways). I will confront these aesthetics with those that patients bring forward. My case is the technology of tube feeding for patients with ALS. This technology can be seen as changing a patient's aesthetic experiences (taste, smell, sociability) in different ways, and in different relations, both with their relatives and with doctors. In this way, solidarities through shared aesthetics will be explored.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years themes of coherence and coordination across organizational boarders has become increasingly important in healthcare quality work. This is among other things reflected in a variety of technologies within the very broad topic of 'quality development' developed in order to support coordination and coherence. Some of these technologies are closely linked to scientific work showing a close relation between quality and coordination, others are related to public debates addressing patient's right to linear, fast and coherent trajectories of care. Either way these technologies are intended to impact not only one but several local configurations of work in the healthcare institutions. STS offers many insights to the understanding of the co-existence of ambiguities and to the creation of order in otherwise incoherent settings. Among these are also studies that show how new schemes of action unintentionally can disturb some parts of an already existing order while supporting another. Hence, technologies of coherence can be perceived as a potential threat to its own intentions - not the least because of their multi-sited nature - and propose a new and additional challenges to the establishment of coherence.

This apparent paradox of coherence is investigated through an analysis based on an ethnographic field work. The fieldwork took place at two hospital departments in a Danish Hospital. In this fieldwork the work of the two quality coordinators were observed focusing on their efforts to combine and embed the ordering of work of delineated organizational units within the orderings offered by the technologies of coherence.

Paper long abstract:

Social media are said to offer seemingly endless ways of connecting with people in a variety of online spaces. The mediated form that such communication takes has re-opened many theoretical debates regarding the status of relationships that are organized and managed online.

In this paper we explore what it means to be a body in the mediated environments of everyday lives of those who visit social media sites that are designed to help people deal with mental distress. Mental health communities are increasingly being shifted online as physical community spaces become fewer due to austerity and funding cuts. The implications of this shift include managing one's 'distressed body' in and through mediated technological spaces. A range of digital initiatives are emerging in mental health care, which in a sense, require people to develop practices of 'digital self care' (e.g. being able to articulate complex experiences of distress on social media sites). One such initiative is the Elefriends website designed and run by the UK mental health charity Mind. We will draw on data taken from a project exploring the way that distress comes to be managed and organised through Elefriends. A non-dualistic approach to understanding 'distressed bodies' online will be drawn from Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of technology and information. The paper will explore how socially mediated bodies are disposed for action in ways that involve negotiating communication through the mediated noise (Serres) of social media, along with having to manage distress through embodied and technological realms, often simultaneously.